as

highest individual efforts, is not the diffusion itself a gain, and is it after all consistent with fact that the supposed causes are producing the alleged effect? That there is a law of vicissitude in the intellectual power of a nation; that, as there are years of good crop and years of bad crop in the vegetable world, so there are ages in a nation's life of superexcellent nerve and faculty, and again ages intellectually feeble, seems satisfactory a generalization as any of the rough historical generalizations we yet have in stock; but that this law of vicissitude implies diminished capacity in the highest individuals according as the crowd increases, does not appear. The present era of British literature, counting from the year 1789, is as rich, as brilliant with lustrous names, as any since the Elizabethan era and its continuation, from 1580 to 1660; nay, if we strike out from the Elizabethan firmament its majestic twin-luminaries, Shakespeare and Bacon, our firmament is the more brilliantly studded -studded with the larger stars. Nothing but a morose spirit of disregard for what is round us, or an excess of the commendable spirit of affection for the past, or, lastly, an utter ignorance of the actual books of the past which we do praise, prevents us from seeing that many of the poets and other authors even of the great Elizabethan age, who retain their places in our collections, or that, still more decidedly, many of the celebrities of that later age which is spanned by Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," were but poetasters and poor creatures, compared with relative authors of the last seventy years. Test the matter roughly in what is called our current literature. What an everlasting fuss we do make about Junius and his letters! And yet there is no competent person but will admit that these letters will not stand a comparison, in any respect of real in tellectual merit, with many of the leading articles which are written overnight at present by contributors to our daily newspapers, and skimmed by us at breakfast next morning.

ciation towards our current literature, that we venture to point out certain of its wide-spread vices. [The vices which we select are not those which might turn out to be the deepest and most radical; they are simply those that cannot fail to catch the eye from the extent of surface which they cover.

1. There is the vice of the Slip-shod or Slovenly. In popular language it may be described as the vice of bad workmanship. Its forms are various. The lowest is that of bad syntax, of lax concatenation of clauses and sentences. It would be easy to point out faults of this kind which reappear in shoals in each day's supply of printed matterfrom the verbs misnominatived, and the clumsy "whiches" looking back ruefully for submerged antecedents, so common in the columns of our hasty writers, up to the unnecessarily repeated "that" after a conditional clause which some writers insert with an infatuated punctuality, and even the best insert occasionally. Should the notice of a matter so merely mechanical seem too trivial, there is, next, that form of the slip-shod which consists in stuffing out sentences with certain tags and shreds of phraseology lying vague about society, as bits of undistributed type may lie about a printing-room. "We are free to confess," "we candidly acknowledge," "will well repay perusal," we should heartily rejoice," "did space permit," causes beyond our control," "if we may be allowed the expression," 66 commence hostilities"-what are these and a hundred other such phrases but undistributed bits of old speech, like the "electric fluid" and the "launched into eternity" of the penny-a-liners, which all of us are glad to clutch, to fill a gap, or to save the trouble of composing equivalents from the letters? To change the figure (see, I am at it myself!), what are such phrases but a kind of rhetorical putty with which cracks in the sense are stopped, and prolongations formed where the sense has broken short? Of this kind of slipshod in writing no writers are more

style chiefly by public speaking; and it is in them also that the kindred faults of synonyms strung together and of redundant expletives are most commonly seen. Perhaps, indeed, the choicest specimens of continuous slip-shod in the language are furnished by the writings. of celebrated orators. How dilute the tincture, what bagginess of phraseology round what slender shanks of meaning, what absence of trained muscle, how seldom the nail is hit on the head! It is not every day that a Burke presents himself, whose every sentence is charged with an exact thought proportioned to it, whether he stands on the floor and speaks, or takes his pen in hand. And then, not only in the writings of men rendered diffuse by much speaking after a low standard, but in the tide of current writing besides, who shall take account of the daily abundance of that more startling form of slip-shod which rhetoricians call Confusion of Metaphor? Lord Castlereagh's famous "I will not now enter upon the fundamental feature upon which this question hinges," is as nothing compared with much that passes daily under our eyes in the pages of popular books and periodicals-tissues of words in which shreds from nature's four quarters are jumbled together as in heraldry; in which the writer begins with a lion, but finds it in the next clause to be a waterspout; in which icebergs swim in seas of lava, comets collect taxes, pigs sing, peacocks wear silks, and teapots climb trees.

Pshaw! technicalities all! the mere minutia of the grammarian and the critic of expression! Nothing of the kind, good reader! Words are made up of letters, sentences of words, all that is written or spoken of sentences succeeding each other or interflowing; and at no time, from Homer's till this, has anything passed as good literature which has not satisfied men as tolerably tight and close-grained in these particulars, or become classic and permanent which has not, in respect of them, stood the test of the microscope. We distinguish, indeed, usefully enough, between matter and expression, between

thought and style; but no one has ever attended to the subject analytically without becoming aware that the distinction is not ultimate-that what is called style resolves itself, after all, into manner of thinking; nay, perhaps (though to show this would take some time) into the successive particles of the matter thought. If a writer is said to be fond of epithets, it is because he has a habit of always thinking a quality very prominently along with an object; if his style is said to be figurative, it is because he thinks by means of comparisons; if his syntax abounds in inversions, it is because he thinks the cart before he thinks the horse. And so, by extension, all the forms of slip-shod in expression are, in reality, forms of slip-shod in thought. If the syntax halts, it is because the thread of the thought has snapped, or become entangled. If the phraseology of a writer is diffuse; if his language does not lie close round his real meaning, but widens out in flat expanses, with here and there a tremor as the meaning rises to take breath; if in every sentence we recognise shreds and tags of common social verbiage-in such a case it is because the mind of the writer is not doing its duty, is not consecutively active, maintains no continued hold of its object, hardly knows its own drift. In like manner, mixed or incoherent metaphor arises from incoherent conception, inability to see vividly what is professedly looked at. All forms of slip-shod, in short, are to be referred to deficiency of precision in the conduct of thought. Of every writer it ought to be required at least that he pass every jot and tittle of what he sets down through his mind, to receive the guarantee of having been really there, and that he arrange and connect his thoughts in a workmanlike manner. Anything short of this is-allowance being made for circumstances which may prevent a conscientious man from always doing his best-an insult to the public. Accordingly, in all good literature, not excepting the subtlest and most exuberant poetry, one perceives a strict logic linking thought with thought. The velocity