Something of the same feeling attends a church till they are sixty and past rapine, but the shadow in "In Memoriam " hear service out of window." shadow feared by man," that "Bore thee where I could not see "the Nor follow, though I walk in haste, And think that somewhere in the waste, The shadow sits that waits for me." And where the fears of conscience in Guinevere are brought before us through the vague fears of superstition : "A vague spiritual fear Like to some doubtful noise of creaking doors, Heard by the watcher in a haunted house, That keeps the rust of murder on ths walls, Held her awake." Three qualities are essential to a perfect illustration. It must be apt, it must be original, and it must be characteristic of its author. So far we have treated illustration mainly in its poetical aspect; as the world reads and enjoys it oftenest and most familiarly, it is wit. An apt illustration taken from the life we live in is wit, however grave the matter it illustrates, and sombre the surroundings. Our old divines allowed themselves these relaxa tions much more freely than is the habit now, and in so doing imprinted themselves more vividly on their works. The preacher of our day keeps his good stories for his friends at his own fireside. There was nothing within the bounds of modest decorous mirth that Jeremy Taylor or Fuller thought unfit to brighten a grave discourse or a weighty subject. "There is a disease of infants," says Fuller, "called the rickets. Have not many nowadays the same sickness in their souls? their heads swelling to a vast proportion, and they wonderfully enabled with knowledge to discourse. But, alas! how little their legs, poor their practice, and lazy their walking in a godly conversation !," On niceties of religious differences he argues: "He that describes a man can tell you the colour of his hair, his stature, and proportion, and describe some general lines enough to distinguish him from a Cyclop or a Saracen ; but when you chance to see the man you will discover figures or little features of which the description had produced in you no fantasm or expectation. And on the exterior signification of a sect, there are more semblances than in men's faces and greater uncertainty in the signs." The casualties to which human life is incident are shown by examples: — "And those creatures which nature hath left without weapons, yet are they armed suffileft obnoxious, to a sunbeam, to the roughness ciently to vex those parts of a man which are of a sour grape, to the unevenness of a gravelstone, to the dust of a wheel, or the unwholesome breath of a star looking awry upon a sinner." Of those whom the practice of fasting makes peevish and difficult to live with ("as was sadly experimented in St. Jerome") he says: "It is not generally known whether the beast that is wanton or the beast that is cursed be aptest to gore." That fearlessness characteristic of the born illustrator is especially shown in his triads of examples. He leads up to them without knowing exactly what will come, making sure that fancy will not leave him in the lurch, and when he looked for one, he argues, will put most on the greatest A wise person, three crowd upon him. interest: "No man will hire a general to cut wood, or shake hay with a sceptre, or spend his soul and all his faculties upon the purchase of a cockleshell." There is, again, his quaint impersonation of second childhood. "The Pyramids, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders." And negroes, with "To resolve is to purpose to do what we may him, are "images of God cut in ebony." if we will. Some way or other the thing is in Jeremy Taylor abounds in illustration our power; either we are able of ourselves or sure to excite a smile, whatever the con- elephant, to be as wise as Solomon, or to dewe are helped. No man resolves to carry an text; as where he defines the weak reason-stroy a vast army with his own hand.” er: "He that proves a certain truth from an uncertain argument, is like him that wears a wooden leg when he has two sound ones already." Those who postpone the day of repentance are like Again, the humour often lies in a word of metaphor, as where the disconsolate husband, when his grief has boiled down somewhat, turns his thoughts to a second marriage. South talks of men made atheists by a bad conscience, who dare not look truth "The Circassian gentlemen who enter not into in the face, and "had rather be befooled into a prudent, favourable, and propitious lie; a lie which shall chuck them under the chin and kiss them, and at the same time, strike them under the fifth rib; and of the cheating tradesman selling his soul like brown paper into the bargain." Hammond, in a grave discourse, likens the self-delusion of professors to the practice of some Mohammedans, who, when they would get drunk, get rid of conscience by exorcising their soul into some extremity of the body, thus relieving the mass of its responsibility. We do not gather, however, that illustration was ever thought essential to be cultivated where it did not naturally grow. Barrow, who exhausted every subject he took up, never illustrated it beyond the most matter-of-fact examples. capable,' as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was belonging only to her husband.'" Theocritus's Doric, he says, has an incomparable sweetness in its clownishness, "like a fair shepherdess in her country russet talking in a Yorkshire tone." Inferior critics are "French Huguenots, and Dutch boors brought over, but not naturalized, who have not lands of two pounds per annum in Parnassus, and therefore are not privileged to poll." The age boasted itself a witty one, and false and true wit alike must wear the fashion of their day. The Drama overflowed with it. Thus Witwould, in Congreve's comedy, never opens his mouth without a trope. He rushes upon the stage: "That's hard, very hard a messenger! a Dryden's was the fancy that most teemed with illustration of the witty as well as poetical sort. His prose is enliv-mule, a beast of burden! He has brought me a letter from the fool my brother, as heavy as a ened with it almost to excess. He plunges panegyric in a funeral sermon, or a copy of into it, after the manner of a clever commendatory verses from one poet to another; "Times" article, on the opening of a ded- and, what's worse, 'tis as sure a forerunner of ication or preface, all his observations on the author as an epistle dedicatory." life, society or the court, ready at his He overwhelms Millamant, whom he atpen's end. tends, with similes. Her entrance, indeed, is in a sort of firework of metaphor. Her irritated lover, expecting her to be followed by the usual troop of admirers, begins: "It is with the poet as with a man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the cost beforehand; but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons short in the expense he first intended. He alters his mind as the work proceeds and will have this or that convenience made, of which he had not thought when he began. So it has happened to me: I have built a house where I intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain nobleman, who, beginning with a dog-kennel, never lived to finish the palace he had contrived." "Mirabel.- Here she comes, i' faith, full sail, with her fall spread and streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.- Ha! no! I cry her mercy. You seem to be unattended, Madam; you used to have the beau monde throng after you, and a flock of gay fine perukes hovering round you. "Witwould.- Like moths about a candle. I had like to have lost my comparison for want of And he apologizes in the same vein for the breath. poems thus prefaced: "I will hope the best, that they will not be condemned; but if they should, I have the excuse of an old gentleman, who. mounting on horseback before some ladies, when I was present, got up somewhat heavily; but desired of the fair spectators that they would count fourscore and eight before they judged him. By the mercy of God I am already come within twenty years of his number, a cripple in my limbs; but what decays are in my mind the reader must determine.' He values himself on the fineness of his satire in a comparison we have seen quoted. There is, he says, "A vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be 6 "Millamant.- I have denied myself air today. I have walked as fast through the crowd and with as few followers. with your similitudes, for I am as sick of 'em I "Witwould. As a physician of a good air. cannot help it, Madam, though 'tis against myself. Yet again! Mincing, stand "Millamant · between me and his wit. "Witwould.-Do, Mrs. Mincing, like screen before a great fire. I confess I do blaze to-day; I am too bright." It is not only the avowed wit who overpowers us with metaphor; the dramatist strives to show his own invention through the medium of the whole dramatis personœ. Everybody has an image or a figure to a lasting taste behind. Nobody else can clinch his meaning; it is one main cause say a word, but he is down upon the critic of the absolute difference between talk on for stupidly mistaking the poet's crowning the stage and off it. Not that author or excellence for defect; but when he takes spectator quite knows this, for the humour him in hand he is presently reminded of for illustration is sometimes irrepressible some anecdote which the poet would not -a sort of fever on the author's side: thank him for remembering at that moand it is one of the chief merits and ment. Thus the story of Margaret in the charms of a good play that it communi- "Excursion," on which so much pathos and cates to the listener an inner sense and pity is lavished, suggests a tale in direct share of its own cleverness; it being the ridicule and disparagement of both, as great function of illustration to enlarge merely abstract and sentimental. the common stock of human intellect, wit, and poetry. There is a story somewhere told of a man But we must not linger among the who complained, and his friends also complained, writers of a past age. Every memory will that his face looked almost always dirty. The man explained this strange affection out of a recall examples which they prefer to our mysterious idiosyncrasy in the face itself, upon own. Shakespeare is too familiar a friend which the atmosphere so acted as to force out to borrow much from. Ben Jonson's ex- stains and masses of gloomy suffusion, just as it quisite cluster of similes in "The Triumph does upon some qualities of stone in rainy or of Charis" need not be quoted; nor yet vapoury weather. But,' said his friend, had Pope's equally delightful tumult of com- you no advice for this strange affection?'- ‘Oh parisons, which fail to express Belinda's yes: surgeons had prescribed; chemistry had despair. Indeed, all Pope's best illustra- exhausted its secrets upon the case; magnetism tions are wit of the first water, and as had done its best; electricity had done its worst.' such proverbial. Lord Landesborough,' "His friend mused for some time, and then asked, The tall Bully," and a hundred other Pray, amongst these painful experiments, did cues, need only be given to bring the it ever happen to you to try one that I have read neatest of couplets crowded with meaning perhaps on the same principle it might be alof namely, a basin of soap and water?' And to the reader's memory, such as lowable to ask the philosophic wanderer who "Who can escape Time's all-destroying hand? washes the case of Margaret with so many coats Where's Troy, and where's the May-pole in of metaphysical varnish, but ends with finding all unavailing, Pray, amongst your other experiments, did you ever try the effect of a guinea? ''' the Strand?" 66 Every age has its peculiar line; and every writer of genius uses similitudes after a manner of his own, whether na- Sydney Smith's wit goes out very much ture is treated merely as a picture, or in- in illustration, which is indeed the case vested with a human heart and temper, or with all wit; but his forte is putting an deserted altogether for social comparisons imaginary case and crowding it with vivid found in man and his works. In this last, and appropriate detail. His arguments for a favourite method is the allegory or ap- Roman Catholic emancipation are all enologue, or more familiar anecdote - that riched with the choicest pictures in this case in point with which some minds are vein of begging the question, as when our so wonderfully stored, that it suggests the constitution is compared to a frigate going idea of invention. This, in clever hands, into action, in which the captain (whose is the engine or weapon of malice, of all name was Perceval), "instead of talking degrees, from the playful to the venomous. to his sailors of king, country, glory, and A subject thus introduced has no chance sweethearts, gin, French prisons, aud -it takes any colour the author pleases. wooden shoes, claps twenty or thirty of But its influence is subtler when applied his prime sailors, who happen to be Cathto nullify what has gone before, and to at- olics, into irons, and reminds the crew tach a sly sting at the tail of commenda- generally, in a bitter harangue, that they tion. We observe, for instance, that Deare of different religions; exhorts the Quincey can never enlarge either on the Episcopal gunner not to trust the Presbylife or poetry of Wordsworth, without aterian quartermaster; rushes through touch of spleen or bile following close on blood and brains, examining his men in the approval of his taste and intellect. the Catechism and Thirty-nine Articles," He uses forcible words of esteem for his and so on. In his case this mode of proof person, and reverence for his genius; but is peculiarly effective, because, as he did then comes a little story or apologue, just not the least understand the grounds on the slightest infusion of bitter that leaves which his opponents acted, we need not think him deliberately unfair. Nothing exhausts himself in simile to describe the could be stronger than his faith in his own hurry of his own genius-"Invention views, unless it was his contempt for those presses upon a man like a night-mare.” of the other side. He had a profound" All of a sudden a flash comes inside your contempt for what he thought non-essentials in religion. To see people differ, and quarrel, and legislate about and against them, was to him simply ridiculous; so his illustration expressed exactly the ground and bottom of the matter, and was exhaustive to his own mind. "I have often thought, if the wisdom of our head as if a powder-mill had exploded without any noise." The pedlar in the "Mill on the Floss," describes his head as "all alive inside like old cheere." And Charles Lamb is happy in the vein of his peculiarities, his likes and dislikes. "There is an order of imperfect intellects," he says "(under which mine must be content to ancestors had excluded all persons with red rank), who, amongst other things, seldom hair from the House of Commons, of the throes wait to mature a proposition, but e'en and convulsions it would occasion to restore them bring it to market in the green ear." His to their natural rights. What mobs and riots whole paper on Imperfect Sympathies, it would produce! To what infinite abuse and which is a personal one, is alive with metaobloquy would the capillary patriots be exposed! phor. Thus, of the Scotchman he is what wormwood would distil from Mr. Perce- pleased to say that "he stops a metaphor val! what froth would drop from Mr. Canning! like a suspected person in an enemy's how (I will not say my but our Lord Hawkes- country. His mind is put together on the bury, for he belongs to us all) - how our Lord principles of clock-work." Jews he likes as Hawkesbury would work away about the hair a piece of stubborn antiquity; but in their of King William, and Lord Somers, and the au- dress of modern Liberalism "they are thors of the great and glorious Revolution! how Lord Eldon would appeal to the Deity and to the neither fish nor flesh." In the negro counhair of his children! Some would say that red- tenance he acknowledges traits of benighaired men were superstitious; some would nity. "I have yearnings of tenderness prove they were atheists. They would be peti- towards their faces, or rather masks; " tioned against as the friends of slavery and the though "he would not wish to associate advocates of revolt. In short, such a corrup- or share his meals and good nights with tion of the heart and the understanding is the them because they are black." He would spirit of persecution, that these unfortunate starve at the primitive banquet of Quaker people, if they did not emigrate to countries life and converse. My appetites are too where hair of another colour was persecuted, high for their salads." would be driven to the falsehood of perukes, or the hypocrisy of the Tricosian fluid." Minds of this lively order cannot argue without illustration. They rush to it as rest from the pains of disquisition, as well as in confidence thus to win over the suffrages they are anxious for. a The gift of imagination wreathes every abstract speculation, as well as all personal experience, bitter as well as sweet, with these graces, which, when they come unsought, are associated with the subjectmatter indissolubly. Every reader of "Jane Eyre," remembers the simile of the snow in June as part of the blank despair where the marriage is broken off. It belongs to some natures to pause, even in crisis, in search of that sympathy from nature their reserve forbids them to look for in man, though more commonly illustration is the amusement of the mind in greater leisure and composure of spirit. The illustration in George Eliot's writings that stands foremost in the memory is of this sort. The habit in some minds exercises itself mainly on itself. There are states of the mind that can only be cleared to itself through metaphor; so Haydon 66 The practised hand shows its skill sometimes in a sort of tour de force, throwing a shower of graceful imagery over common things and matters of the house. How pleasantly Lord Lytton glorifies sixpence in the Caxtons: writes a correspondent, dating from Mark the respectable members of the communiLane, "the events of the last five weeks ty than to its outlaws and black sheep. A have but rippled the surface of the grain trade, society that has forty phrases to express which has flowed in the direction I ven- drunkenness, as those say who have counttured to anticipate." "Since the days of ed them, must be credited with some play drainage dawned," writes another. While of fancy. All callings that find plain we read of the hog crop, and of hogs com- speaking inconvenient, invent a dialect of manding a high price, and so on. It re- metaphor and allusion, and acquire facility quires, indeed, a certain delicacy of per- in the use of imagery. "Come along, ception, denied to some, to distinguish the cried a drunken convict cook, squaring at appropriate field for metaphor. A biogra- her master, who invaded the kitchen to pher who opens his subject thus: "Born know why breakfast did not appearin the cradle of the wholesale book trade," "Come along, my hearty! Them as wants certainly misses it; so does the writer of their breakfast must fight for it, like the a dictionary who pronounces truth to be dogs do." And burlesque, which is the the soul of his work, and brevity its body; passion of the vulgar, ministers to this and so does the poet who warns against taste, both in language and impersonation. discontent through the medium of fable. "As well the newt might make complaint, Because a nightingale it aint." Nor is it only nameless poets who have evinced a deadness of perception in this matter. The warmest admirers of the Botanic Garden were obliged to own that Dr. Darwin carried the Prosopopoeiathe illustration of qualities by a bodily presentment of them too far. In fact this figure will not bear detail. It should be touch and go. Lady Macbeth uses it thus airily when she gives the sentiment – "Let good digestion wait on appetite, And health on both." Impersonation is also a method for the exercise of the illustrating faculty in society of another order altogether. The poor Empress's fancy-dress balls, which amazed Paris and the world some years back, exhausted the invention of the belles and beaux. One lady personated a violet, another a snowstorm, others butterflies and other insects, another a pack of cards. To act out the qualities of all these objects must necessarily be the aim of a clever impersonator. Hard though the task, "Punch's parody represented it as possible even in the case of purer abstractions. "The Honourable Miss Top Sawyer wonderfully represented to Brighton and back for half-a-crown." "The Duchess of Herne Bay was elegantly robed as the St. Martin's baths and washhouses." And the masterpiece of the evening was "Alderman Sir R. Gobble, as the General Omnibus Company (Limited)." He would have enlarged on digestive processes till the hardiest stomach grew qualmish, in the spirit in which he laboriously trifles with chemical affinities, making Azotic Gas the lover of the virgin Air, and transforming Fire into a jealous riyal From all accounts the Americans beat indignant at the treacherous courtship. us holiow in illustration. No provincial Again, where the mechanism of that famil- paper but has a corner of witticisms iar object, the pump, is illustrated by a mainly contributed by them. Sam Slick picture of matronly beauty administering absolutely bristles with imagery. Every sustenance to her infant; the pump thus man far west is a Sam Weller. The comfurnishing matter for reproof to the fash- monest incidents of life are portrayed, the ionable world, in which affluent mothers most ordinary questions are answered in are seduced by indolence or dissipation metaphor. The lecturer is assured that into unnatural contempt for this "delight- an audience will come with a rush "like a ful duty." Those instances fail through shower of little apples." An imposture is the endeavour to raise the familiar and "a steamboat; to be overreached is to prosaic by supplying them with artificial have your "eye-teeth drawn;" to drink wings. On the other hand, metaphor and is to "conceal too much whiskey about the illustration are constantly used to lower person." Small means and modest preand familiarize the dignified or mysterious, tentions are represented by "one horse;' as where Thackeray's simple heroine is left a "one-horse show; a "one-horse to the care of guardian angels with or reputation;" swamps give a fine crop without wages, and Dryden indicates Dido of chills and fevers; coffins are "wooden as the coming dowager. overcoats." Smething of the same tone When it is said that most men are with- characterizes American authors when out the gift and habit of illustration, it they leave the woods, plains, and must be owned that this rather applies to streams for their inspiration, and re |