Yet we find, even in works of celebrity, whole pages of these general or these particular descriptive sketches, which leave nothing behind but noun substantives propped up by random epithets. The old writers were quite delighted to fill up their voluminous pages with what was a great saving of sense and thinking. In the _Alaric_ of Scudery sixteen pages, containing nearly five hundred verses, describe a palace, commencing at the _façade_, and at length finishing with the garden; but his description, we may say, was much better described by Boileau, whose good taste felt the absurdity of this "abondance stérile," in overloading a work with useless details,