peared exciting. But we, or
rather the steam-engine and the camera for us, have changed all that. The
man who plays tennis every year at the foot of the Matterhorn, and
billiards on the summit of the Rigi, does not thank you for an elaborate
and painstaking description of the Grampian Hills. To the average man,
who has seen a dozen oil paintings, a hundred photographs, a thousand
pictures in the illustrated journals, and a couple of panoramas of
Niagara, the word-painting of a waterfall is tedious.

An American friend of mine, a cultured gentleman, who loved poetry well
enough for its own sake, told me that he had obtained a more correct and
more satisfying idea of the Lake district from an eighteenpenny book of
photographic views than from all the works of Coleridge, Southey, and
Wordsworth put together. I also remember his saying concerning this
subject of scenery in literature, that he would thank an author as much
for writing an eloquent description of what he had just had for dinner.
But this was in reference to another argument; namely, the proper
province of each art. My friend maintained that just as canvas and
colour were the wrong mediums for story telling, so word-painting was, at
its best, but a clumsy method of conveying impressions that could much
better be received through the eye.

As regards the question, there also lingers in my memory very distinctly
a hot school afternoon. The class was for English literature, and the
proceedings commenced with the reading of a certain lengthy, but
otherwise unobjectionable, poem. The author's name, I am ashamed to say,
I have forgotten, together with the title of the poem. The reading
finished, we closed our books, and the Professor, a kindly, white-haired
old gentleman, suggested our giving in our own words an account of what
we had just read.

"Tell me," said the Professor, encouragingly, "what it is all about."

"Please, sir," said the first boy--he spoke with bowed head and evident
reluctance, as though the subject were one which, left to himself, he
would never have mentioned,--"it is about a maiden."

"Yes," agreed the Professor; "but I want you to tell me in your own
words. We do not speak of a maiden, you know; we say a girl. Yes, it is
about a girl. Go on."

"A girl," repeated the top boy, the substitution apparently increasing
his embarrassment, "who lived in a wood."

"What sort of a wood?" asked the Professor.

The first boy examined