These personal impressions of a writer or other artist may or may not be accompanied by a vague imagination of his visible appearance. Some persons have so strong a need to think in connection with visual images that they seem to form no notion of personality without involuntarily imagining what the person looks like; while others can have a strong impression of feeling and purpose that seems not to be accompanied by any visual picture. There can be no doubt, however, that sensible images of the face, voice, etc., usually go with personal ideas. Our earliest personal conceptions grow up about such images; and they always remain for most of us the principal means of getting hold of other people. Naturally, they have about the same relative place in memory and imagination as they do in observation. Probably, if we could get to the bottom of the matter, it would be found that our impression of a writer is always accompanied by some idea of his sensible appearance, is always associated with a physiognomy, even when we are not aware of it. Can anyone, for example, read Macaulay and think of a soft and delicately inflected voice? I imagine not: these periods must be connected with a sonorous and somewhat mechanical utterance; the sort of person that speaks softly and with delicate inflections would have written otherwise. On the other hand, in reading Robert Louis Stevenson it is impossible, I should say, not to get the impression of a sensitive and flexible speech. Such impressions are mostly vague and may be incorrect, but for sympathetic readers they exist and constitute a real, though subtle, physiognomy.