amplification of this statement he devoted four paragraphs, whose topics are In the Spiritual order, In the Industrial order, In the Speculative and Scientific order, Fourthly, and finally, in the Political order. This is a simple enumeration. Another plain example may be seen in Ecclesiastes iii. 1–8, where the verses after I simply reduce to particulars the opening assertion. 2. A general principle is most naturally amplified by exemplification, in which the object is not so much to substantiate by the number of details as to illustrate by their character. The example shows the truth in question in the concrete. EXAMPLE. - In the following the principle enunciated at the beginning is, after it has been enlarged by some definitive sentences, exemplified by several names chosen casually: "The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution. The community may evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of this or that ferment decides in which way it shall evolve. Why, the very birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us." 1 3. It is to be noted here that the order of amplification in this form may sometimes be reversed, the general coming in as a summary to interpret a body of particulars. This is analogous, on a small scale, to the order of investigation, mentioned above.2 3. By adding Descriptive Details. Not all amplification is in the nature of proof or example; nor is it always employed merely in the interests of the understanding. The imagination, 1 JAMES, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays, p. 229. 2 See above, p. 446. "The examples which we take to prove other things, if we wish to prove the examples, we should take the other things to be their examples; for, as we always believe that the difficulty is in what we wish to prove, we find the examples more clear, and they aid us in proving it. Thus when we wish to illustrate a general principle, we must exhibit the particular rule of a case: but if we wish to illustrate a particular case, we must begin with the general rule." PASCAL, Thoughts, p. 232. too, has its claim. On the scaffolding of formal plan or logical movement there must, in a large proportion of material, be erected a structure such as may be seen and felt, — realized as it were by the senses; and the amplification used for this end must be of a heightening and vivifying character.1 1. Narrative and descriptive writing is the special field for such imaginative amplification; there the motive of the work, largely, is to give life and concrete reality, and details are observed or invented to this end. EXAMPLE OF ITS RECOGNIZED IMPORTANCE. As a mere historical event the discovery of the Wisconsin River might have been dispatched in a few words; Parkman chooses rather to make its importance more vividly perceived by describing the scenery of the river as it must have looked to the explorers, Joliet and Marquette : — ... "The perplexed and narrow channel brought them at last to the portage; where, after carrying their canoes a mile and a half over the prairie and through the marsh, they launched them on the Wisconsin, bade farewell to the waters that flowed to the St. Lawrence, and committed themselves to the current that was to bear them they knew not whither, — perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the South Sea or the Gulf of California. They glided calmly down the tranquil stream, by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grapevines; by forests, groves, and prairies, the parks and pleasure-grounds of a prodigal nature; by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars; under the shadowing trees, between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow of some woody bluff. At night, the bivouac, — the canoes inverted on the bank, the flickering fire, the meal of bison-flesh or venison, the evening pipes, and slumber beneath the stars: and when in the morning they embarked again, the mist hung on the river like a bridal veil; then melted before the sun, till the glassy water and the languid woods basked breathless in the sultry glare." 1 "Invention determines that such events shall happen; but in the case of the finest work it attempts to go no further. It has proposed the scene: the power which sets the scene like life before the inward eye, the graphic touch which makes it unforgettable, belong, of right, to the imagination alone." — Article on Invention and Imagination, Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. lvi, p. 275. 2 PARKMAN, Discovery of the Great West, p. 54. Not only the historian's sense of its importance, but the pains he was at to get this imagined scene authentic, may be indicated in the footnote appended to this paragraph of description: "The above traits of the scenery of the Wisconsin are taken from personal observation of the river during midsummer." 2. In many cases where the idea is abstruse, or where it needs to be keenly realized as a truth of life, some figure of analogy or metaphor is employed to make it more apprehensible to the imagination. EXAMPLE. In the following the attempt is made, by figurative description, to make more apprehensible to imagination the mystery of our world as a dwelling-place :· 66 Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to our experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings to rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt our first surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this connection; a few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn. Far off on all hands other dead embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far that the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance. Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with mankind on its bullet. Even to us who have known no other, it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.❤1 3. Incidents, anecdotes, apologues, are a frequent means of illustrative amplification, especially in popular discourse. They may be regarded as a free form of exemplification. As to the management of them, they are to be regarded as a story told not for its details but for its point; which latter must be so identified with the idea illustrated that the illustration will not be remembered by itself. To make a discourse of stories that illustrate nothing or only insignificant things is to degrade literature from a worthy use to a mere entertainment. 1 STEVENSON, Lay Morals, Works, Vol. xxii, p. 552. EXAMPLE. In the article on Invention and Imagination, already quoted from, the argument is thus concluded and summed up by apologue: "Are we, then, to conclude, from these considerations, that invention is to be despised? Far from it. In its own domain it is a power. We owe the Arabian Nights almost to it alone. Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, could not have been produced without its active aid; nor, indeed, could some far mightier works, Paradise Lost or The Inferno. But when it comes to making men and women, Centaurs and archangels, breathe and live, invention either stands aside in modesty, or toils and fails. "Solomon (so runs the apologue) was one day musing in his garden, at the fifth hour of the day, when there appeared to him two Spirits, who bowed down before him, and besought him to judge, by his wisdom, which of them was the most powerful. Solomon consented, and commanded the first Spirit to display his might. The Spirit took a piece of rock, and smote with it upon a larger block; again, and yet again, the blows fell; and slowly, as the Spirit toiled, the block assumed the figure of a man. And the man sat motionless and moved not; because he was of rock. Then Solomon signed with his finger to the other Spirit. And he stepped towards the man of rock, and breathed upon his eyes, and upon his feet, and upon his heart. And the man rose up as if from sleep, and moved, and bowed down at the feet of Solomon; for he had become a living thing. Then the first Spirit drooped and trembled; but the eyes of the other shone like light, and he laughed so gloriously with triumph, that at the sound of his laughter Solomon awoke; and behold, it was a dream."1 IV. Accessories of Amplification. Besides the direct means of amplification, there are to be noted. certain accessories that, rightly employed, do much to give fulness and interest to the thought. Quotation. For corroborating one's own statements, or for giving them the pointedness of felicitous phrase, quotation may be made a valuable accessory to amplification. The right use of it, however, is an art, which modern habits of 1 Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. Ivi, p. 278. 2 2 " He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; he that uses that of his superior elevates his own to the stature of that he contemplates.”Remark quoted from Burke, by EMERSON, Works, Vol. viii, p. 170. thought in literature have made somewhat exacting. One or two features of the art we may here note. 1. To be rightly employed a quoted thought must be thoroughly assimilated in one's own thinking, and lie in the direct line of it. If it is a little aside, or looks toward a different conclusion and all the more if only a little out of the way it confuses the unity and impairs the tissue of the work. EXAMPLE OF THE FAULT.-The following quotations, especially the one in verse, which occur in the midst of a passage inculcating painstaking in composition, turn the thought aside and confuse it : "Our best poets have been equally painstaking. Ben Jonson declared, contrary to the popular opinion, that a good poet's made, as well as born.' So, also, Wordsworth : 'O many are the poets that are sown By nature, men endowed with highest gifts, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, From this point onward the subject of painstaking, which has waited for these irrelevant quotations, is resumed. 2. The modern sense of honesty in composition demands that a quotation be given in the exact words, grammatical construction, and punctuation of the author quoted; the quotation marks guarantee that. To this end, if any construction must be modified to suit the quotation, it must be the writer's own. EXAMPLES OF THE FAULT.-The following, from a student essay, involves the writer in an impossible grammatical construction : "Not very far from my home the Charles, the 'River! that in silence wendest,' flows onward, pursuing its course to the sea." The following, from a similar source, compels the quoted expression to use the wrong grammatical case: "Yet he did know that 'Christ and Him |