ETIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 85 



Matthew Arnold, who were genuine poets, nor Jane 

 Austen, nor Dickens, nor Stevenson, were consumed 

 by feeling. High intellect can, now and then, in some 

 degree, understand emotion, can sympathise with it, 

 borrow its language, and don its vestments. 



It is not always easy to pass judgment on the men and 

 women either of fiction or of poetry. Many are not 

 drawn from life, and frequently bodily characteristics are 

 either not given or not given with sureness of touch. 

 The reflective, brooding, impassioned Hamlet in real 

 life would in build and pose be, I believe, quite different 

 from Serlo in Goethe's " Wilhelm Meister " the 

 quick, confident, unresting Serlo, who was always 

 demanding praise for himself, but never able to give 

 any to others. Is it too much to say that Rochester had 

 a skeleton and a hair growth unlike those of Mr. 

 Spurgeon, and that in actual life a Jane Eyre's bodily 

 peculiarities would not be those of Jane Austen ? 



Fortunately we are not without some reliable know- 

 ledge of the physique not only of a few leading novelists 

 whose lives and actions are known to us, but also of their 

 most interesting and striking characters. Nathaniel 

 Hawthorne, both in anatomical characteristics and in 

 temperament, was of the more impassioned and less 

 active order. His genius tended to reverie, to pathos, 

 and to smouldering passion. Arthur Dimsdale was no 

 scheming hypocrite in his unlawful passion for Esther, 

 and in his passion for the eternal welfare of his fellow 

 creatures : he was led by two headlong and con- 

 current impulses. His portrait is not, I believe, 

 drawn for us, but we may be sure that in his bodily 

 backbone there was more of Robert Burns than of 

 John Wesley. Of one anatomical feature of Esther 

 Prynne the most pathetic figure in fiction we are 



