MENTAL PICTURES.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Six,—In the review of a new book by E. CE. Somerville and Martin Ross in last week's Punch the reviewer ends with these words : " I could have wished that the artist had left .M's. Knox to my unfettered imagination. No hand, even that of her creator, could improve on my mental image of this wonderful and superhuman being."
How many of us have suffered a similar pang on seeing an
illustrated edition of a familiar book which we had only read in editions without illustrations ! It is marvellous that one should be able, as one reads a tale, to make instantaneously mental pictures of the scenes, people, and incidents described by the author, but it is almost more wonderful that these identical pictures, in every detail, should be reproduced when- ever one reads the tale again. As I read Scott's novels to-day the mental pictures which I made when first reading them, say, fifty years ago, of Jonathan Oldbuck, his crowded roome of antiquarian rubbish, of Edie Ochiltree (surely one of the most delightful characters ever created), of Ellangowan, Dandle Dinmont, Meg Dods, &o., are just the same now as they were then.
If there are illustrations in a book when we first read it, we naturally accept the characters as therein drawn, and resent having the ideas of another artist thrust upon us—e.g., Pickwick, Pecksniff, Captain Cuttle, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the White Knight. If we see a play after having read the book on which it is founded, we are almost sure to be disappointed with some of the characters, merely because they differ from the mental images we had formed of them ; but if we see the play first and read the book after, we adopt the stage characters, and so are satisfied.—I um, Sir, &e.,
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