ShmoopTube

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Try this shmoopy question on for size... Last time you'll ever see this passage in

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your life, we swear. Pause and review once more for good measure...

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All of the following literary devices are used in this passage EXCEPT

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And here are the potential answers...

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Ugh, these questions are always toughies. Rather than just having to track down one literary device or reference, we have to track

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them all down to find out which one is missing.

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And we don't even have access to a team of bloodhounds.

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Let's take them one by one and see what we get...

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Are there any allusions here? Allusions, in the literary sense, are references to something

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outside the realm of the story at hand...

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...and we certainly get that in lines 7 through 8. Check.

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What about metaphor? Oh yeah -- gobs. Any time Bacon defends the value of friendship

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by comparing it to something else...

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...like when he talks about diseases of the body and compares them to weaknesses of the soul...

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...he is employing metaphor. So B is accounted for.

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Parallelism? Yeah, we got your parallelism... right here...

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Especially in the first paragraph, when Bacon says that the first clause of a given maxim

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is true, but the second clause is not.

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And alliteration is the repeating of initial letter sounds at the start of words...

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...and we have that in droves. So it must be E, right? Euphemism?

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Indeed. Euphemism is the use of certain, gentler terms in place of something else.

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Like if when he said "savage beast," he wasn't referring to actual beasts of the wild, but

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instead something... slightly more risqué. But he isn't, so... it's not.

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Answer E is the odd man out.

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