Le says, "The Scots delivered their fire with such constancy and swiftness, it was as if the whole air had become an element of fire-in the ancient summer gloaming there.”*

In poetry again, it is constantly employed, as the mention. of an individual calls up a picture before the mind. Thus Milton compares Satan, not to a bird, nor to a bird of prey, but to a cormorant.

"Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life

Sat like a cormorant."

This rule is again closely allied with the Law of Fulness. If you know a story completely, you can describe it with every living detail, just as if you had it all before your eyes. One rule, therefore, under this head, may be thus stated:

Try to see what you are describing.

Of course enumeration of particulars may be carried too far; and in some kinds of narrative it might become tiresome and a little pedantic to describe work-people as “those who held the plough, or drove the looms of Norwich, or squared the stones of St. Paul's." This must be left to the taste of the writer, who must allow himself to be guided in all things by his feelings of simplicity and truthfulness. If Roget's "Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases" is ever of use to a person engaged in composition, it will be of use in reference to this point. After the paper is written, but not during the writing of it, Roget, or some such book, might be used, to give a higher degree of specification to the statements, always providing that this specification is in keeping with the facts and with the sincere feeling of the paper. But there is no surer way of crippling real power

* Quoted by Minto, p. 197.

CHAPTER V.

THE LAW OF PLAINNESS.

HE ground of this law lies in the fact that the weight or importance of what we have to say comes from the statement itself, and not from the manner of stating. We cannot add to the weight a thing by the way we put it into the scales. A fact always tells its own story; and our duty is, as it were, only to stand aside and let it do so. That is to say,

of

real eloquence lies in the facts we have to narrate, in the light in which they lie, and in the feelings they give rise to— not in the words made about them and about them. case here is similar to that described in the question,—

The

"Which of you by taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? And I why take ye thought for the rest ?"

The greatest literary men and poets have felt this most strongly, and have always been more anxious to get at the real facts about and the feelings of the men and women they describe, than to find the phrases to describe them. Shakspeare makes King Lear, when his heart is almost bursting with disappointment and indignation, say only this :

66

Pray you undo this button: thank you, sir."

A weather-beaten sailor is shortly and simply introduced. by Chaucer in the line :

66
"With many a tempest had his beard been shake;

and a sudden burst of tears is thus described :

"And from his eyen ran the water down."

and the shortness of life is mentioned in the Bible with the quiet words :

"The wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof knoweth it no more."

But the great value of plainness will appear most clearly by looking at examples of its opposite. A writer wishes to state that vegetable life is more luxuriant in the tropics than in the temperate zone; and he does it in the following remarkable and stilted language:

"The course of the existence of plants, in the torrid zone, seems much more rapid and energetic, and the conditions under which it advances far more conducive of success, than in our distance from the equator."

Another speaks about the feeling of hope in this fashion :

"The benignant influence exercised by the passion of hope over the soul of man, in soothing and sustaining him under the numerous afflictions of life, and in giving birth to an infinite variety of pleasing emotions," etc., etc.

Another begins the fable of "The Bears and the Bees," in this way :

"Two young bears setting out on one occasion from the covert of a forest, chanced, in what seemed to them a lucky moment, to light upon a bee-hive laden with the rich and inviting store of the laborious race of honey-makers."

And a well-known novelist writes of Rome:

:

"A winding and turbid river divided the city in (sic) unequal parts, in one of which there rose a vast and glorious temple crowned with a dome of almost superhuman size and skill, on which the favoured sign of heaven flashed with triumphant truth."

It is to be observed, in the first place, that no writer of any sense and no thoughtful person whatever could or would write such stuff as the first three sentences, or such phrases as "the laborious race of honey-makers," "an infinite

variety of pleasing emotions," or call our latitude "our distance from the equator." But the worst effect of allowing oneself to write in this mouthing and garrulous fashion is that our minds get gradually so degraded that they mistake mere words and phrases for thoughts.

"Words are like leaves; and, where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found."

But there is a method of turning the thought in one's mind on every side, and looking at it from many different points of view. This is not wordiness, but a most useful rhetorical art.

Same statement in three forms.

Same statement

in seven varieties, with slightly different concomitants.

Now in the mind of Mr. Southey, reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is.-He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents.

It has never occurred to him that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions, than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them.--It has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration,— that a rumour does not always prove a fact,-that a single fact, when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, -that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable -truths,-that to beg the question is not the way to settle it,— or that, when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than "scoundrel" and "blockhead."

The too great use of Latinized expressions often makes a sentence very clumsy. Dr. Chalmers, who was much given to them, has this lumbering sentence:—

"The man who considers the poor will give his chief anxiety to the wants of their eternity."

The following sentence seems to abound in tautologies;