ature, which stamps the story home like an illustration.
Crusoe[13] recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over
against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running
with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in
the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye forever. Other
things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they are
beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it was
ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last
mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for
sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that
neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, then,
is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, or
emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to
the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words;
the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and
the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared
with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical
or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution,
and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at
Burford, or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite
another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country
famous with a legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with
the most cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human
spirit; it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story
of Ajax[14] or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second is
something besides, for it is likewise art.

English people of the present day[15] are apt, I know not why, to look
somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink
of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to
write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one.
Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be
communicated by the art of narrative; a sense of human kinship
stirred; and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and
air of _Sandy's Mull_, preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences
recorded. Some people work, in this manner, with even a strong touch.
Mr. Trollope's inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in
this connection. But even Mr