strike home hardest upon the hearer's perceptions. Now that which
strikes home hardest on a man is a tale which he can grasp by the
concretest images conveyed in the concretest language. '_Labor improbus
omnia vincit_' tells him not half so much as a tale of the labours of
Hercules; so he will learn more of patience from Job or Griselda; more
of chivalrous courage from Hector or Roland or Launcelot or the tale of
Palamon and Arcite; more of patriotism from the figures in
history--Leonidas, Horatius, Regulus, Joan of Arc, William Tell,
Garibaldi, Gordon--that have translated the Idea back into their own
lives with the noblest simplicity, so that we say of them that they are
"epical figures" or "figures worthy of romance," thereby paying them the
highest compliment in our power: yes and more of Christian simplicity
from my Uncle Toby, Colonel Newcome, even Mr. Pickwick; than from a
hundred copybook maxims concerning these virtues: all these figures
indeed illustrating the tritest copybook maxim of all--that "Example
is better than Precept." Thus Charles Lamb praises the Plays of
Shakespeare as "enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a
withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all
sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity,
generosity, humanity: for," say he, "of _examples_, teaching those
virtues, his pages are full."

* * * * *

The Poet then, having seized on the Idea and purged it of what is
trivial or accidental, reclothes it in a concrete dress and so
represents it to us. And you will generally remark in the very greatest
poets that not only are the images they represent to us extraordinarily
definite and concrete and therefore vivid--as Dante, for example, will
describe a Scene in Hell or in Paradise with as much particularity as