a remarkably correct writer, uniting splendor and precision as few have done before. On the other hand, he is possessed with the very demon of mannerism, and his tricks of style are so transparent that the veriest novice may detect them. The peculiar swing and swell of his sentences, the epigrammatic antitheses and balanced clauses, the short sentences between the long, "that, like the fire of sharp-shooters through cannon, break the volume of sound," are not the product of the highest art. Though pleasing at first, they tire at last by their unshaded brilliancy and unvarying monotony. They remind one of the measured march of the grenadier to the music of the fife and drum, rather than of the free and lofty movement of the giant. Again, Macaulay's hatred of pronouns, limitations, and qualifications; the lack of organic unity in his sentences,- of flexibility, airiness, and grace,and especially of those reticences, half-tones, and subtle interblendings of thought which are among the lamps of style; and last, not least, his Chinese lack of perspective, and his fondness for exaggeration and startling contrasts, greatly detract from the excellence of his style. As he himself says of Tacitus, "he stimulates till stimulants lose their power." Because it is thus obtrusive by its brilliancy, and constantly calls attention to itself, Macaulay's style is necessarily second-rate. The writer who perpetually strikes you as a great literary artist is not artist enough, just as the man who strikes you as crafty is never crafty enough, because he cannot hide his craft. The painter who works consciously, and who is always ready with a reason for every touch of his brush, instead of laying tint on tint at the mandate of a mysterious instinct, we may be sure is not a Raphael or a Titian.

Shakspeare has no style, because he has so many styles,because he is forever coining new forms of expression, and breaking the moulds as fast as they are coined.

Here, had we space, we should like to speak of the serried strength of Barrow and the indignant brevity of Junius; of Burke, the materials of whose many-colored style were gathered from the accumulated spoils of many tongues and of all ages; of Robert Hall, the stately, imperial march of whose sentences was fashioned after no model of ancient or modern times, a style the product not of art, but of a mind full to bursting with intellectual riches, and which, though often declamatory, never wearies, because he never declaims only, there is the bolt as well as the thunder; of South, Fuller, and Sydney Smith, the ivy-like luxuriance of whose wit conceals the robust wisdom about which it coils itself; of Walter Savage Landor, who handles the heavy weights of the language as a juggler his balls; of Froude, some of whose historical pictures are among the triumphs of English prose; of Huxley, in whose hands the hard, granitic vocabulary of science becomes malleable in such a union of sweetness with strength as to realize the Saturnian prodigy of "honey sweating from the pores of oak"; of our own Everett, whose level passages are never tame, and whose fine passages are never superfine; and, above all, of the three great masters of style, De Quincey, Ruskin, and Newman, who have evoked, as with an enchanter's wand, the sweetness and strength of the English speech. Prof. Newman's diction, polished ad unguem, is the very acme of simplicity and clearness; but how the colorless diamond blade flashes as he brandishes it on the battlefield of controversy! Ask the ghost of poor Kingsley, if

you doubt its edge! If we must go to other writers to see the full breadth and sweep of our language,— the majestic freedom of its unfettered movement, we must go to Prof. Newman to see what it can do when it enters the arena a trained and girded athlete, every limb developed into its utmost symmetry, and every blow and every movement directed with definite purpose, and with most clear-sighted and deadly aim.

Again, how vividly are the seer-like nature and the exaggerated individualism of Emerson,- his serene, Jove-like composure, and icy calmness of temperament,- manifested in his disconnected sentences, which some wit has compared to Lucretius's "fortuitous concourse of atoms!" Of all the masters of language (we do not say of style), he is the least sequacious. His verbal troops, like the old Continentals, his townsmen, who fought Pitcairn, never fire in companies, or even by platoons, but each "on his own hook," man by man. Individually complete and self-poised, like his ideal man, his sentences are combined merely by the accident of juxtaposition, and touch without adhering, like marbles in a bag. His language is densely suggestive, and abounds in those focalizing words and turns of expression peculiar to our day, which condense many rays of thought into one burning phrase. It abounds, too, in those happy phrases which are

"New as if brought from other spheres,
Yet welcome as if known for years."

Hardly any writer surpasses Emerson in what has been called the "polarization of language," by which effete terms are reinforced, and ordinary words are put to novel uses, and charged with unusual powers. But his style lacks. repose, and, like Seneca's, wearies by excessive epigram

and point. Its main defect is, that, as De Quincey says of Hazlitt's manner, "it spreads no deep diffusions of color, and distributes no mighty masses of shadow. A flash, a solitary flash, and all is gone." It is said that Coleridge, when told that Klopstock was the German Milton, said: "A very German Milton, indeed!" A like exclamation is provoked, when one hears the remark, so thoughtlessly made, than which nothing marks more clearly the prevalent insensibility to the differences of style,- that Emerson is "the American Carlyle." As well might one compare the gentle gales that fan lake Walden to the hoarse blast that blows in winter from Ben Lomond; the stream that ripples along the Concord meadows" with propulsion, eddy, and sweet recoil," to the brawling and turbid Highland torrent; the notes of the robin to the scream of the northern eagle; or the cold, pitiless radiance of a sunlit iceberg to the lurid glare of the volcano, blazing with tyrannic fury through the silence and shadows of midnight, and hurling its sulphureous blackness against the starry canopy.

Of the few partial exceptions to the law that we have mentioned, Goldsmith is one of the most striking. Never was there a greater chasm between the man and the writer. Why is it that, carousing at college with midnight revelers and ale-house tipplers,- fond all his life of coarse pleasures and gambling,—at once a dandy and a sloven in his dress and life, he is never either finical, or coarse and slovenly in his writing? Whence come the artless but unapproachable graces of that style, as chaste as it is musical and fascinating? Why does his pen never for a moment betray the disorder of his life? "Like the squalid silk-weaver, sending forth piece after piece of the purest white tissue,

'poor Noll," says an English writer, "sends forth from his garret only the most snowy-white products, amid circumstances of his outer life which strangely contrast with his inner life of thought. Irish to the backbone in his temperament and all his ways of life, he is yet English in almost every characteristic of his writings."

It is in this idiosyncratic peculiarity, this indefinable something which distinguishes one writer from another, and which can neither be imitated nor forged, that lies the priceless value of style. It is not, as it has been too often regarded, a cloak to masquerade in, a kind of ornament or luxury that can be indulged in at will,—a communicable trick of rhetoric or accent, but the pure outcome of the writer's nature, the utterance of his own individuality. This sensibility of language to the impulses and qualities of him who uses it, its flexibility in accommodating itself to all the thoughts, feelings, imaginations and aspirations which pass within him, so as to become the faithful expression of his personality, indicating the very pulsation and throbbing of his intellect, and attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow, and, strangest, perhaps, of all, the magical power it has to suggest the idea or mood it cannot directly convey, and to give forth an aroma which no analysis of word or expression reveals, is one of the marvels of human speech. Because language is thus the faithful mirror of our natures, because expression is literally the pressing out into palpable form of that which is already within us, it is plain that nothing can be more foolish than imitation. In the old text-books of rhetoric it used to be stated, in the words of Johnson, that whoever wished to obtain a perfect style should give his days and nights to the study of Addison.