worth speaking of, and things that only fairly well deserve that honour. The instinct which leads to the right choice is called the power of selection. Perhaps we might more truly name it the sense of proportion, since it is that gift which makes the proper choice because it sees the proper relations of things: it sees a large object as large, and a small object as small. This is not so easy a matter when one is very close to the object: a pencil held near the eye will shut out the view of a mountain range. But the sense of proportion applies not merely to large and small; it applies even more to important and unimportant. To say, then, that Irving has the sense of proportion is to say that he knows what is worth writing about.

Of course, to know what is worth while to write does not imply the ability to write it. Irving has the power of transferring into language the things that strike his retina, his outward sight, and the things that he sees with his inner vision. He has the gift of apt description, of quiet, truthful explaining, of illuminating interpretation.

He writes without making a parade of his power to write. He does not indulge in elaborate word-painting where a few pleasant words suffice. Still less does he seek to make his thoughts seem greater and finer than they really are, clouding or spoiling a plain thought by the use of many high-sounding but empty words. Such an insincerity one often finds in second-rate political orators who utter commonplaces in swelling sentences. In authors this misuse of language is ironically called "fine writing," - a somewhat unfortunate term, because it wastes an expression otherwise good. Of this artificial

heaping-up of words Irving shows no trace: he means what he says; his writing possesses sincerity.

It possesses simplicity as well. You must not regard simplicity in a writer as something akin to language adapted to children. Simplicity means the power of making plain, and there could hardly be a greater triumph than to tell a difficult, subtle thought in such a way that everybody can understand it. Irving never avoids speaking of shades of meaning, but he does not search for subtleties. His usually well-composed sentences, moreover, do their share toward making his meaning apparent.

His simplicity of style rests upon his simplicity of thinking. The man himself is so straightforward and frank that he looks about him not unemotionally, but undisturbed. Among the intricate forces whose manifestations we call life, he has found his bearings, and, therefore, being steadfast, his point of view does not waver; and since his point of view is fixed fast, he can look upon wavering, mutable things with some sense of certainty.

I would not imply that Irving has unravelled so many of the mysteries of existence that he can submit to us a calm reason for any turbulence of life. Many such problems, indeed, to which great geniuses have offered answers, are quite out of his power to solve. But I do mean that he looked at life receptively, and the fine gentlehood of his own nature made what he saw seem clear and righteous, instead of an inextricable muddle of incomprehensible activities. He had simplicity of thought because of his inherent faith in his fellow-men.

And this gives his style its peculiar quality of mellowness. It is too easy an explanation of this fine quality in Irving, to say that he acquired it from Addison or, particularly, from Goldsmith. If it were so easily imitable, why has it not been oftener imitated successfully? It arises mainly from the warmth of Irving's fine-grained nature; and the influence of his English predecessors in essay writing was an influence that only cultivated, and did not create, his natural quality.

Irving's humour, a very real thing, is pleasant. He is not an inveterate joker, but still less does he present a countenance of unrelieved solemnity. Like most other men who are really alive, he feels in the presence of the preposterous, the ridiculous, the incongruous, that quick, cheerful reaction which we call a sense of humour. It adds a ray of sunniness to his style.

That he modelled this style upon men whom he was willing to regard and to proclaim his literary masters, is nothing to his discredit. It is true that the tremendous works of genius come only from those who break roads through untrodden wildernesses of thought, but we have room and to spare for noble-minded writers who are yet not of the clan of Shakespeare and Dante; just as in our own acquaintanceship we find hearty place for persons who, not being the keenest minds we know, are yet near to us and inspiring by reason of their strength and friendliness. The debt of Irving to Goldsmith, who himself is not one of the mighty, is a debt of guidance,

a genuine debt, but not a bankruptcy. Goldsmith

gave Irving few ideas, I think, but he helped him to a style.

This style is smooth and fluent. The writer avoids harsh-sounding words and abrupt rhythms; his sentences move gracefully. To be fair, two points must be noted here. One is that too much value may be placed upon smoothness of style; elegance sometimes palls. The other point is, that Irving, although writing what would once have been termed a polished style, fails now and then to rub off the unevennesses. He is not especially fastidious, not a real purist in speech, and several times his meaning is apparent, through no virtue of his wordarrangement. This latter point calls for notice, because such writers as De Quincey and Cardinal Newman and Walter Pater have taught us, by force of their example, that unremitting care and precision in an extreme degree are wholly consonant with clear and definite effects.

Along with whatever of his style he may have gained from Goldsmith, Irving also drew something from that genial master's spring of inspiration, the respect for good taste that distinguished the eighteenth century. This is a thing too often spoken of slightingly; and Goldsmith, who revolted against eighteenth-century absurdities, is hastily deemed to have revolted against the whole eighteenth-century system. He did not; he was a creature of that century, of its gentlest mood, as later, too, was Lamb and Irving, as a child of the nineteenth century, kept his heart and mind open to the best influences of the days that had given him the author he counted his master. We, in the twentieth century, must certainly

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come again to a deeper respect for a period which, with all its limitations, did so much for the preservation of good ideals in the English-speaking race.

Putting together a few of the notes we have been collecting, we may now see readily why Irving, fine-grained, frank, observant, even-tempered, gentle, keen, chose so instinctively this essay form. He saw life simply and meditatively, and wished neither to overturn society nor to expose its terrors or its depths. Poetry, drama, the novel, these forms he liked, but with them he had no creative affinity. The pleasant discursive essay, among the writers of which he ranks honourably with Addison, Goldsmith, Hazlitt, Lamb, and (though in somewhat different form) Oliver Wendell Holmes, afforded him his opening.

A word regarding this especial essay form. If you read the trenchantly brief essays of Bacon, the longer, strikingly suggestive essays of Emerson, you will find yourself in the company of a thinker, of a seer, who used his prose to impart the highest and deepest knowledge that was at his command. Bacon, resting on his vast experience, was mainly concerned in summing up the phenomena of life; Emerson, in inspiring the inexperienced many to face these phenomena with individual courage. Their prose forms partook of their purposes: Bacon's, compact, cogent, final; Emerson's, rhapsodic, copious, —in a good sense of the word, rhetorical. Neither of these forms resembles the essay form of Irving and the others who used it before him: a form so satisfying in its general effect that we must hope for its re-establishment,—it is too