3. The Washington Arch in New York: compare with the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, the Brandenburger Thor, Berlin, the Arch of Trajan, Rome.

4. Napoleon as painted in his youth by Greuze: compare with other portraits of Napoleon at later periods. McClure's Life of Napoleon has a large number of pictures. I find great opportunities for exercises like this in the current magazines.

5. The Giusti Garden, Verona (Harper's for August 1893, p. 404): compare with the gardens of the Quirinal, Villa Medici, Villa d'Este, the Boboli gardens, of which you will find pictures in the July and August numbers.

6. The Virgin Enthroned, by Abbott Thayer. Compare first with a Madonna by Botticelli, and note any characteristic differences. Then compare with The Mother, by Edward Simmons, and a Madonna by Francis Vincent Du Mond, and you will learn a few other things about it. The modern pictures may be found in the Christmas Century for 1892. There are also a number of Madonnas in the Christmas McClure for 1895.

18. The Processes of Description. Now this is an important matter. If we are quite sure that in writing a Description we want to mention those characteristics which only our subject possesses, we have got a good way. We know at least what to look for, when we think of describing anything. That tramp who came to the house the other day, what will you say of him? That he was ragged and dirty, that he hadn't eaten anything for three days, that he asked for work? That won't describe him: those things are as true of all tramps as of this one. Say that he not only asked for work, but actually sawed wood for an hour, even after he had eaten a breakfast. That will mark him among a thousand.

Sometimes the main aim of a descriptive writer will be the separate particularities. "The æsthetic critic, then," says Pater," regards all the objects with which he has

1 For the careful student of these problems Walter Pater is a very good author, on account of his constant effort after careful discrimination, as well as for other reasons that will be apparent later. The average Sophomore, however, will not be likely to find much that he can either appropriate or assimilate.

to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of human life, as powers or forces, producing sensations, each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind." We might as well regard everything that we have to deal with in writing as being more or less peculiar and unique," if we can only find out just how. We shall get to enjoy everything the more thoroughly the better we find ourselves able to discriminate between it and everything else.

"But," you will perhaps say, "I don't always want to know the peculiar and unique. I may know that; I may want to know the generalities about some particular thing. Take Queen Elizabeth: I know the unique thing about her; she reigned over England from 1558 to 1603. That identifies her; no one else did that. What I want to know is, What were her human qualities?" This is very just. When we read the description of the character of somebody-Queen Elizabeth, since we are speaking of her '-we hear of qualities which the individual shared with other people. Elizabeth was a courtier, and a scholar as well; so were many others of her day. She was resolute and manysided and popular and lonely. These are not peculiarly individual qualities, they are, on the whole, common. Wherein, then, lay Elizabeth's individuality? In the union of them all, I suppose, in the person of the Queen of England, daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn. And that union is as much a particularization as is the fact that she reigned such and such a time. It is always getting at something particular, something unique, is Description, but that something unique may be of differing kind.

It will be well, however, to look at this matter a little more closely. Are we in Description to mention only those things which are absolutely particular? That is certainly hardly possible in some cases. And it will probably at

1 1 By Green, for instance, in his Shorter History, ch. VII. sec. iii,

once occur to you that many descriptions of particular things contain mention of points that are by no means particular to the subject in hand.' Suppose I say, “It was one of those blue misty mornings not uncommon in October, but I shall always remember it from the solemn stillness in which everybody asked news of the President.” Now certainly the first thing said there of that morning is not particular. By its very form it might have been said of many other mornings. Or if one should say, "The trees stood bare and gaunt and black in the driving rain, waving their branches in fantastic dread of some evil to come.". There too the first things said are not particular, but might apply to many trees.

This objection is quite just, and brings forward another thing about Description that will be of value to us. Those remarks criticised are not particular, they are general. And yet they undoubtedly have their place in the description. What is that place? Why, those things serve to classify. They serve to place the subject of which we are speaking in some well-known class: when that is done, we can note the particular. First we put our subject into the class of "those blue misty mornings not uncommon in October, or, in case of the trees, into such as are bare, gaunt, and black in the driving rain.” That gives us some

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thing of an idea to start with, and we go on to make the idea more definite. Sometimes we can do our classification by a single word: as by the word tramp we understand a person who is ragged and dirty, who hasn't eaten anything for three days, and who is anxious for work. In such cases the exposition of the general term in question is already familiar to us. Often enough, however, we have to

1 In discussing this point I speak in a popular manner and disregard the subtleties which are introduced into the subject by the Hegelian Logic. At the same time I would advise any one who likes to deal with a good problem, to consider the matter in relation, say, to the discussion of Hegel's philosophy in Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, lect. VII. sec. iii.

say something of the class to bring it to the reader's mind. These remarks which serve to classify may not seem to be Description in the strict sense of the word, but we see that they are practically necessary. A curious analogy which may serve as illustration may be observed in the method of identifying criminals in use by the Parisian Police.' This system provides for the measurement of criminals according to certain principles, and for the noting all private marks, such as moles, scars, tattooings, and so on. It is evident that these latter marks are the truly descriptive ones. If you find a man with a mole to the left of the larynx, the scar for operation for croup just below it, a deep scar an inch long lying obliquely on the right collar bone, and a particular tattoo mark on his left wrist, it is certain that he is the same man on whom those marks were recorded twenty years before. There you have the police description. But the question, when you have a criminal, is, How to get at the right description? There are over a hundred thousand such descriptions in the Anthropometric Bureau at Paris or at Scotland Yard in London. The man arrested to-day may have left his description among them, but how are you going to find it?

The descriptions must be classified somehow, if you are to be able easily to get at any desired description in a hurry. As a means for this classifying serve the measurements. The length of head is one means of division, the width of head of subdivision under that, then the length of the left middle finger, and so on; so by the time you get to the last measurement, the width of the right ear, you have reached a class that is comparatively small. There may be only half a dozen men out of the hundred thousand whose measurements practically coincide. Among these half dozen you can easily enough find your man by the

2

1 Described in the Nineteenth Century for Sept. 1894, pp. 356-370. 'They are almost all of bony parts which are constant in adults.

private marks. What this system-Bertillonage it is called -means, is, first Classification, and then Description. We may learn something from it.

We now begin to understand what we are doing when we describe. We are talking about some particular thing and we are saying particular things about it. That is the real Description. Furthermore, we say things that might be said, also, of some other subject, but those are only preliminary. To be strictly accurate, those things would perhaps come under the head of Exposition, though it would be splitting hairs always to insist upon the distinction.

If now you try to describe, try really to seize the individuality of anything, even of something with which you are familiar, you will see that you must sharpen your powers of observation.

EXERCISES.

The student may continue the exercises in 17 or go on to those of 19.

19. The Purpose of Description. We have so far been talking loosely of Description as though it were all a thing of the same kind. But there are really different kinds of Description, and it will help us to better ideas on method to note some of them. Here are two examples of Description: the first is a description of a man's face mostly according to M. Bertillon's method for detective recognition, and the other is a description of the same face according to very different ideas.

"Medium nose, wavy convex, drooping base.

Ears usually hidden by cap.

Medium forehead intermediate.

Eyes deep-set.

Cheek-bones prominent.

Mouth drooping.

“To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces