depends upon the man and his theme. The first law of good writing is that it should be an expression of a man's self, a reflected image of his own character. If we know what the man is, we know what his style should be. If it mirrors his individuality, it is, relatively, good; if it is not a self-portraiture, it is bad, however polished its periods, or rhythmical its cadences. The graces and witcheries of expression which charm us in an original writer, offend us in a copyist. Style is sometimes, though not very happily, termed the dress of thought. It is really, as Wordsworth long ago declared, the incarnation of thought. In Greek, the same word, Logos, stands for reason and speech,—and why? Because they cannot be divided; because thought and expression are one. They each co-exist, not one with the other, but in and through the other. Not till we can separate the soul and the body, life and motion, the convex and concave of a curve, shall we be able to divorce thought from the language which only can embody. it. But allowing, for the moment, that style is the verbal clothing of ideas, who but the most poverty-stricken person would think of wearing the clothes of another? It is true that there are certain general qualities, such as clearness, force, flexibility, simplicity, variety, which all good styles will alike possess, just as all good clothing will have certain qualities in common. But for all men to clothe their thoughts in the same manner would be as foolish as for a giant to array himself in the garments of a dwarf, a stout man in those of a thin, or a brunette in those of a blonde. Robert Hall, when preaching in early life at Cambridge, England, for a short time aped Dr. Johnson; but he soon saw the folly of it. "I might as well have attempted," said he, "to dance a hornpipe in the cum

brous costume of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts Icould not sustain the load of words in which I tried to clothe them."

It is with varieties of style as with the varieties of the human face, or of the leaves of the forest; while they are obvious in their general resemblance, yet there are never two indistinguishably alike. Sometimes the differences are very slight, so minute and subtle, as almost to defy characterization; yet, like the differences in musical styles which closely resemble each other, they are felt by the discerning reader, and so strongly that he will scarcely mistake the authorship, even on a single reading. Men of similar natures will have similar styles; but think of Waller aping the gait of Wordsworth, or Leigh Hunt that of Milton! Can any one conceive of Hooker's style as slipshod,- of Dryden's as feeble and obscure,—of Gibbon's as mean and vulgar,-of Burke's as timid and creeping,of Carlyle's as dainty and mincing,― of Emerson's as diffuse and pointless,-or of Napier's as lacking picturesqueness, verve, and fire?

There are some writers of a quiet, even temperament, whose sentences flow gently along like a stream through a level country, that hardly disturbs the stillness of the air. by a sound; there are others vehement, rapid, redundant, that roll on like a mountain torrent forcing its way over all obstacles, and filling the valleys and woods with the echoes of its roar. One author, deep in one place and shallow in another, reminds you of the Ohio, here unfordable, and there full of sand-bars,-now hurrying on with rapid current, and now expanding into lovely lakes, fringed with forests and overhung with hills; another, always brimming with thought, reminds you of the Mississippi, which rolls

onward the same vast volume, with no apparent diminution, from Cairo to New Orleans. "Sydney Smith, concise, brisk, and brilliant, has a manner of composition which exactly corresponds to those qualities; but how would Lord Bacon look in Smith's sentences? How grandly the soul of Milton rolls and winds through the arches and labyrinths of his involved and magnificent diction, waking musical echoes at every new turn and variation of its progress; but how could the thought of such a light trifler as Cibber travel through so glorious a maze, without being lost or crushed in the journey? The plain, manly language of John Locke could hardly be translated into the terminology of Kant,- would look out of place in the rapid and sparkling movement of Cousin's periods, and would appear mean in the cadences of Dugald Stewart."*

Not only has every original writer his own style, which mirrors his individuality, but the writers of every age differ from those of every other age. Joubert has well said that if the French authors of to-day were to write as men wrote in the time of Louis XIV., their style would lack truthfulness, for the French of to-day have not the same dispositions, the same opinions, the same manners. A woman who should write like Madame Sévigné would be ridiculous, because she is not Madame Sévigné. The more one's writing smacks of his own character and of the manners of his time, the more widely must his style diverge from that of the writers who were models only because they excelled in manifesting in their works either the manners of their own age or their own character. Who would tolerate to-day a writer who should reproduce, however successfully, the stately periods of Johnson, the mel

*"Essays and Reviews," by Edwin P. Whipple.

Happiness is a better word, more musical, and genuine English, coming from the Saxon." Not more musical,"

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said Dr. Gregory. "Yes, more musical,—and so are all words derived from the Saxon, generally. Listen, sir: 'My heart is smitten, and withered like grass.' There is plaintive music. Listen again, sir: Under the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.' There is cheerful music." "Yes, but rejoice is French." "True, but all the rest is Saxon; and rejoice is almost out of time with the other words. Listen again: Thou hast delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.' All Saxon, sir, except delivered. I could think of the word tear till I wept." But whence did Robert Hall get the words musical," and "plaintive music "? Are they not from the Greek and the French? Is not this stabbing a man with his own weapons? It is a curious fact, that, in spite of this eulogy on Saxon words, a more than ordinary percentage of the words used in Mr. Hall's writings are of Romanic origin. Again, even Macaulay, one of the most. brilliant and powerful of all English writers, finds it impossible to laud the Saxon part of the language without borrowing nearly half the words of his famous panegyric from the Romanic part of the vocabulary. In his article

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on Bunyan, in a passage written in studied commendation of the "pure old Saxon" English, we find, omitting the particles and wheelwork, one hundred and twenty-one words, of which fifty-one, or over forty-two per cent., are classical or alien. In other words, this great English writer, than whom few have a more imperial command oyer all the resources of expression, finds the Saxon insufficient for his eloquent eulogy on Saxon, and is obliged

to borrow four-tenths of his words, and those the most emphatic ones, from the imported stock!

It is an important fact, that while we can readily frame. a sentence wholly of Anglo-Saxon, we cannot do so with words entirely Latin, because the determinative particles, -the bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure,- must be Saxon. Macaulay, in his famous contrast of Dr. Johnson's conversational language with that of his writings, has vividly illustrated the superiority of a Saxon-English to a highly Latinized diction. "The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. 'When we were taken up

stairs,' says he in one of his letters from the Hebrides, 'a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie.' This incident is recorded in his published Journey as follows: Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man as black as a Cyclops from the forge.' Sometimes," Macaulay adds, "Johnson translated aloud. The Rehearsal,' he said, 'has not wit enough to keep it sweet; then, after a pause, 'It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction."" Doubtless Johnson, like Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon, thought that he was refining the language by straining it. through the lees of Latin and Greek, so as to imbue it with the tone and color of the learned tongues, and clear it of the barbarous Saxon; while real purity rather springs from such words as are our own, and peculiar to our fatherland. Nevertheless, the elephantine diction of the Doctor proved, in the end, a positive blessing to the language; for by pushing the artificial or classic system to