unreal, it cannot in any way lie and retain its own nature. The use of this rational imagination is not confined to the world of art. It is only by its aid that we build up the horizons of our earthly life and fill them with objects and events beyond the reach of our senses. To it we are indebted for our knowledge of the greater part of others' lives, for our idea of the earth's surface and the doings of foreign nations, of all past history and its scene, and the events of primaeval nature which were even before man was. So far as we realize the world at all beyond the limit of our private experience of it, we do so by the power of the imagination acting on the lines of reason. It fills space and time for us through all their compass. Nor is it less operative in the practical pursuits of men. The scientist lights his way with it; the statesman forecasts reform by it, building in thought the state which he afterward realizes in fact; the entire future lives to us—and it is the most important part of life—only by its incantation. The poet acts no otherwise in employing it than the inventor and the speculator even, save that he uses it for the ends of reason instead of for his private interest. In some parts of this field there is, or was once, or will be, a physical parallel, an actuality, containing the verification of the imagined state of things; but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a conception of the reason just as normal, which is not the less real because it is a tissue of abstract thought. In art this governance of the imagination by the reason is fundamental, and gives to the office of the latter a seeming primacy; and therefore emphasis is rightly placed on the universal element, the truth, as the substance of the artistic form. But in the light of this preliminary description of the mental processes involved, let us take a nearer view of their particular employment in literature.

Human life, as represented in literature, consists of two main branches, character and action. Of these, character, which is the realm of personality, is generalized by means of type, which is ideal character; action, which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal action. It is convenient to examine the nature of these separately. A type, the example of a class, contains the characteristic qualities which make an individual one of that class; it does not differ in this elementary form from the bare idea of the species. The traits of a tree, for instance, exist in every actual tree, however stunted or imperfect; and in the type which condenses into itself what is common in all specimens of the class, these traits only exist; they constitute the type. Comic types, in literature, are often simple 

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