Ferdinand. How doth our sister Duchess bear herself
                In her imprisonment?

  Basola. Nobly:  I’ll describe her. 
                She’s sad as one long used to ’t, and she seems
                Rather to welcome the end of misery
                Than shun it:  a behaviour so noble
                As gives a majesty to adversity
(Note the abstract terms.)
                You may discern the shape of loveliness
                More perfect in her tears than in her smiles;
                She will muse for hours together; and her silence
(Here we first come on the concrete:  and beautiful it is.)
                Methinks expresseth more than if she spake.

Now set against this the well-known passage from “Twelfth Night” where the Duke asks and Viola answers a question about someone unknown to him and invented by her—­a mere phantasm, in short:  yet note how much more definite is the language:—­

Viola. My father had a daughter lov’d a man;
                As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
                I should your lordship.

Duke. And what’s her history?

Viola. A blank, my lord.  She never told her love,
                But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,
                Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,
                And with a green and yellow melancholy
                She sat like Patience on a monument
                Smiling at grief.  Was not this love indeed?

Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when Shakespeare has to use the abstract noun ‘concealment,’ on an instant it turns into a visible worm ‘feeding’ on the visible rose; how, having to use a second abstract word ‘patience,’ at once he solidifies it in tangible stone.

Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who have written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim—­to prefer the concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the definite to the vague—­as a canon of rhetoric.  Whately has much to say on it.  The late Mr E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke (prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens to scholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim by setting a passage from Burke’s speech “On Conciliation with America” alongside a passage of like purport from Lord Brougham’s “Inquiry into the Policy of the European Powers.”  Here is the deadly parallel:—­

BURKE.

In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities.  Nature has said it.  The Turk cannot govern AEgypt and Arabia and Curdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna.  Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster.  The Sultan gets such obedience as he can.  He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders.

BROUGHAM.