general rule," advised Sydney Smith, "run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style." Bacon, it has been Bacon. well said, packs his meaning till the plain words take on an air of enigma from their very excess of significance; it is a condensed speech, a dialect borrowed from the gods. "The best passages in our chief prose writers, no less than in our poets, are where the phraseology has become oracular; the verbiage grows wiser than the thoughts, more tender than the feelings; and the man who falls into this trance of language is himself the most amazed at the glory and the beauty of the utterance." "A style grows from within, and forms only round a nucleus of thought." "Language is part of a man's character." "A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes." "The sentences of Sen- The seneca are stimulating to the intellect; the Seneca, Epictetus, sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the and Marcus character; the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their way to the soul." Carlyle, in describing the style of Marquis Mirabeau (father of the great Mirabeau), gives a pretty good description of his own: "Marquis Mirabeau had the indisputablest ideas; tences of Aurelius. gest of styles. but then his style! In very truth, it is the The stran- strangest of styles, though one of the richest: a style full of originality, picturesqueness, sunny vigor; but all cased and slated over, threefold, in metaphor and trope; distracted into tortuosities, dislocations; starting out into crotchets, cramp turns, quaintnesses, and hidden satire; which the French had no ear for. Strong meat, too tough for babes!" So it was that England had at first no palate for his own strong, tough meat. He wrote in his Journal: "Literature still all a mystery; nothing 'paying'; Teufelsdröckh beyond measure unpopular. An oldest subscriber came in to Fraser and said, 'If there is any more of that damned stuff, I will, etc., etc.'; on the other hand, an order from America (Boston or Philadelphia) to send a copy of the magazine 'so long as there was anything of Carlyle's in it.'" Napier unexpectedly, and even gratefully, accepted Character Characteristics, Froude tells us. He con Teufelsdröckh. istics. fessed that he could not understand it; but anything which Carlyle wrote, he said, had the indubitable stamp of genius upon it, and was therefore most welcome in the Edinburgh Review. Charles Sumner observed to Lord Jeffrey that he thought of rhetoric. Carlyle had changed his style since he wrote the article on Burns. "Not at all," said Jeffrey; "I will tell you why that it is different from the other articles — I altered it." "'T is a good rule of rhetoric," A good rule thought Emerson, "which Schlegel gives – 'In good prose every word is underscored'; which, I suppose means, never italicize. Dr. Channing's piety and wisdom had such weight that, in Boston, the popular idea of religion was whatever this eminent divine held. But I remember that his best friend, a man of guarded lips, speaking of him in a circle of admirers, said: 'I have known him long, I have studied his character, and I believe him capable of virtue.' An eminent French journalist paid a high compliment to the Duke of Wellington, when his documents were published: 'Here are twelve volumes of military dispatches, and the word glory is not found in one of them.' "Right words in right places,” Right words was Daniel Webster's idea of style, which places. he came as near realizing as any one; for even the fastidious Samuel Rogers was free to say that he knew nothing in the English language so well written as Mr. Webster's letter to Lord Ashburton on the subject of the impressment of seamen. Of in right PUBLIC Montaigne and his style, Emerson says: "The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive." Examples without doubt may be cited of great writers who have been illustrious as speakers; but it is a general truth, that to write a book is a bad preparation for public and premeditated speaking. Literary labor, as judiciously observed, is regular and methodical. The writer proposes to himself an ideal perfection, inconsistent with the unforeseen or accidental turn of a debate. Almost all the merits of a book are defects in a speech. A great book is written for the future. A speech is made for the present. Its business is the business of to-day. A book is thought; a speech is action. What is explained in a Fox's asser- book is only hinted at in a debate. Fox asserted that if a speech read well it was not a good speech. A speech is to be heard and not read. Lysias, says Plutarch, wrote a defense for a man who was to be tion. with the tried before one of the Athenian tribunals. Long before the defendant had learned the speech by heart, he became so much dissat- Dissatisfied isfied with it that he went in great distress speech." to the author. "I was delighted with your speech the first time I read it; but I liked it less the second time, and still less the third time; and now it seems to be no defense at all." "My good friend," said Lysias, "you quite forget that the judges are to hear it only once." When Dr. Johnson furnished Boswell with the materials for an address to a committee of the House of Commons on an election petition he added, "This you must enlarge on. You must not argue there as if you were arguing in the schools. You must say the same thing over and over again, in different words. If you say it but once, they miss it in a moment of inattention." The masters of eloquence have enforced the rule. iom. It was an axiom of Thiers' that when Thiers' axa speaker wants to carry away a stolid assembly or uncultured mass, he should often present the same argument, but each time in a new verbal dress. Therefore he did not fear repeating himself, but was careful to vary the form of his repetitions. Fox advised Sir Samuel Romilly, when |