84. The coward, driven to despair, leaps back into the face of danger; and the tame, stimulated to exertions and aiming at expression, puffs spirit into flutter; or tears the garb of passion and flourishes the rags. 85. Affectation cannot excite sympathy. How can you feel for him who cannot feel for himself? How can he feel for himself, who exhibits the artificial graces of studied attitude? 86. The loathsome is abominable, and no engine of expression. _Coroll._ When Spenser dragged into light the entrails of the serpent, slain by the Red-cross Knight, he dreamt a butcher's dream and not a poet's: and Fletcher,[10] or his partner, when rummaging the surgeon's box of cataplasms and trusses to assuage hunger, solicited the grunt of an applauding sty. 87. Sympathy and disgust are the lines that separate terror from horror: though we shudder at, we scarcely pity what we abominate. _Coroll._--Rowe, when he congratulates the ghost on bidding Hamlet spare his mother, accuses _her_ of a crime with which the poet never charged her: that Shakspeare might be hurried on to horror let the "vile jelly" witness, which Cornwall treads from Gloster's bleeding sockets. 88. Expression animates, convulses, or absorbs form. The Apollo is animated; the warrior of Agasias is agitated; the Laocoon is convulsed; the Niobe is absorbed. 89. The being seized by an enormous passion, be it joy or grief, hope or despair, loses the character of its own individual expression, and is absorbed by the power of the feature that attracts it: Niobe and her family are assimilated by extreme anguish; Ugolino is petrified by the fate that sweeps his sons; and every metamorphosis from that of Clytie to the transfusion of Gianni Fucci[11] tells a new allegory of sympathetic power. 90. Reject with indignant incredulity all self-congratulations of conscious villainy, though they be uttered by Richard or by Iago. 91. The axe, the wheel, saw-dust, and the blood-stained sheet are not legitimate substitutes of terror. 92. All division diminishes, all mixtures impair the simplicity and clearness of expression. 93. The epoch which discovered expression, or what the Greeks called "manners,"[12] is marked by Pliny as that which gave importance and effect to art. _Coroll._--Homer invested his heroes with ideal powers, but copied nature in delineating their moral character. Achilles, the irresistible in arms, clad in celestial armour, is a splendid being, created by himself; Achilles the fool of passions, is the real man delivered to him by tradition. That the plastic artist should have had an aim beyond the poet is improbable, because the poet, in general, furnished him with materials; he composed his man of beauty and ideal limbs, not to obscure, but to invigorate his character and our attention.