Two other purely literary questions are discussed in _The Veil of the Temple_, the first of these being as follows. One of the speakers calls attention to a criticism which is often and justly made with reference to many, and even to the best of novels, that, while the minor characters are drawn with the utmost skill, the heroes (such as most of Scott's) have often no characters at all. The reason, he says, is that, in most cases, the hero is not so much an individual, with characteristics peculiar to himself, as a certain point of view, from which all the other characters and incidents of the story are drawn. Or else, if some of these are, as very often happens, not drawn from the point of view of the hero, they are drawn from the point of view of some other ideal spectator, on whose position, moral or local, the whole perspective of the story, mental or ocular, depends. Let us take, for example, a typical opening scene of a kind proverbially frequent in the novels of G. P. R. James. Such scenes were proverbially described very much as follows: "To the right lay a gray wall, which formed, to all appearance, the boundary of some great sheep tract. To the left was a wood of larches. Between these was a road, showing so few signs of use that it might have been a relic of some almost forgotten world. Proceeding along this road on a late October evening might have been seen three horsemen, of imperfectly distinguishable, yet vaguely sinister, aspect." In the absence of an ideal spectator, who is tacitly identified with the novelist, his hero, or his reader, such a description would mean very little more than nothing. There would be no left or right unless for a supposed spectator standing in a particular place and looking in a particular direction. The aspect of the horsemen could not be sinister or indistinguishable unless there were an assumed man whose eyes were unable to distinguish it.