s meaning well and sometimes ill, 'How well so-and-so
would do in a book!' Such people are by no means the best people; but
they are the most effective people--the most rememberable people.
Frequently when we first know them, we like them because they explain
to us so much of our experience; we have known many people 'like
that,' in one way or another, but we did not seem to understand them;
they were nothing to us, for their traits were indistinct; we forgot
them, for they _hitched_ on to nothing, and we could not classify
them; but when we see the _type_ of the genus, at once we seem to
comprehend its character; the inferior specimens are explained by the
perfect embodiment; the approximations are definable when we know the
ideal to which they draw near. There are an infinite number of classes
of human beings, but in each of these classes there is a distinctive
type which, if we could expand it out in words, would define the
class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a landscape
or a species of landscapes; but we have an art, an art of words, which
can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in addition to
their long journals--which though so living to them, are so dead, so
inanimate, so undescriptive to all else--a pen-and-ink sketch, rudely
done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and
strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see
it. They say at once, '_Now_ we know the sort of thing'. The sketch
has _hit_ the mind. True literature does the same. It describes sorts,
varieties, and permutations, by delineating the type of each sort, the
ideal of each variety, the central, the marking trait of each
permutation.

On this account, the greatest artists of the world have ever shown an
enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to
philosophize; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of
thought, are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A
Schiller, a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for _ideas_--for the
parings of the intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a
Shakespeare, a Homer, a Goethe, finds his mental occupation, the true
home of his natural thoughts, in the real world--'which is the world
of all of us'--where the face of nature, the moving masses of men and
women, are ever changing, ever multiplying, ever mixing one with the
other. The reason is plain--the business of the poet, of the artist,
is with _ty