Whatever is distinctive is, indeed, vulgar and boisterous, and, from mere coarseness of perception, if from no worse alloy, irreverent. But mingled with these effusions are uniformly many of the best hymns in our language, and often tender and graceful modern compositions, in startling discrepancy with the prevailing tone. All we can say is, if a penitent prize-fighter or reformed drunkard, in his moments of contrition, can be brought to understand and estimate them at their true worth, a work has been effected which cannot be regarded as other than a good one.

ILLUSTRATION.

PERHAPS there is no intellectual gift that conveys a greater sense of power than that of ready and felicitous illustration, or one that wins its possessor a more undisputed pre-eminence. It is one of those points on which it may be said that all people know themselves, and are forced to acknowledge a superior. A man may talk nonsense and not know it, or write commonplace in full persuasion that he is original, or uphold his fallacies against the conclusions of the ablest logician; but he cannot help knowing when he is no hand at an illustration. There is no room for self delusion or rivalry. Not only does it not come readily, but he beats his brain for it in vain. It would be a curious inquiry how many men live and die, respected and useful members of society too, without once hitting off a happy simile. We are convinced they would immeasurably outnumber that formidable array of figures telling the difference between the sexes, which causes so much anxiety in the present

day. Of course it is competent to people to say that they do not care for illustration-that it proves nothing that it is a mere "toy of thought," interfering with and often perplexing the business of reason and action; but whether we like ourselves as well without this faculty or not, it is impossible not to enjoy its exercise in another. We may treat it as solid satisfaction of

a superfluity; it may lack the reason and demonstration, and be only like the nard. pistic Jeremy Taylor talks of, the perfume of which "is very delightful when the box is newly broken, but the want of it is no trouble-we are well enough without it;" but the sudden fresh fragrance is not the less delicious while it lasts, and invigorating to the spirits.

Of

We use the word illustration as embracing the widest field, and including the whole figurative machinery of fancy and imagination-metaphor, simile, imagery, figure, comparison, impersonation-in fact, every method of elucidation through their agency. course invention may be actively and delightfully employed without any use of this charming gift, and therefore, we should say, without the possession of it; for an apt illustration, an exquisite simile, will out if it flashes into the brain. There is a certain concentration in the matter in hand-the scene, the situation which stands the writer instead of any other gift, and dispenses with all ornament. This, we should say, is the case with Mr Trollope, whose metaphor, when he uses it, is from the open, acknowledged,

familiar stock of all mankind; and remarkably with Miss Austen, in whose whole range of writings no original figure occurs to us, unless it be Henry Tilney's ingenious parallel between partners in matrimony and partners in a country-dance. Her experience probably presented her with no example of a ready illustrator, and she painted men and women as she found them, as making failures when they tried; like Lydia Bennet, who flourished her hand with its wedding-ring, and "smiled like anything"; or, adding triteness to common dulness, as in Mr Collins, whose letter found favour with Mary; "the idea of the olive-branch is not wholly new, but I think it is well expressed." When we say that most men are without the gift in question, it is obvious that we mean original illustration. Only a poet could first invest Time with wings; but we talk of the flight of time now without pretending to any share of his gift. There are certain figures incorporated in the language which we cannot speak without using. We are all poetical by proxy. Such common property is the imagery connected with sunrise and the dawn; sunset and twilight; sun, moon, stars, and comets; lightning and storm; seas, rivers, frost, and dew; the road, the path, the ladder; the rose, the lily, and the violet; the dying lamp and its extinguisher; angels, the grave; the lion, the tiger, the wolf, and the lamb; the eagle, the dove, and the parrot; the goose and the monkey. But indeed the list of incorporated metaphor is endless, and it has required a real poet

these several hundred years past to hit off anything new out of the subjects of it. But they are all capable in his hands of a sudden illumination, of figuring in new characters, of imparting the surprise which is the very essence of the illustration proper. And once a surprise is always a surprise-that is, the flash in the poet's mind plays and coruscates round it always. We may weary of the hackneyed use of it; in dull hands it may sound stale; but no taint destroys the first freshness when we come upon it in its right place. There it still delights us to read how

"The weak wanton Cupid

Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane

Be shook to air."

The grandeur of the comparison when Pandemonium rose like an exhalation, never sinks to commonplace. The suggestions of what is noble, beautiful, and familiar in nature, are really endless, however the soil may seem exhausted to prosaic minds, which are yet quite capable of being freshened into awakened interest by a new epithet or an original collision of ideas, revealing some undiscovered sympathy with human feeling. Every poet adds something to the common stock of imagery, and so enlarges our perceptions. Shakespeare, on saluting a beautiful woman as Day of the World, quickens our sense of beauty alike in nature and in man. It needed imagination first to affix the idea of