“So it does, sir,” said Billy. “And yet Homer makes his hero go heavy-hearted as he hears the ever-sounding sea.” “What does that signify, Doctor?” said Harcourt, impatiently. “Telling me what a character in a fiction feels affects me no more than telling me what he does. Why, man, the one is as unreal as the other. The fellow that created him fashioned his thoughts as well as his actions.” “To be sure he did; but when the fellow is a janius, what he makes is as much a crayture as either you or myself.” “Come, come, Doctor, no mystification.” “I don't mean any,” broke in Billy. “What I want to say is this, that as we read every character to elicit truth,--truth in the working of human motives, truth in passion, truth in all the struggles of our poor weak natures,--why would n't a great janius like Homer, or Shakspeare, or Milton, be better able to show us this in some picture drawn by themselves, than you or I be able to find it out for ourselves?” Harcourt shook his head doubtfully. “Well, now,” said Billy, returning to the charge, “did you ever see a waxwork model of anatomy? Every nerve and siny of a nerve was there,--not a vein nor an artery wanting. The artist that made it all just wanted to show you where everything was; but he never wanted you to believe it was alive, or ever had been. But with janius it's different. He just gives you some traits of a character, he points him out to you passing,--just as I would to a man going along the street,--and there he is alive for ever and ever; not like you and me, that will be dead and buried to-morrow or next day, and the most known of us three lines in a parish registhry, but he goes down to posterity an example, an illustration--or a warning, maybe--to thousands and thousands of living men. Don't talk to me about fiction! What _he_ thought and felt is truer than all that you and I and a score like us ever did or ever will do. The creations of janius are the landmarks of humanity; and well for us is it that we have such to guide us!” “All this may be very fine,” said Harcourt, contemptuously, “but give _me_ the sentiments of a living man, or one that has lived, in preference to all the imaginary characters that have ever adorned a story.” “Just as I suppose that you'd say that a soldier in the Blues, or some big, hulking corporal in the Guards, is a finer model of the human form than ever Praxiteles chiselled.” “I know which I 'd rather have alongside of me in a charge, Doctor,” said Harcourt, laughing; and then, to change the topic, he pointed to a lone cabin on the sea-shore, miles away, as it seemed, from all other habitations. “That's Michel Cady's, sir,” said Traynor; “he lives by birds,--hunting them saygulls and cormorants through the crevices of the rocks, and stealing the eggs. There isn't a precipice that he won't climb, not a cliff that he won't face.” “Well, if that be his home, the pursuit does not seem a profitable one.”