what it feels to be the truth.  If you are imaginatively representing the feelings of another, as in some playful exaggeration or some dramatic personation, the truth required of you is imaginative truth, not your personal views and feelings.  But when you write in your own person you must be rigidly veracious, neither pretending to admire what you do not admire, or to despise what in secret you rather like, nor surcharging your admiration and enthusiasm to bring you into unison with the public chorus.  This vigilance may render Literature more laborious; but no one ever supposed that success was to be had on easy terms; and if you only write one sincere page where you might have written twenty insincere pages, the one page is worth writing—­it is Literature.

Sincerity is not only effective and honourable, it is also much less difficult than is commonly supposed.  To take a trifling example:  If for some reason I cannot, or do not, choose to verify a quotation which may be useful to my purpose, what is to prevent my saying that the quotation is taken at second-hand?  It is true, if my quotations are for the most part second-hand and are acknowledged as such, my erudition will appear scanty.  But it will only appear what it is.  Why should I pretend to an erudition which is not mine?  Sincerity forbids it.  Prudence whispers that the pretence is, after all, vain, because those, and those alone, who can rightly estimate erudition will infallibly detect my pretence, whereas those whom I have deceived were not worth deceiving.  Yet in spite of Sincerity and Prudence, how shamelessly men compile second-hand references, and display in borrowed footnotes a pretence of labour and of accuracy!  I mention this merely to show how, even in the humbler class of compilers, the Principle of Sincerity may find fit illustrations, and how honest work, even in references, belongs to the same category as honest work in philosophy or poetry.  Editor.

CHAPTER V.

The principle of beauty.

It is not enough that a man has clearness of Vision, and reliance on Sincerity, he must also have the art of Expression, or he will remain obscure.  Many have had

“The visionary eye, the faculty to see
The thing that hath been as the thing which is,”

but either from native defect, or the mistaken bias of education, have been frustrated in the attempt to give their visions beautiful or intelligible shape.  The art which could give them shape is doubtless intimately dependent on clearness of eye and sincerity of purpose, but it is also something over and above these, and comes from an organic aptitude not less special, when possessed with fulness, than the aptitude for music or drawing.  Any instructed person can write, as any one can learn to draw; but to write well, to express ideas with felicity and force, is not an accomplishment but a talent.  The power of seizing unapparent relations of things is not always conjoined with the power of selecting the fittest verbal symbols by which they can be made apparent to others:  the one is the power of the thinker, the other the power of the writer.