PKEFA.CE.

sketching, wliero sounds, ideas, and Imagination have to do dutyfor pencil, colours, and canvas. It can only attain its endsuggestively — tliat is to say, by making the reader conjure up inliis own mind tho imago that the author desires to present to it.High-class litcrary description is, so to speak, a continual seriesof gliost-raisings—tho excitation of a succession of pictorialapparitions ; so that a kind of phantom panorama, or visionarydrama (according as we are treating of men or places), shall flitbefore " the mind's eye" with all the " counterfeit presentment"and illusive reality of a dream.

There are three ways, apparently, of describing unknownobjects, — (1), By detailing the qualities or circumstances inconnexion with them ; (2), By comparing them to some knownobjects ; and (3), By setting forth the effects or feelings producodby them.

The first constitutes, in its literal phase, the " cataloguing "process, and belongs rather to the plainness of science than to thecoloured rhetoric of literature ; whilst, in its picturesque aspect, itnot only approaches the coneiseness of logical definition, but inseizing upon the literary "essence," as it were, or signal peculiarityof an object, discovers the precise point of Cognition and re-cog-nition in connexion with it-—that is to say, the one particularquality by which it is immediately apprehended in the mind; andthus, instead of clouding the idea with a mass of words, conjuresup in the fancy a sudden and vivid image of the thing, scene,or character intended. Shakspeare and Milton possessed thispicturesque power of description to a wondrous degree.

Tho second mode of description, or that which conveys anidea of unknown objects by comparing them to known ones, is atonce brilliant and striking. The simile, indeed, is essentially afigure of enlightenment as well as beauty. Not only is there anexquisite charm in discovering some unexpected resemblance (andthis, indeed, is the main source of the pleasure produced by imi-tative arts in general), but the very vividness of the " gay sur-prise" which is excited by the eunning of the comparison serves