to strive for conceits, prettinesses, and affectations, and to consider a sentence beautiful only when, as Turner said of Guido's Mater Dolorosa, it is "polished to inanity." This is the spirit which in music prefers the nice form of expression to the thought itself; which sets the technical proficiency of the player and singer above the God-given feeling by virtue of which they are artists at all.

Traits of this kind are among the surest signs of intellectual decay. The student of English literature ought to be warned that not all the authors in a Hand-book are models for imitation; that extraneous characteristics of style are peculiar to each author, and cannot be put on by another like a second-hand garment; that solid thought and unaffected feeling are the things chiefly valuable in any literary composition, and that graces of manner, like those of the person, are most winning when unconsciously worn.