Thus, in a recent debate on the treatment of Canada, [85] Sir C. Adderley deprecates the continuance of a debate on a question "purely sentimental." I doubt if Sir C. Adderley knew in the least what was meant by a sentimental question. It is a purely "sentimental question," for instance, whether Sir C. Adderley shall, or shall not, eat his mother, instead of burying her. Similarly, it is a purely sentimental question, whether, in the siege of Samaria, the mother who boiled her son and ate him, or the mother who hid her son, was best fulfilling her duty to society. Similarly, the relations of a colony to its mother-country, in their truth and depth, are founded on purely parental and filial instincts, which may be either sentimental or bestial, but must be one or the other. Sir Charles probably did not know that the discussion of every such question must therefore be either sentimental or bestial. Into one or other, then, of these two forms of sentiment, conjugal and family love, or compassion, all human happiness, properly so called, resolves itself; but the spurious or counter-happiness of lust, covetousness, and vanity being easily obtained, and naturally grasped at, instead, may altogether occupy the lives of men, without ever allowing them to know what happiness means. But in the use I have just made of the word 'compassion', I mean something very different from what is usually understood by it. Compassion is the Latin form of the Greek word 'sympathy'--the English for both is 'fellow-feeling'; and the condition of delight in characters higher than our own is more truly to be understood by the word 'compassion' than the pain of pity for those inferior to our own; but in either case, the imaginative understanding of the natures of others, and the power of putting ourselves in their place, is the faculty on which the virtue depends. So that an unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind. The main use of works of fiction, and of the drama, is to supply, as far as possible, the defect of this imagination in common minds. But there is a curious difference in the nature of these works themselves, dependent on the degree of imaginative power of the writers, which I must at once explain, else I can neither answer for you my own question put in last 'Fors,' why Scott could not write a play, nor show you, which is my present object, the real nature of sentiment. Do you know, in the first place, what a play is? or what a poem is? or what a novel is? That is to say, do you know the perpetual and necessary distinctions in literary aim which have brought these distinctive names into use? You had better first, for clearness' sake, call all the three 'poems,' for all the three are so, when they are good, whether written in verse or prose. All truly imaginative account of man is poetic; but there are three essential kinds of poetry,--one dramatic, one lyric, and one epic.