Page:On the Sublime 1890.djvu/88



action. And by pointing your words to the individual reader, instead of to the readers generally, as in the line

and thus exciting him by an appeal to himself, you will rouse interest, and fix attention, and make him a partaker in the action of the book. 

Sometimes, again, a writer in the midst of a narrative in the third person suddenly steps aside and makes a transition to the first. It is a kind of figure which strikes like a sudden outburst of passion. Thus Hector in the Iliad

The poet then takes upon himself the narrative part, as being his proper business; but this abrupt threat he attributes, without a word of warning, to the enraged Trojan chief. To have interposed any such words as "Hector said so and so" would have had a frigid effect. As the lines stand the writer is left behind by his own words, and the transition is