"It is necessary that these revisions be made at due distances of time. A very simple example will show the reason of this rule. In the easiest operation of arithmetic, the casting up an account, a person may do it twenty times together, and twenty times together commit the same mistake. But if he should repeat the process at due distances of time, it is scarcely possible that that should take place. So it fares with our critical sagacity; very gross improprieties may elude examination, and if they once escape our attention, it is probable they will continue to escape it at that time, let us read over our composition ever so often. It is necessary, therefore, that the mind should come fresh to the subject, that the taste be not blunted by too much exercise, the thought too much implicated in the same trains and habits; and above all, that the familiarity of words and ideas be passed off, which whilst it lasts, renders the perception of faults almost impossible. To me it appears, that this principle was very well known to the classic ages of literature. The nonum prematur in annum was not merely for the purpose of frequent revisions, for which surely a much less time would have been sufficient, but to allow such space also and distance between them, as that they might be made with the best effect. It is also of consequence to view a subject in different states of spirits, different moods of temper, and different dispositions of thought. That can hardly be wrong which pleases under all these varieties of mind or situation; that may be very much so which pleases only in one. For instance, an inflamed diction, fantastic or extravagant, bold conceits, violent or daring expressions, may gratify a mind heated or elated with its subject, which, when the animal spirits were subsided and the enthusiasm gone, would appear intolerable even to the same person."

11. In writing and correcting your discourse, let the idea, rather than the manner of expressing it, be the chief object of attention; and prefer that manner which the idea most naturally suggests. One of the most instructive rules ever given by a rhetorician was given by Dr. Emmons to a young preacher: "First, find out what you have to say; secondly, say it." A writer wastes his time, acquires an artificial method of thought and speech, in laboring to say something in a neat or dignified or learned style. "What thought do I really wish to express?" That is the first, second, and third question.1 In answering this question a wise man

1 Lord Bacon criticising the literature introduced by the Reformation, says: "Men began to hunt more after words than matter, and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject,

expends his main strength. In mentally answering it to himself he will be impelled to use certain words. They come naturally. The main course of those words is probably the right one. They may be modified in some particulars; the modification of them will require time and care; but the original selection of them is a short work and almost unconscious; and, in the general, if they express his thought really, they express it fitly.

If a writer fails to make the idea his main object of attention, he will often injure his style in attempting to improve it. Many do this, and thereby awaken a prejudice against elaborate composition. "Give us more lays," says Southey to Walter Scott, "and correct them at leisure for after editions not laboriously, but when the amendment comes naturally and unsought for. It never does to sit down. doggedly to correct."1 Not doggedly, but intelligently; not laboriously in the sense of tiresomely, but in the sense of energetically and cautiously, should a writer improve his compositions by the multa litura. Not without severe toil can he obtain the power of Professor Playfair, of whom Lord Jeffrey says: "He wrote rather slowly, and his first sketches were often very slight and imperfect, like the rude chalking for a masterly picture; his chief effort and greatest

Then

soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. . did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo; 'Decem annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone'; and the 'echo answered in Greek, "Ove,' 'asine.' . . . . . - How is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men's works like the first letter of a patent or limned book; which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter. It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity; for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture." - Bacon's Works, Vol. ii. pp. 36, 37. These remarks of Bacon are in no way inconsistent with principles laid down under § 2. I. 1. above in regard to the elaborating of a discourse. Dr. Rawley, in his Life of Bacon, says: "I myself have seen, at the least, twelve copies of the Instauration [Instauratio Magna] revised year by year, one after another, and every year altered and amended in the frame thereof; till at last it came to that model in which it was committed to the press." -Bacon's Works, Vol. ix. p. 27. 1 Lockhart's Life of Scott, Vol. ii. p. 269.

pleasure was in their revisal and correction; and there were no limits to the improvement which resulted from this application." He first drew the outline of his essay, and then performed the most material part of his work, enriching and improving it, "without any risk either of destroying the proportions of that outline or injuring the harmony and unity of the original design."

991

12. When you are writing one part of your sermon, and such thoughts occur to you as may be needed for another part of it, note down brief hints of them. Unless they are thus fixed in a permanent form, they may never be recalled; and you may labor in constructing an artificial paragraph in the place of that natural one, the plan of which darted through your mind when it was aglow with your theme. Some of our best thoughts flit before us when they cannot be used. It certainly cannot be said of every writer, as is said of Professor Playfair, that "he had no capricious visitings of fancy, which it was necessary to fix on the spot or to lose forever, no casual inspirations to invoke and to wait for, no transitory and evanescent lights to catch before they faded."2 The ideas which come to one writer and are instantly forgotten, would form a richer sermon than could possibly be written by another man. "Mr. Locke long ago observed that the most valuable of our thoughts are those which drop, as it were, into the mind by accident; and no one exercised in these matters will be backward to allow that they are almost always preferable to what is forced up from the mind by pumping," etc. "I am in the habit," says Reinhard, and the same has been said by a hundred others, " of writing down those thoughts which occur to me in reading, regular reflection, or incidentally, and are worthy of being treated of in detail in a sermon, just as they present themselves to my mind at the moment, without having any particular object in view. If, then, at any time, I meet with difficulty in finding something appropriate in a text upon which I am 1 Jeffrey's Essays, Vol. iii. p. 687. 2 Jeffrey's Essays, Vol. iii. p. 688 8 Paley's Works, Vol. vi. p. 413.

called to preach, I recur to this catalogue of interesting thoughts, in order to see whether some of them cannot be made to bear upon the text in question. This often proves to be the case; and in this way I have been led to many happy combinations of which I should otherwise never have thought." 1

13. So arrange your studies as to avoid unnecessary fatigue. The excitement of writing facilitates both thought and expression, but tends to exhaust both body and mind. Some of the most eminent authors have been compelled by their feeble health to suspend their studies at a predetermined hour, even although the hour found them at the height of their inspiration. Thus they have sacrificed some of their best thoughts to a physical necessity. Others, being accustomed to wait for their inspired moods, have prolonged. their work during the continuance of those moods, and ended it in such a state of exhaustion as has disgusted them with their writing, and indisposed them to renew it until they were again visited with one of their mysterious inspirations. This irregular habit is eminently unfit for the pastor of a church. Another class, who are not inclined to "humor their disposition," persevere in writing while they are weary, and thus make it sure that the sermon will be dry, even if, like truth, it should be at the bottom of the well. What is said to all artists, may be said to clerical authors: "When you begin to tire of your work, leave off. You will certainly injure yourself." 2

One of the most important applications of the present rule is this: Do not continue the work of composition to a late

1 Reinhard's Confessions, Letter x.

2 Leslie. It is said that Macaulay, as soon as his writing palled upon him, left it, and took a stroll in the open air. When residing in London "he would throw down his pen at midnight and walk through the silent streets for two or three hours. He thought the silence and solitude of a great city favorable to meditation, and generally returned to his desk with a fresh stock of vivid and picturesque thoughts." Edmund Burke when wearied, "would enter with cordial glee into the sports of children, rolling about with them on the carpet, and pouring out in his gambols the sublimest images mingled with the most wretched puns."- Life of Sir James Mackintosh, Carey's Library, p. 14.

hour in the week. Strive to close the work as early as Saturday noon. The habit of writing late on Saturday and early on Sabbath morning imperils the health of body, intellect, and heart. Entering the pulpit in an enfeebled state, the writer loses the benefit of his previous study. His sermon, however strong as an essay, is lame as an address to the people. A soldier continuing a forced march through the night is unfit, though he may be compelled, to fight in the morning. Bishop Hall considered it his most religious duty not to let his studies intrude upon his evening's quiet. "That student shall live miserably," he says, " which, like a camel, lies down under his burden." Izaak Walton tells us 1 that on the last day of the week Dr. Donne "usually gave himself and his mind a rest from the weary burthen of his week's meditations, and usually spent that day in visitation of friends, or some other diversions of his thoughts, and would say that he gave both his body and mind that refreshment that he might be enabled to do the work of the day following, not faintly, but with courage and cheerfulness." "I made it an invariable rule," says Reinhard, "before delivering one sermon to have another already prepared to follow it in my desk...... I was never driven to the necessity of preaching unprepared, or of extemporizing. ..... This habit of early preparation made it unnecessary for me to do anything in haste."2 That remarkable man Julius Charles Rieu adopted Reinhard's plan. "Seldom did he preach a sermon, either in French or German, unless that, which was to succeed it was ready in his desk; and thus he was never left to be embarrassed by those accidents which might occur during the week to interrupt the labors of preparation." Tschirner objects to this method. An ordinary preacher will not feel so much interest in delivering a sermon which he finished a week before as in delivering one which he finished the day before.1 1 Library of Old English Prose Authors, Vol. v. p. 86.

2 Reinhard's Confessions, Letter viii.

8 Memoir of Rieu, p. 23.

"He

In President Brown's Memoir of Rufus Choate pp. 308, 309, we read: could not prepare his cases for trial weeks and months in advance, as is the

VOL. XXVIII. No. 112.

93