and cultivated man. It is necessary not only to him who would express himself, but to him who would think, with precision and effect. There is, indeed, no higher proof of thorough and accurate culture than the fact that a writer, instead of employing words loosely and at hap-hazard, chooses only those which are the exact vesture of his thought. As he only can be called a well-dressed man whose clothes exactly fit him, being neither small and shrunken, nor loose and baggy, so it is the first characteristic of a good style that the words fit close to the ideas. They will be neither too big here, hanging like a giant's robe on the limbs of a dwarf, nor too small there, like a boy's garments into which a man has painfully squeezed himself; but will be the exact correspondents and perfect exponents of his thought. Between the most synonymous words a careful writer will have a choice; for, strictly speaking, there are no synonyms in a language, the most closely resembling and apparently equivalent terms having some nice shade of distinction,— a fine illustration of which is found in Ben Jonson's line, "Men may securely sin, but safely never"; and again, in the reply with which Sydney Smith used to meet the cant about popular education in England: "Pooh, pooh! it is the worst educated country in the world, I grant you; but it is the best instructed." William Pitt was a remarkable example of this precision of style. Fox said of him: " 'Though I am myself never at a loss for a word, Pitt not only has a word, but the word,the very word, to express his meaning." Robert Hall chose his words with a still more fastidious nicety, and he gave as one reason for his writing so little, that he could so rarely approach the realization of his own beau-idéal of a perfect style. It is related of him that, when he was cor

recting the proofs of his sermon on "Modern Infidelity," on coming to the famous passage, "Eternal God, on what are thine enemies intent? What are those enterprises of guilt and horror, that, for the safety of their performers, require to be enveloped in a darkness which the eye of Heaven must not penetrate?"- he exclaimed to his friend, Dr. Gregory: "Penetrate! did I say penetrate, sir, when I preached it?" "Yes." "Do you think, sir, I may venture to alter it? for no man who considers the force of the English language would use a word of three syllables there but from absolute necessity. For penetrate put pierce: pierce is the word, sir, and the only word, to be used there."

John Foster was a yet more striking example of this conscientiousness and severity in discriminating words. Never, perhaps, was there a writer the electric action of whose mind, telegraphing with all nature's works, was so in contrast with its action in writing. Here it was almost painfully slow, like the expression of some costly oil, drop by drop. He would spend whole days on a few short sentences, passing each word under his concentrated scrutiny, so that each, challenged and examined, took its place in the structure like an inspected soldier in the ranks. When Chalmers, after a visit to London, was asked what Foster was about, he replied: "Hard at it,

at the rate of a line a week." Read a page of the essay on "Decision of Character," and you will feel that this was scarcely an exaggeration,- that he stood by the ringing anvil till every word was forged into a bolt. Few persons know how hard easy writing is. Who that reads the light, sparkling verse of Thomas Moore, dreams of the mental pangs, the long and anxious thought, which a single word often cost him! Irving tells us that he was

once riding with the Irish poet in the streets of Paris, when the hackney-coach went suddenly into a deep rut, out of which it came with such a jolt as to send their pates bump against the roof. "By Jove, I've got it!" cried Moore, clapping his hands with great glee. "Got what?" said Irving. "Why," said the poet, "that word I've been hunting for six weeks, to complete my last song. That rascally driver has jolted it out of me."

The ancient writers and speakers were even more nice and fastidious than the moderns, in their choice and arrangement of words. Virgil, after having spent eleven years in the composition of the Eneid, intended to devote three years to its revision; but, being prevented by his last sickness from giving it the finishing touches which his exquisite judgment deemed necessary, he directed his friends to burn it. The great orator of Athens, to form his style, transcribed Thucydides again and again. He insisted that it was not enough that the orator, in order to prepare for delivery in public, should write. down his thoughts, he must, as it were, sculpture them in brass. He must not content himself with that loose use of language which characterizes a thoughtless fluency, but his words must have a precise and exact look, like newly-minted coin, with sharply-cut edges and devices. That Demosthenes himself "recked his own rede" in this matter we have abundant proof in almost every page of his great speeches. In his masterpieces we are introduced to mysteries of prose composition of which the moderns. know nothing. We find him, as a German critic has remarked, bestowing incredible pains, not only upon the choice of words, but upon the sequence of long and short syllables, not in order to produce a regularly recurring

metre, but to express the most various emotions of the mind by a suitable and ever-changing rhythm. It is in this art of ordering words with reference to their effect, even more, perhaps, than in the action for which his name is a synonyme, that he exhibits his consummate dexterity as an orator. Change their order, and you at once break the charm. The rhythm, in fact, is the sense. You destroy the significance of the sentence as well as its ring; you lessen the intensity of the meaning as well as the verbal force. "At his pleasure," says Professor Marsh, "he separates his lightning and his thunder by an interval that allows his hearer half to forget the coming detonation, or he instantaneously follows up the dazzling flash with a pealing explosion that stuns, prostrates and crushes the stoutest opponent."

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Not less did the Roman orators consult the laws of euphonic sequence or metrical convenience, and arrange their words in such a succession of articulate sounds as would fall most pleasingly on the ear. The wonderful effects which sometimes attended their elocution were, in all probability, chiefly owing to their exquisite choice of words and their skill in musical concords. It was by the charm of numbers, as well as by the strength of reason, that Cicero confounded Catiline and silenced the eloquent Hortensius. It was this that deprived Curio of all power of recollection when he rose to oppose that great master of enchanting rhetoric; it was this that made even Cæsar himself tremble, and at last change his determined purpose, and acquit the man he had resolved to condemn. When the Roman orator, Carbo, pronounced, on a certain occasion, the sentence, Patris dictum sapiens temeritas filii comprobarit," it was astonishing, says Cicero, to ob

serve the general applause which followed that harmonious close. Doubtless we are ignorant of the art of pronouncing that period with its genuine emphasis; but Cicero assures us that had the final measure,- what is technically called a dichoree,- been changed, and the words placed in a different order, their whole effect would have been absolutely destroyed. With the same exquisite sensibility to numbers, an ancient writer says that a similar result would follow, if, in reading the first line of the Eneid,

"Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris,"

instead of primus we were to pronounce it primis (is being long, and us short).

It is this cunning choice, along with the skillful arrangement of words, that, even more than the thought, eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. More than any other quality it is a writer's own property; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is "the ordered march of his lordly prose" that is the secret of Macaulay's charm; and it is the unstudied grace of Hume's periods which renders him, in spite of his imperfect learning, in spite of his willful perversions of truth, in spite of his infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of England.

From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of