mirers; you may, perhaps, just catch the turn of a simile or single image, but to write in the real manner of Jeremy Taylor would require as mighty a mind as his. Many parts of Algernon Sidney's treatises afford excellent exemplars of a good modern practical style; 5 and Dryden in his prose works is a still better model, if you add a stricter and purer grammar. It is, indeed, worthy of remark that all our great poets have been good prose writers, as Chaucer, Spencer, Milton; and this probably arose from their just sense of meter. Io For a true poet will never confound verse and prose; whereas it is almost characteristic of indifferent prose writers that they should be constantly slipping into scraps of meter. Swift's style is, in its line, perfect; the manner is a complete expression of the matter, the 15 terms appropriate, and the artifice concealed. It is simplicity in the true sense of the word.

After the Revolution, the spirit of the nation became much more commercial than it had been before; a learned body, or clerisy, as such, gradually disap- 20 peared, and literature in general began to be addressed to the common miscellaneous public. That public had become accustomed to, and required, a strong stimulus; and to meet the requisitions of the public taste, a style was produced which by combining triteness of 25 thought with singularity and excess of manner of expression, was calculated at once to soothe ignorance and to flatter vanity. The thought was carefully kept down to the immediate apprehension of the commonest understanding, and the dress was as anxiously arranged 30 for the purpose of making the thought appear something very profound. The essence of this style consisted in

a mock antithesis, that is, an opposition of in a rage for personification, the abstrac mate, far-fetched metaphors, strange phras scraps, in everything, in short, but gent 5 Style is, of course, nothing else but the art

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ing the meaning appropriately and with perspicuity, whatever that meaning may be; and one criterion of style is that it shall not be translatable without injury to the meaning. Johnson's style has pleased many from Io the very fault of being perpetually translatable; he creates an impression of cleverness by never saying anything in a common way. The best specimen of this manner is in Junius, because his antithesis is less merely verbal than Johnson's. Gibbon's manner is 15 the worst of all; it has every fault of which this pecu

liar style is capable. Tacitus is an example of it in Latin; in coming from Cicero you feel the falsetto immediately.

In order to form a good style, the primary rule and 20 condition is, not to attempt to express ourselves in language before we thoroughly know our own meaning: when a man perfectly understands himself, appropriate diction will generally be at his command either in writing or speaking. In such cases the thoughts and the 25 words are associated. In the next place preciseness in the use of terms is required, and the test is whether you can translate the phrase adequately into simpler terms, regard being had to the feeling of the whole passage. Try this upon Shakspeare, or Milton, and 30 see if you can substitute other simpler words in any given passage without a violation of the meaning or tone, The source of bad writing is the desire to bę

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mething more than a man of sense, -the straining to be thought a genius; and it is just the same in speech-making. If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be! Another rule is to avoid converting 5 mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find, in any great writer before the Revolution, the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case; as "the watch's hand," for "the hand of the watch." The possessive 10 or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. And I cannot conclude this Lecture without insisting on the importance of accuracy of style, as being near akin to veracity and truthful habits of mind. He who thinks loosely will 15 write loosely; and, perhaps, there is some moral inconvenience in the common forms of our grammars, which give our children so many obscure terms for material distinctions. Let me also exhort you to careful examination of what you read, if it be worth any 20 perusal at all: such an examination will be a safeguard from fanaticism, the universal origin of which is in the contemplation of phenomena without investigation into their causes.-Lectures, iv. 337.

Autobiographical.

6. THE REV. JAMES BOWYER.

AT school (Christ's Hospital), I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe, master, the Reverend James Bowyer.* He early molded my taste to the preference 5 of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Vergil, and again of Vergil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the soIo called silver and brazen ages, but with even those of the

Augustan era; and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former, in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were 15 studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemzo ingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, *See Charles Lamb's "Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago,"

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In the truly great poets, he

and more fugitive causes. would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the synonyms to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to 5 show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text.

In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education), he showed no Io mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words.* Lute, harp, and lyre; Muse, Muses, and inspirations; Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an 15 abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay, certain introductions, 20 similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the similes, there was, I remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects; in which however it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander 25 and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and

*This is worthy of ranking as a maxim (regula maxima) of criticism. Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N. B. 30 By dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associ ations.