every part of matter affording proper necessaries and conveniences for the livelihood of multitudes which inhabit it.

The elaborate mention of details is a leading quality of Bunyan, Defoe, and Carlyle. It would be difficult, however, to find a more striking example than Shakespeare's description of Queen Mab:

She comes

In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman;
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses, as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider's web;
The collars, of the moon-shine's watery beams;
Her whip of cricket's bones; the lash of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm,
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid.
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,

Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers.

It is obviously impossible to give a list of all the means of amplification, which are as numerous as the ways by which thought is clearly, strongly, and elegantly expressed. It rarely happens that a writer is restricted to one of them. Generally different modes are combined, as in the following exquisite passage:

Did you never in walking in the fields come across a large flat stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it close to its edges? and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge, and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to herself, 'It's done brown enough by this time'? What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the

sudden dismay and scattering among the members produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous, or hornyshelled turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches (nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-pattern live timekeepers to slide into it); black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless slug-like creatures; young larvæ, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned, and the wholesome light of day let in upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs — and some of them have a good many-rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.

The stone is ancient error. The grass is human nature, borne down and bleached of all its color by it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native hues in the sunshine. Then shall God's minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty, divinely taking outlines and colors, light upon the souls of men, as the butterfly — image of the beatified spirit rising from the dust-soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings had not the stone been lifted.-Dr. Holmes.

Quotations, if tasteful and judicious, give completeness and finish. By necessity,' 'By necessity,' says Emerson, by proclivity,

by delight, we quote.' Never hesitate to quote an author who will strengthen or illuminate your position. Great names have great weight. 'It is generally supposed,' says D'Israeli, 'that where there is no quotation there will be found most originality. . . . The greater part of our writers, in consequence, have become so original that no one cares to imitate them; and those who never quote, in return are seldom quoted Probably no writer has quoted more copiously and forcefully than Sir William Hamilton,

himself one of the most erudite and brilliant of men. Be solicitous to quote aptly and usefully. Emerson well says: 'In literature quotation is good only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I, gives me a cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of my road, I had better have gone afoot.'

EXERCISES.

1. What is the status of Macbeth, of Campbell's Last Man, or of Holland's Bitter-Sweet?

2. Criticise and amend the following analysis of The College Burning:

(1) The smothered spreading of the fire.

(2) The kindling of the fire.

(3) Progress from part to part of the building.

(4) The bursting out of the flames.

(5) Importance of Education.

(6) The ruins.

(7) The sin of carelessness.

(8) The dying out of the fire.

(9) Classical study.

(10) The utility of fire departments.

(11) Relative destructiveness of fire and water.

(12) Cause of the fire.

3. Correct the faults in the subjoined analysis of Anger: (1) What it is.

(2) Importance of self-control.

(3) Feelings consequent upon the indulgence of anger.
(4) Effects on the individual and on society.

(5) Moral character of this passion.

(6) Quotations — what others say of it.

(7) A person in a violent fit of passion has the appearance

of a maniac.

(8) An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes. -Cato.

4. Prepare an analysis of Hamlet, Richelieu, first book of Paradise Lost, Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Goldsmith's Deserted Village, or Hamilton's lecture on The Causes of Philosophy.

5. Take account of your present knowledge or opinions on each of the following subjects; after reflection and (if necessary) after investigation, decide upon the point of view from which the subject shall be regarded—if the status is not given in the form in which the subject is presented for treatment; read, either as you may elect or as indicated by the accompanying references; determine the general heads, and arrange the special under them, or revise your provisional analysis if such has been made; amplify - dispose your materials in effective order:

(1) HAPPINESS MORE IN PURSUIT THAN IN POSSESSION.

See Montaigne's Essays, p. 383; Royal Path of Life, p. 384; Hamilton's Metaphysics, Lecture I, pp. 6–9; Haven's Mental Philosophy, p. 512; Ruskin's Modern Painters, Vol. I,

(2) CONSCIENCE.

p. 16.

See Montaigne's Essays, pp. 229, 231; Gladstone's Might of Right, p. 110; Smiles' Duty, p. 13; Clarke's Self-Culture, p. 195; Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, pp. 145, 147, 303; Popular Science Monthly, Vol. IX, p. 80; ibid, Vol. XIII, p. 5; Joseph Cook's Conscience, pp. 13, 87, 171; Wayland's Elements of Moral Science, pp. 49, 59, 71; Hoyt's Cyclopædia of Practical Quotations, pp. 61-63; Haven's Mental Philosophy, p. 314; Schuyler's Empirical and Rational Psychology, pp. 439, 489; Ruskin's Modern Painters, Vol. II, p. 35; Shakespeare's Henry VI, Act 3, Scene 1; Richard III, Act 1, Scene 4, Act 5, Scene 3; Henry VIII, Act 2, Scene 2, Act 3, Scene 2.

(3) DOES POVERTY OR RICHES DEVELOP CHARACTER BEST. See Royal Path of Life, p. 120; Hamerton's Intellectual Life, pp. 187, 341; Le Roy Pope's Modern Fancies and Follies, p. 79; Talmage's Daily Thoughts, p. 263; Holland's Gold Foil, p. 179; Holland's Letters to the Joneses, p. 335; Bacon's Essays, XXXIV;

Mathews' Getting On in the World, p. 280; Smiles' Self-Help, pp. 40, 342, 344; Nation, Vol. III, p. 215; Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XLVI, p. 846; Whipple's Success and its Conditions, p. 273; George Macdonald's Cheerful Words, p. 67; Ruskin's Modern Painters, Vol. I, pp. 4-5.

(4) FRIENDSHIP.

See Alcott's Table-Talk, p. 76; Bacon's Essays, XXVII; Emerson's Essays, First Series, VI; Greeley's Hints toward Reforms, p. 357; Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor, p. 212; Munger's On the Threshold, p. 31; Foster's New Cyclopædia of Practical Quotations, pp. 172-5; George Macdonald's Cheerful Words, p. 167; North American Review, Vol. LXXXIII, p. 104, Vol. CXXXIX, p. 453; Living Age, Vol. CXXIX, p. 214; Thackeray's London Sketches, pp. 26, 94; Alcott's Table-Talk, p. 77.

(5) DANCING.

See Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. VI, p. 43; Talmage's Abomination of Modern Society, p. 79; Chambers' Encyclopædia, Vol. III, p. 412; Munger's On the Threshold, p. 191; Thomason's Fashionable Amusements, p. 115; Living Age, LXXIII, p. 55; Penny Magazine, Vol. V, p. 1; Leigh Hunt's Seer, p. 105; Wise's Young Lady's Counselor, p. 199.

(6) NOVEL-READING.

See Potter's American Monthly, Vol. XII, p. 187; Edinburgh Review, Vol. XLIII, p. 356; Putnam's Magazine, Vol. IV, p. 389; Living Age, Vol. CXL, p. 349; Nation, Vol. II, p. 138; Talmage's Daily Thoughts, p. 327; Holland's Every-Day Topics, p. 269; Royal Path of Life, p. 162; Le Roy Pope's Modern Fancies and Follies, p. 172; Princeton Review, Vol. XLI, p. 202.

(7) A TASTE FOR LITERATURE.

See Dr. Porter's Books and Reading, pp. 30, 37-47, 72-80; Montaigne's Essays, p. 254; Hamerton's Intellectual Life, pp. 147, 353, 384; Munger's On the Threshold, p. 155; Beecher's Star Papers, p. 250; Emerson's Society and Solitude, p. 167; Scribner's Monthly, Vol. XV, p. 681; Living Age, LXIII, p. 72; Clarke's Self-Culture, p. 307; Isaac D'Israeli's Miscellanies, Vol. I, p. 22.

(8) FLOWERS.

See Beecher's Star Papers, p. 93; Beecher's Fruit, Flowers, and Farming, p. 117; Ruskin's Studies of Wayside Flowers; All the Year Round, Vol. VII, p. 414; Atlantic Monthly, Vol. X, p. 694;