an elegant style of prose of the Elizabethan period; characterized by balance and antithesis and alliteration and extended similes with and allusions to nature and mythology
originally an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden; it is now used to refer to anything that is tempting but dangerous (as sexuality)
belonging to or befitting a supreme ruler; "golden age of imperial splendor"; "purple tyrant"; "regal attire"; "treated with royal acclaim"; "the royal carriage of a stag's head"
befitting or belonging to an emperor or empress; "imperial palace"
relating to or associated with an empire; "imperial colony"; "the imperial gallon was standardized legally throughout the British Empire"
filled with shade; "the shady side of the street"; "the surface of the pond is dark and shadowed"; "we sat on rocks in a shadowy cove"; "cool umbrageous woodlands"
concerned with effect or style of writing and speaking; "a rhetorical question is one asked solely to produce an effect (especially to make an assertion) rather than to elicit a reply"
of or relating to rhetoric; "accepted two or three verbal and rhetorical changes I suggested"- W.A.White; "the rhetorical sin of the meaningless variation"- Lewis Mumford
excessively elaborate or showily expressed; "a writer of empurpled literature"; "many purple passages"; "speech embellished with classical quotations"; "an over-embellished story of the fish that got away"