in *Rhetoric*, a figure by which a person who is either absent or dead is addressed as if he were present and attentive to us. This figure is, in boldness, a degree lower than the address to personified objects (see **Personification**); since it requires a less effort of imagination to suppose persons present who are dead or absent, than to imagine insensible beings and direct our discourse to them. The poems of Ossian abound with the most beautiful instances of this figure. "Weep on the rocks of roaring winds, O Maid of Inistore! Bend thy fair head over the waves, thou fairer than the ghost of the hills when it moves in a sunbeam at noon over the silence of Morven! He is fallen! Thy youth is low: pale beneath the sword of Cuchullin!"

**APOTROPHY**, in *Grammar*, the contraction of a word by the use of a comma: as *call'd* for *called*, *tho' for though*.

**APOTACTITÆ**, or **APOTACTICI**, an ancient sect, who affecting to follow the evangelical counsels of poverty, and the examples of the apostles and primitive Christians, renounced all their effects and possessions. It does not appear that they gave into any errors during their first state; some ecclesiastical writers assure us they had divers holy virgins and martyrs under the persecution of Diocletian in the fourth century; but they afterwards fell into the opinions of the Encratites, and taught that the renouncing of all riches was not only a matter of counsel and advice, but of precept and necessity. And hence the sixth law in the Theodosian code joins the Apotactite with the Eunomians and Arians.