CHAPTER XX.
Mr.Arabin The Rev.Francis Arabin, fellow of Lazarus, late professor of poetry at Oxford, and present vicar of St.Ewold, in the diocese of Barchester, must now be introduced personally to the reader.

He is worthy of a new volume, and as he will fill a conspicuous place in it, it is desirable that he should be made to stand before the reader's eye by the aid of such portraiture as the author is able to produce.
It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description.

How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of a man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the sign-board at the corner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge.
And yet such mechanical descriptive skill would hardly give more satisfaction to the reader than the skill of the photographer does to the anxious mother desirous to possess an absolute duplicate of her beloved child.

The likeness is indeed true, but it is a dull, dead, unfeeling, inauspicious likeness.

The face is indeed there, and those looking at it will know at once whose image it is, but the owner of the face will not be proud of the resemblance.
There is no royal road to learning, no short cut to the acquirement of any valuable art.