that Sunday morning; " and familiar as world, perfectly familiar with the little the type of the road is as conveying a cares, the homely objects, the minor pleasmoral, we find no triteness in Crabbe ures, troubles, inconveniencies, which bewhen, satirizing the learning-made-easy set ordinary humanity, and taking them of some teachers of his day, he clenches it in precisely the same spirit. In his diswith

“And some to Heaven itself their byway know."

course on fanatical scruples of conscience,
it is very agreeable, for instance, to find
Jeremy Taylor illustrating a deep ques-
tion of casuistry by a simile open to the
comprehension of every man, woman, and
child who has ever worn a shoe. Scruples,
he says, are like a stone in the shoe: if
you put your foot down it hurts you; if
you lift it up you cannot go on.
Its apt-
ness, allied to its homeliness, tickles the
fancy like wit. No subject can be dull
under such handling.

Illustration is an amiable gift - amiable at least to the reader. It seeks constantly to relieve the tedium of attention and fixed thought. It is modest, and labours to save him the irksomeness of elaborate

It renders things clear

and plain, with least trouble to ourselves, and throws in a good thing into the bargain. Constantly, indeed, it is a necessity. We can know some things only through vivid illustration. How, for instance, can a stay-at-home receive any idea of the Stourbach but through such a picture as Tennyson draws of

Nothing is so trite through other men's use that it may not be invested with new qualities, or brightened with renewed glory by the poet; but in speaking of illustration, of course we more particularly mean a fresh coinage altogether-that happy fit and neat adjustment of things not coupled together before, which brings the matter illustrated with sudden force to the reader or hearer. The gift of doing this implies very wide powers, and unremitting industry in the use of them: an activity of observation possessed by very few; a lifelong habit of taking in what passes before and ears and reasoning demonstration. eyes upon them; an exceptional memory, and method in the training of it. What the illustrator observes he arranges in his mind, storing its treasures on a system which can produce them at the right moment. Most of us have an illustration to the point if we could find it; but our minds, even if they be busy ones, are furnished too much on the plan, or want of plan, of Dominie Sampson's - stowed with goods of every description, like a pawnbroker's shop, but so cumbrously Its serious office is to help along an abpiled together, and in such total disorga-stract argument, to lighten and facilitate nization, that the owner can never lay his the discussion of grave topics, to adminishands on any one article at the moment ter a fillip to infirm attention, and arrest a he has occasion for it. This at least may be the case with the conversational blunderers who lead up to where they expect an apt simile, tumble up and down for it, and do not find it. But a good illustrator has not only his attention alive and awake, and thinks to purpose - he has sympathy with his kind in all those fields of observation from which he derives his fund of illustration. And this is one main bond of union. We recognize a mind interested in what interests ourselves. Nothing is more charming, for instance, than to find a man of genius, whose thoughts and aspirations might all be supposed to circle above the heads of the common work-a-day

"The Alpine ledges, with their wreaths of dangling water smoke."

straggling wayward fancy. Illustrations don't prove a point, but they help us to tide over the labour of proof, and sweeten the extreme effort to most men of steady thought. Of all gifts this secures readers for weighty and toilsome questions on morals, politics, and religion; and is the only legitimate method of lightening these, except, indeed, extreme neatness and precision of expression, which can for a time dispense with all ornament or alleviation whatever to the severity of the topic under treatment. Locke, through an illustration, inflicts a sense of shame on the reader who has not thought for himself, which no reproof in sterner shape would impart; and

at the same time, by a second metaphor, gives a stimulus to endeavours. In his Preface we read: "He who has raised himself above the alms-basket, and, not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinion sets his own thoughts on work to find and follow truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the hunter's satisfaction; every moment of his pursuit will reward his pains with some delight, and he will have reason to think his time not ill spent, even when he cannot boast of any great acquisition."

Of passion; was obedient as a lute
That waits upon the touches of the wind."

obedience to these varying moods. When
Every object in nature takes a colour in
apostrophizing the daisy, the "wee modest
flower," he finds likenesses for it in things
most opposite. It is a nun; it is a spright-
ly maiden; it is

"A queen in crown of rubies drest,

A starveling in a scanty vest." But, Protean as these resemblances may be, nothing in nature can affect the poet but through his sympathy with man. The waning moon allies itself in Bryant's mind with waning intellect.

"Shine thou for forms that once were bright,
For sages, in the mind's eclipse,

For those whose words were spells of might,
But falter now with stammering lips.'

We have said that the illustrator habitually keeps his attention alive; but this, of course, applies only to a mind of very wide sympathies. Most people are oneeyed; half the world is a blank to themthey do not observe it. It was said of Tasso that he never departed from the woods that is, all his comparisons were taken from the country. We can imagine All pity for nature's decay and weakhim, indeed, as passing over the common ness can only arise through this unconlife of cities with eyes that saw nothing. scious comparison with the same in ourNot so with Ariosto; his verse is enlivened, his story illustrated, by a hundred familiar allusions to the manners and habits of his time. One of his heroes, for example, passes from one danger to a worse, or, as Mrs. Browning draws from the familiar it is expressed, out of the frying-pan into object, -a shadow cast on running wathe fire. Dante has appropriate illustra-ters, a sad but just illustration of tion for everything alike, when he conde- faith and constancy misplaced, thus givscends to use it, nature in its grandeur ing the key-note of the poem which it and repose, the pulpit, the studio, and the opens: workshop.

selves.

Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven,
As falls the plague on men."

"The lady's shadow lies

Upon the running river;
It lieth no less in its quietness
For that which resteth never,
Most like a trusting heart

Upon a passing faith,
Or as upon the course of life

The steadfast doom of death."

In every case, and however it is applied, metaphor may be said to be the natural link between man and the world he lives in; neither can be brought home to the feelings but through the help of the other. When nature is the theme, man's labours, his humours and passions, are necessary to give force to the picture: when man and It is not necessary to a poet of genius his works occupy the front, then nature to have seen either the illustration or the and in nature we include all that is not thing illustrated. Milton had neither seen man and those works-is instinctively Satan "rear from off the pool his mighty sought into for incans towards that stature," nor witnessed anything at all comparison and likeness the mind craves approaching to the convulsion of nature for. We all think mistily in this veia. to which he compares the demon standThe poet gives it expression. Thus ing erect Wordsworth, in the history of his own

"As when the force

mind, portrays the faculty of illustra- Of subterranean wind transports a hill,
tion:-

"To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
E'en the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life; I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling:
Add that whate'er of Terror or of Love,
Or Beauty, Nature's daily face put on
From transitory passion, unto this
I was as sensitive as waters are

To the sky's influence in a kindred mood

Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side
Of thundering Etna, whose combustible
And fuell'd entrails thence conceiving fire,
Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds,
And leave a singèd bottom, all involved
With stench and smoke: such resting found the
sole

Of unblest feet."

Neither had Bacon's outward ear caught the tones of Greek music when he describes

"Like one that on a lonesome road

the mythological truths handed down by have made his own verses famous; as, old traditions as the "breath and purer for instance, that which pictures the horspirits of the earliest knowledge, floating ror which held the Mariner's eyes fixed down and made musical by Grecian before him so that he little saw of flutes." But this method of illustration, what had else' been seen :without distinct knowledge for eye and sense, needs the rarest gifts. In meaner hands it is the source of most of the dull and trite illustration of which we are so weary; and lies at the root of the prejudice which popularly hangs about simile and metaphor as so much flimsy decoration, so that every sentence that seems to

contain them is eluded by the practised eye. In truth we trust a writer when we apply our minds with hope and animation to his imagery. When authors insert metaphor as as ornament, which is the way many people view it, it does not deserve to be read. A really happy metaphor is part and parcel of the work, and ought no more to be regarded as a superfluity than a child's golden tresses, on the ground that it can live in health without them.

Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread."

This was neither anticipation nor afterthought, but essential part of a whole. The department of nature that furnishes least the gift as a distinction, is that which the commonest illustration, and needs finds its most appropriate field in the fable. The extraordinary sympathy that infancy manifests towards all forms of anifor horse and cow, cat and dog, parrot and mal life the passion every baby shows canary, so that for their sake it willingly

forswears mere intellectual converse

makes us regret the general disuse of fable eration does not know Esop as its proas moral teaching for children. This gen

Some authors allow it to transpire that they keep a note-book, in which they enter every happy thought or pretty simile that occurs to their leisure, to be incorpor-genitors of all time have known him. But ated subsequently into some larger work. These prepared similes are very certain to do him no credit, to be ornaments out of place, and to betray their origin. Either they don't fit at all, or they manifest that

-

this natural affinity is reason enough for animals and men; the alliance and resemthe universal habit of comparison between blance is so obvious, and of so long standDr. ing, that everybody is alive to it. Johnson died in this form of metaphor. His friends record his complaints of the man who attended him: "Instead of

stop."

The sympathy is so intimate that every passion expresses itself through this vocabulary instinctively

universal fitness which constitutes the commonplace so that we know all about it beforehand- or they are led up to by too transparent artifice, entangling and watching, he sleeps like a dormouse; and when he helps me to bed he is awkward breaking the author's line of thought. The simile that lives is of the essence of as a turnspit-dog the first time he is put into the wheel." Everybody can call his the page where it is enshrined, coeval with the matter it illuminates, or at least flash-neighbour an ass, and liken a songstress or a lover to a nightingale — ing upon the author while he still muses upon what he has written. De Quincey"Sad Philomel thus - but let similes drop, says that Coleridge in his early days used And now that I think on't, the story may the image of a man "sleeping under a manchineel-tree," alternately with the case of Alexander killing his friend Clitus, as resources for illustration which Providence had bountifully made inexhaustible in their applications. No emergency could possibly arise to puzzle the poet or the orator, but one of these similes (please When we say that a writer does not use Heaven!) should be made to meet it. So metaphor, we must therefore except this long as the manchineel continued to blis- form of it. In glancing over any one of ter with poisonous dews those who con- Mr. Trollope's novels, Dr. Thorne," for fided in its shelter, so long as Niebuhr instance, we find very lively use of the forbore to prove Alexander of Macedon a animal kingdom. His readers must be fahoax and Clitus a myth, his fixed deter-miliar with his habit of calling young men, mination was that one or other of these in their capacity of lover, wolves; and we images should come upon duty when he come upon decoy-ducks, birds of prey, turfound himself on the brink of insolvency. tle-doves, chattering magpie, leeches, etc., Not so adjustable were the similes that and so on. When the Doctor wishes

66

What, all my pretty chickens, at one fell swoop!"

66

to prepare his niece for the great for-ing mystified one of his friends by a p tune that has fallen to her he talks in sage from Swedenborg, he bids him re d fable:

"I fear, Mary, that when poor people talk disdainfully of money, they often are like your fox, born without a tail. If nature suddenly should give that beast a tail, would he not be prouder of it than all the other foxes in the world?'

"Well, I suppose he would. That's the very meaning of the story. But how moral you've become all of a sudden, at twelve o'clock at night! Instead of being Mrs. Radcliffe, I shall think you're Mr. Æsop.'

again.

"Don't you understand it? Read it a third time. Try it backwards. See if you can make anything of it diagonally. Turn it upside down. Philosophers have discovered that you may turn a polypus inside out, and it will live just as well one way as the other. It is not to be supposed that nature ever intended any of its creatures to be thus inverted, but so the thing happens." The satirist illustrates the qualities and passions of men by beasts, birds, and in

days.

Mrs. Gaskell is seldom tempted to illus-sects, in the spirit of fable, accepting the popular idea of their properties without tration, but this form of it suits the femin- troubling himself further. Our readers to ine genius. In the "Cranford Papers," Mr. whom it is familiar, must excuse our givMulliner, the Hon. Mr. Jamieson's pow-ing the opening of the "Hind and Pandered footman, the terror of all the good ther," for it is not everybody to whom ladies who could not boast such a distinc- Dryden's masterpieces are familiar nowation, "in his pleasantest and most gracious mood, looked like a sulky cockatoo." In ordinary minds this modified exercise of the fancy is applied mostly to the purposes of common vituperation or endearment. Bird and beast gain nothing by this association with man. But the poet idealizes his inspiration, glorifies them into types of power, dignity, ferocity, whatever their distinctive attributes, as Dante's "Sordella".

"A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged;
Without unspotted, innocent within,
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.
Yet had she oft been chased with horns and
hounds

And Scythian shafts; and many winged
wounds

Aimed at her heart; was often forced to fly, And doomed to death, though fated not to die."

"Posasi come Leon che posa;" as the wolf swells into demon atrocity in Then follow the denominations-the Cowley's fine simile, occurring in his de- "bloody Bear, an Independent beast; bate with the fiend, Cromwell's advocate. "the Socinian Reynard;" "the CalvinisFailing in argument, that "great bird of tic Wolf, pricking predestinating ears; prey "would have carried the poet offand last, the creeping things representing first to the tower, thence to the court of minor sects for liberty of conscience was justice, and from thence you know whith-not a poet's theme in those days. er! but for the interposition of an angel." A slimy-born and sun-begotten tribe, Naturally it irritates the fiend to be balked

so unexpectedly, and

The bleating lamb from out his ravenous jaws.
The shepherd fain himself would he aɛsail,
But fear above his hunger does prevail,
He knows his foe too strong, and must be
gone;

He grins as he looks back, and howls as he
goes on."

Though it must be allowed in this case that Cowley had probably only his inner consciousness to guide him as to the deportment of a wolf under these circum

Who, far from steeples and their sacred sound,

In fields their sullen conventicles found."
The Panther the Church of England -
is drawn with elaboration. but in disdain
of close analogy: her spots were all the
conversation with her -
poet cared for. The Hind enters into

"Considering her a well-bred civil beast,
And more a gentlewoman than the rest.
After some common talk, what rumours ran,
The lady of the spotted muff began."

Swift finds the animal and insect kingdom a very convenient medium for his cynicism. "A little wit," he says, "is valued in a woman, as we are pleased with a few words spoken plainly by a parrot." His political opponent is the spider arguIn another vein Southey uses the poly-ing with the bee, swelling himself into the pus as the type of the unintelligible. Hav- size and posture of a disputant, with a

stances.

resolution to be heartily scurrilous and angry, to urge his own reasons without the least regard to the answers and objections of his opposite, and fully predeterImined in his own head against all conviction. This system of fable is perfectly different from the use made of the lower creation in modern poetry. It is still used as illustration, but through close observation of the individual. Nature is being studied now for its own sake, not only as it subserves men's uses; and the poet must share and illustrate the spirit of his age, though sometimes at the risk of seeming to play a game of definitions from a nicety of delineation which exceeds the reader's powers of sympathy. Geraint, in the "Idylls of the King," having commanded his wife to put off her fine clothes and don again the "faded silk," scrutinizes her with the air of a robin

"Never man rejoiced

More than Geraint to greet her thus attired;
And glancing all at once as keenly at her
As careful robins eye the delver's toil,
Made her cheek burn, and either eyelid fall,
But rested with her sweet face satisfied."

This same Enid, when helpless in Earl
Doorm's hands, sent forth

"A sudden sharp and bitter cry,

As of a wild thing taken in a trap,

Like some dread heapy blackness, ruffled
wing,

Convulsed and cowering head that is all eye,
Which proves a ruined eagle who, too blind,
Swooping in quest of quarry, fawn or kid,
Descried deep down the chasm 'twixt rock
and rock,

Has wedged and mortised into either wall
O' the mountain, the pent earthquake of his
power;

So lies, half hurtless yet still terrible,
Just when who stalks up, who stands front to
front,

But the great lion-guarder of the gorge,
Lord of the ground, a stationed glory there!
Yet he too pauses ere he try the worst
O' the frightful unfamiliar nature, new
To the chasm indeed, but elsewhere known
enough,

Among the shadows and the silences
Above i' the sky."

1

There is a class of metaphor bringing home to us a sense of the awful, mysterious, and unknown, through what is itself vague shadow, only half apprehended, that gives evidence of a lofty imagination beyond any other form of this gift. To illustrate what we mean, we must again quote what is familiar, Milton's image of Death:

"The other shape,

If shape it could be called that shape had none,
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;

Which sees the trapper coming through the Or substance might be called that shadow

wood."

This cry the poet must have heard, as h
had seen the fluster inside a dovecot of
"A troop of snowy doves athwart the dusk,
When some one batters at the dovecot doors;"
and watched the manners of the pet par-
rot, which turns

"Up through gilt wires a crafty loving eye,
And takes a lady's finger with all care,

And bites it for true love, and not for harm."

seemed,

Such suggestion is involved in the There is a simile imagined in the mod-"secrets of the prison-house." And we ern spirit of careful truth to nature, in Mr find the same awe veiling itself in imperBrowning's "Balaustion's Adventures." sonation where the prophet Ezekiel warns An eagle in a very unusual predicament, his people that the day of trouble is close who personates Death, is faced at a great upon them, that his prophecy was not of a disadvantage by the lion Apollo. The distant future, but of terrors close at reader will probably have to read it twice hand: over to embrace the situation, but it will be found a vigorous image when once mastered:

"And we observed another Deity

Half in, half out the portal - watch and
ward

Eyeing his fellow: formidably fixed,
Yet faltering too at who affronted him,

As somehow disadvantaged, should they strive.

"An end is come, the end is come; it watcheth for thee; behold it is come;

-the end ready to spring like a thing alive, and inevitable doom craving to destroy and exterminate.

"Woe," cries Bunyan, in his despair"woe be to him against whom the Scriptures bend themselves."