The masters of description touch in details of sound and vision as they progress with the narrative, and the reader hears and sees without being aware that he has read description. The more leisurely novelists, who are great enough to carry a story through three volumes, do often stop and paint a picture, and even the great ones frequently fail to get the pictorial effect they seek. Scott’s descriptions sometimes interfere with his story and descend into a catalogue of details. But the total effect of his description is to make the entire world familiar with Scotland, streets, houses, mountains, and moors. It is part of Scott’s patriotic purpose to preserve in a series of novels the legend, the history, the character, the ideals, the social customs of old and new Scotland; and he allows himself, as a kind of antiquarian, all the space he needs for minute description. So his descriptions serve a purpose, even when they lack imaginative vision. Moreover, the great river of his stories is broad and swift enough to carry an amount of dead wood which would choke narratives of lesser volume and power. A great example of a long descriptive passage in fiction is in the fifty-fifth chapter of “David Copperfield.” There is to be action enough presently to sweep the reader off his feet; in preparation for it Dickens gives three or four pages of description of the storm. The excellence of that description grows upon the reader who finds how seldom even the better novelists succeed in painting on large canvases. Few artists in prose have been adequate to the greatness of the sea. Stevenson has succeeded in giving both the seas on the Scotch coast and the Pacific with its mysterious islands. Of living writers in English the masters of “sea pieces” are Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Joseph Conrad. But none of the younger writers, even of those especially devoted to the sea, has excelled Dickens, landsman and London cockney as he was, in that great picture of the storm. I once knew some young ladies who were enamored of the books of that third-rate novelist, Miss Marie Corelli. To be fair, I never read but two of her novels, and though they are so false that I doubt her ability to write anything beautiful and true, she may have written masterpieces that I have unfortunately missed. The young ladies had named their club after one of Miss Corelli’s books. I asked one worshipper what she liked in her favorite novelist. The reply was startling: “I love the beautiful descriptions.” It was interesting to find a young lady who liked beautiful descriptions for their own sake--most of us are not so far advanced in our critical enjoyment of fiction--and it was interesting to learn that Miss Corelli had written beautiful descriptions. But when I ungraciously pressed the matter, my friend confessed that she could not find any descriptive passage that seemed especially worth exhibiting.