but of tall phantoms of words, abstractions, _genera_ and _species_,
sweeping clauses, periods that unite the Poles, forced alliterations,
astounding antitheses--
And on their pens _Fustian_ sits plumed.
If they describe kings and queens, it is an Eastern pageant. The
Coronation at either House is nothing to it. We get at four repeated
images--a curtain, a throne, a sceptre, and a footstool. These are with
them the wardrobe of a lofty imagination; and they turn their servile
strains to servile uses. Do we read a description of pictures? It is
not a reflection of tones and hues which 'nature's own sweet and cunning
hand laid on,' but piles of precious stones, rubies, pearls, emeralds,
Golconda's mines, and all the blazonry of art. Such persons are in fact
besotted with words, and their brains are turned with the glittering but
empty and sterile phantoms of things. Personifications, capital letters,
seas of sunbeams, visions of glory, shining inscriptions, the figures of
a transparency, Britannia with her shield, or Hope leaning on an anchor,
make up their stock-in-trade. They may be considered as _hieroglyphical_
writers. Images stand out in their minds isolated and important merely
in themselves, without any groundwork of feeling--there is no context
in their imaginations. Words affect them in the same way, by the mere
sound, that is, by their possible, not by their actual application to
the subject in hand. They are fascinated by first appearances, and have
no sense of consequences. Nothing more is meant by them than meets the
ear: they understand or feel nothing more than meets their eye. The web
and texture of the universe, and of the heart of man, is a mystery to
them: they have no faculty that strikes a chord in unison with it.
They cannot get beyond the daubings of fancy, the varnish of sentiment.
Objects are not linked to feelings, words to things, but images revolve
in splendid mockery, words represent themselves in their strange
rhapsodies. The categories of such a mind are pride and ignorance--pride
in outside show, to which they sacrifice everything, and ignorance of
the true worth and hidden structure both of words and things. With a
sovereign contempt for what is familiar and natural, they are the slaves
of vulgar affectation--of a routine of high-flown phrases. Scorning to
imitate realities, they are unable to invent anything, to strike out one
original idea. They are not copyists of nature, it is true; but they
are the poorest of all plagiarists, the plagiarists of words. All is
far-fetched, dear bought, artificial, oriental in subject and allusion;
all is mechanical, conventional, vapid, formal, pedantic in style and
execution. They startle and confound the understanding of the reader by
the remoteness and obscurity of their illustrations; they soothe the ear
by the monotony of the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors.
They are the mock-school in poetry and prose. They flounder about
between fustian in expression and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise
the fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple
of Fame is like a shadowy structure raised by Dulness to Vanity, or
like Cowper's description of the Empress of Russia's palace of ice, 'as
worthless as in show 'twas glittering'--
It smiled, and it was cold!