for his private interest.  In some parts of this field there is, or was once, or will be, a physical parallel, an actuality, containing the verification of the imagined state of things; but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a conception of the reason just as normal, which is not the less real because it is a tissue of abstract thought.  In art this governance of the imagination by the reason is fundamental, and gives to the office of the latter a seeming primacy; and therefore emphasis is rightly placed on the universal element, the truth, as the substance of the artistic form.  But in the light of this preliminary description of the mental processes involved, let us take a nearer view of their particular employment in literature.

Human life, as represented in literature, consists of two main branches, character and action.  Of these, character, which is the realm of personality, is generalized by means of type, which is ideal character; action, which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal action.  It is convenient to examine the nature of these separately.  A type, the example of a class, contains the characteristic qualities which make an individual one of that class; it does not differ in this elementary form from the bare idea of the species.  The traits of a tree, for instance, exist in every actual tree, however stunted or imperfect; and in the type which condenses into itself what is common in all specimens of the class, these traits only exist; they constitute the type.  Comic types, in literature, are often simple abstractions of some single human quality, and hence easily afford illustrations.  The braggart, the miser, the hypocrite, contain that one trait which is common to the class; and in their portrayal this characteristic only is shown.  In proportion as the traits are many in any character, the type becomes complex.  In simple types attention is directed to some one vice, passion, or virtue, capable of absorbing a human life in to itself.  This is the method of Jonson, and, in tragedy, of Marlowe.  As human energy displays itself more variously in a life, in complex types, the mind contemplates human nature in a more catholic way, with a less exclusive identification of character with specific trait, a more free conception of personality as only partially exhibited; thus, in becoming complex, types gather breadth and depth, and share more in the mystery of humanity as something incompletely known to us at the best.  Such are the characters of Shakspere.

The manner in which types are arrived at and made recognizable in other arts opens the subject more fully and throws light upon their nature.  The sculptor observes in a group of athletes that certain physical habits result in certain moulds of the body; and taking such characteristics as are common to all of one class, and neglecting such as are peculiar to individuals, he carves a statue.  So permanent are the physical facts he relies upon that, centuries