So eminent a critic as Frederic Harrison is reported as praising this sentence from the new British author Maurice Hewlett: “In the milk of October dawns her calm brows had been dipped.” The instructor in literature should be able to show his class why this is not good literature. The suggestion of brows dipped in milk is not a pleasant one. One cannot conceive of any brow the beauty of which would be enhanced by it, even by the milk of October dawns, if there were anything in October dawns that in the remotest way suggested milk. Mr. Hewlett is so in love with a crisp style that he describes his heroine as lying white and twisting on a couch, crisping and uncrisping her little hands. Such things come from straining after novelty. They proceed from an unripe taste. Men of real genius and power are at times guilty of such lapses, or go astray in quest of novel images. Walter Bagehot sometimes did. Writing of Sydney Smith, his rhetoric shows its teeth in this fashion: “Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders; Sydney Smith was a molar. He did not run a long sharp argument into the interior of a question; he did not, in the common phrase, go deeply into it; but he kept it steadily under the contact of a strong, capable, jawlike understanding, pressing its surface, effacing its intricacies, grinding it down.” Such a comparison has the merit of being vivid; it also has the demerit of an unworthy alliance,--it marries the noble and the ignoble. You cannot lift mastication up to the level of intellectual processes, and to seriously compare the two is to degrade the latter. Sydney Smith himself could not have been guilty of such bad taste. Let me finish this chapter with a bit of prose from Ben Jonson. “Some words are to be culled out for ornament and color, as we gather flowers to strow houses or make garlands; but they are better when they grow to our style; as in a meadow where, though the mere grass and greenness delight, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and beautify.” II ANALOGY--TRUE AND FALSE I have never seen any thorough examination of the grounds of analogy. The works on logic make but slight reference to them, yet the argument from analogy is one of the most frequent forms of argument, and one of the most convincing. It is so much easier to captivate the fancy with a pretty or striking figure than to move the judgment with sound reasons,--so much easier to be rhetorical than to be logical. We say that seeing is believing; the rhetorician makes us see the thing; his picture appeals to the mind’s visual sense, hence his power over us, though his analogies are more apt to be false than true. We love to see these agreements between thoughts and things, or between the subjective and the objective worlds, and a favorite thought with profound minds in all ages has been the identity or oneness which runs through creation.