[Footnote 2:
"The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at
least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot
strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture."--
_Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 7.]
[Footnote 3:
But Mr. Coleridge took a great distinction between North and the other
writers commonly associated with him. In speaking of the Examen and the
Life of Lord North, in the Friend, Mr. C. calls them "two of the most
interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the
matter, and the _incuriosa felicitas_ of the style. The pages are all alive
with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. A fastidious taste, it is
true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call
_slang_, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the Restoration of
Charles the Second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These
instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not _sought for_,
as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and
their imitators. North never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or
to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve,
pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational _English_."--Vol. ii.
p. 307.--ED.]
* * * * *
Imitation is the mesothesis of likeness and difference. The difference is
as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be
copy or facsimile. But to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a librating
mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in painting, or more to
difference, as in sculpture.