unimaginative character into something approaching the grotesque. Better the actively ugly, for that at least makes our dullest and largest church tower look almost beautiful by contrast, than the passively commonplace. And then, lest our modest efforts remain of small avail, we invent a couple of quaint old travellers hurrying across the road to their inn, accompanied by the barks and gambols of a lively little white dog; by good luck and our own skilful management they come just in front of our dull row of houses, so that what with one thing and another we find our eyes and thoughts very pleasantly diverted. As for the houses on the left we can shut off a great part of them by simply drawing up a lumbering stage-coach on that side of the road and heaping it with ample females in swelling draperies, with burgeoning umbrellas and bounteous baggage. And having got so far, we can now see exactly what it is we want to make our foreground and distance more immediately effective. In the sketch there is a hint that the road dips just a trifle down from the foreground to the church; we increase this slight inequality till we get a dip of something like forty or fifty feet between us and the church, a drop that gives uncommon height and dignity to our humble towers. And now, having got our street laid out to our liking, we want to make the most of its possibilities, so we set another stage-coach down at the foot of our little hill, load it with passengers impatient to be out of their wet clothes, and give it a couple of rearing, prancing, steaming horses to gallop it in hot haste up the declivity, so that now, as we look at the engraving, we can almost hear the ring of the horses’ hooves on the stones and feel the rush of wind made by the coach as it dashes past us; all this merely by way of amplifying the artist’s statement about his imaginary hill, and to drive the idea of his well-invented fiction home into the consciousness of even the dullest of his audience.