FOOTNOTES:
[20] W. W. Story.
[21] F. W. Faber, in “Dublin Review,” June, 1853.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE SECRET OF APT WORDS.
Le style c’est de l’homme.—Buffon.
Altogether the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; therefore if any man wish to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts; and if he would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.—Goethe.
No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart.—Ruskin.
It was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that language was given to man to conceal his thought. There is a class of writers at the present day who seem to be of the same opinion,—sham philosophers for the most part, who have an ambition to be original without the capacity, and seek to gain the credit of soaring to the clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. As all objects look larger in a fog, so their thoughts “loom up through the haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence that is mistaken for sublimity.” This style of writing is sometimes called “transcendental”; and if by this is meant that it transcends all the established laws of rhetoric, and all ordinary powers of comprehension, the name is certainly a happy one. It is a remark often made touching these shallow-profound authors, “What a pity that So-and-so does not express thoughts so admirable in intelligible English!”—whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness and obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The simple truth is, that the profoundest authors are always the clearest, and the chiaro-oscuro which these transcendentalists affect, instead of shrouding thoughts which mankind cannot well afford to lose, is but a cloak for their intellectual nakedness,—the convenient shelter for meagreness of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks and shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs, so is it with thought and language; the cloud almost invariably indicates the shallow.
But, whether language be or be not fitted to cloak our ideas, as Talleyrand and Voltaire before him supposed, there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times inadequate to express them. How many ideas occur to us in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times, the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled birds, they have swept by him,—thoughts so swift and so many-hued that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed like mockery? How common it is, after reflecting on some subject in one’s study, or a lonely walk, till the whole mind has become heated and filled with the ideas it suggests, to feel a descent into the veriest tameness when attempting to embody those ideas in written or spoken words! A thousand bright images lie scattered in the fancy, but we cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious visions appear to us, but we cannot arrest them; questionable shapes float by us, but, when we question them, they will not answer. Even Byron, one of the greatest masters of eloquent expression, who was able to condense into one word, that fell like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish of emotion, experienced the same difficulty, and tells us in lines of splendid declamation:
“Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,—could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe,—into one word,
And that one word were lightning, I would speak;
But, as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.”
So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains:
“I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal,
And half conceal the soul within.”
De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts, but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent melodies in a great musician’s heart, never to roll forth from harp or organ.
“The sea of thought is a boundless sea,
Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach;
The waves that would tell of the mystery
Die and fall on the shore of speech.”
“Thought,” says the eloquent Du Ponceau, “is vast as the air; it embraces far more than languages can express;—or rather, languages express nothing, they only make thought flash in electric sparks from the speaker to the hearer. A single word creates a crowd of conceptions, which the intellect combines and marshals with lightning-like rapidity.”
The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a class of persons who have conception without expression,—gifted, thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when they would put them into language. Such men they term men of “passive genius.” Their minds are like black glass, absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them “the dumb ones of earth,” for, like Zacharias, they have visions of high import, but are speechless when they would tell them. The infirmity of these dumb ones, is, however, the infirmity, in a less degree, of all men, even the most fluent; for there are thoughts which mock at all attempts to express them, however “well-languaged” the thinker may be.
It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet characterizes it, “la pensée devenue matière”; for the very expression involves a contradiction. Words are nothing but symbols,—imperfect, too, at best,—and to make the symbol in any way a measure of the thought is to bring down the infinite to the measure of the finite. It is true that our words mean more than it is in their power to express,—shadow forth far more than they can define; yet, when their capacity has been exhausted, there is much which they fail, not only to express, but even to hint. There are abysses of thought which the plummet of language can never fathom. Like the line in mathematics, which continually approaches to a curve, but, though produced forever, does not cut it, language can never be more than an asymptote to thought. Expression, even in Shakespeare, has its limits. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil.”
“Full oft
Our thoughts drown speech, like to a foaming force
Which thunders down the echo it creates;
Words are like the sea-shells on the shore; they show
Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been.”
Notwithstanding all this, however, there is truth in the lines of Boileau:
“Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure,
L’expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure;
Ce que l’on concoit bien s’énonce clairement,
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.”
In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great poets we have quoted, have expressed in language of wondrous force and felicity their feeling of the inadequacy of language, it is doubtless true, as a general thing, that impression and expression are relative ideas; that what we clearly conceive we can clearly convey; and that the failure to embody our thoughts is less the fault of our mother tongue than of our own deficient genius. What the flute or the violin is to the musician, his native language is to the writer. The finest instruments are dumb till those melodies are put into them of which they can be only the passive conductors. The most powerful and most polished language must be wielded by the master before its full force can be known. The Philippics of Demosthenes were pronounced in the mother tongue of every one of his audience; but “who among them could have answered him in a single sentence like his own? Who among them could have guessed what Greek could do, though they had spoken it all their lives, till they heard it from his lips?” So with our English tongue; it has abundant capabilities for those who know how to use it aright. What subject, indeed, is there in the whole boundless range of imagination, which some English author has not treated in his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an accuracy of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy of discrimination, and a strength and force of expression, which fall scarcely short of perfection itself? Is there not something almost like sorcery in the potent spell which some of these mighty magicians of language are able to exercise over the soul? Yet the right arrangement of the right words is the whole secret of the witchery,—a charm within the reach of any one of equal genius. Possess yourself of the necessary ideas, and feel them deeply, and you will not often complain of the barrenness of language. You will find it abounding in riches,—exuberant beyond the demand of your intensest thought. “The statue is not more surely included in the block of marble, than is all conceivable splendor of utterance in ‘Webster’s Unabridged.’” As Goethe says:
“Be thine to seek the honest gain,
No shallow-sounding fool;
Sound sense finds utterance for itself,
Without the critic’s rule;
If to your heart your tongue be true,
Why hunt for words with much ado?”
But we hear some one say,—is this the only secret of apt words? Is nothing more necessary to be done by one who would obtain a command of language? Does not Dr. Blair tell us to study the “Spectator,” if we would learn to write well; and does not Dr. Johnson, too, declare that “whoever wishes to obtain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison?” Yes, and it is a pity that Johnson did not act upon his own advice. That it is well for a writer to familiarize himself with the best models of style (models sufficiently numerous to prevent that mannerism which is apt to result from unconscious imitation, when he is familiar with but one) nobody can doubt. A man’s vocabulary depends largely on the company lie keeps; and without a proper vocabulary no man can he a good writer. Words are the material that the author works in, and he must use as much care in their selection as the sculptor in choosing his marble, or the painter in choosing his colors. By listening to those who speak well, by profound study of the masterpieces of literature, by exercises in translation, and, above all, by frequent and careful practice in speaking and writing, he may not only enrich his vocabulary, learn the secret of the great writer’s charm, and elevate and refine his taste as he can in no other way, but acquire such a mastery of language that it shall become, at last, a willing and ready instrument, obedient to the lightest challenge of his thought. Words, apt and telling, will then flow spontaneously, though the result of the subtlest art, like the waters of our city fountains, which, with much toil and at great expense, are carried into the public squares, yet appear to gush forth naturally. But to suppose that a good style can be acquired by imitating any one writer, or any set of writers, is one of the greatest follies that can be imagined. Such a supposition is based on the notion that fine writing is an addition from without to the matter treated of,—a kind of ornament superinduced, or luxury indulged in, by one who has sufficient genius; whereas the brilliant or powerful writer is not one who has merely a copious vocabulary, and can turn on at will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences, but he is one who has something to say, and knows how to say it. Whether he dashes off his compositions at a heat, or elaborates them with fastidious nicety and care, he has but one aim, which he keeps steadily before him, and that is to give forth what is in him. From this very earnestness it follows that, whatever be the brilliancy of his diction, or the harmony of his style,—whether it blaze with the splendors of a gorgeous rhetoric, or take the ear prisoner with its musical surprises,—he never makes these an end, but has always the charm of an incommunicable simplicity.
Such a person “writes passionately because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose: he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but what all cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs among the people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.”[22]
It follows from all this that there is no model style, and that the kind of style demanded in any composition 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 cumbrous costume of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts could 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.”[23]
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 mellifluous lines of Pope, or the faultless but nerveless periods of Addison? The style that is to please to-day must be dense with meaning and full of color; it must be suggestive, sharp, and incisive. So far is imitation of the old masterpieces from being commendable, that, as Joubert says, good taste itself permits one to avoid imitating the best styles, for taste, even good taste, changes with manners,—“Le bon goût lui-même, en ce cas, permet qu’on s’écarte du meilleur goût, car le goût change avec les mœurs, même le bon goût.”
Let no man, then, aim at the cultivation of style for style’s sake, independently of ideas, for all such aims will result in failure. To suppose that noble or impressive language is a communicable trick of rhetoric and accent, is one of the most mischievous of fallacies. Every writer has his own ideas and feelings,—his own conceptions, judgments, discriminations, and comparisons,—which are personal, proper to himself, in the same sense that his looks, his voice, his air, his gait, and his action are personal. If he has a vulgar mind, he will write vulgarly; if he has a noble nature, he will write nobly; in every case, the beauty or ugliness of his moral countenance, the force and keenness or the feebleness of his logic, will be imaged in his language. It follows, therefore, as Ruskin says, that all the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral: it becomes accurate, if the writer desires to be true; clear, if he write with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible; powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has a sense of rhythm and order.
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 pulsating and throbbing of his intellect, and attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow; and, strangest, perhaps, the magical power it has, where thought transcends the sensuous capacities of language, 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. The writer, therefore, who is so magnetized by another’s genius that he cannot say anything in his own way, but is perpetually imitating the other’s structure of sentence and turns of expression, confesses his barrenness. The only way to make another’s style one’s own is to possess one’s self of his mind and soul. If we would reproduce his peculiarities of diction, we must first acquire the qualities that produced them. “Language,” says Goldwin Smith, “is not a musical instrument into which, if a fool breathe, it will make melody. Its tones are evoked only by the spirit of high or tender thought; and though truth is not always eloquent, real eloquence is always the glow of truth.” As Sainte-Beuve says of the plainness and brevity of Napoleon’s style,—“Prétendre imiter le precédé de diction du héros qui sut abréger Cæsar lui-même ... il convient d’avoir fait d’aussi grandes choses pour avoir le droit d’être aussi nu.”
It is not imitation, but general culture,—as another has said, the constant submission of a teachable, apprehensive mind to the influence of minds of the highest order, in daily life and books,—that brings out upon style its daintiest bloom and its richest fruitage. “So in the making of a fine singer, after the voice has been developed, and the rudiments of vocalization have been learned, farther instruction is almost of no avail. But the frequent hearing of the best music given by the best singers and instrumentalists,—the living in an atmosphere of art and literature,—will develop and perfect a vocal style in one who has the gift of song; and, for any other, all the instruction of all the musical professors that ever came out of Italy will do no more than teach an avoidance of positive errors in musical grammar.”[24]
The Cabalists believed that whoever found the mystic word for anything attained to as absolute mastery over that thing as did the robbers over the door of their cave in the Arabian tale. The converse is true of expression; for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought becomes master of the word fitted to express it, while he who has but a half-possession of it vainly seeks to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be in himself. The secret of force in writing or speaking lies not in Blair’s “Rhetoric,” or Roget’s “Thesaurus,”—not in having a copious vocabulary, or a dozen words for every idea,—but in having something that you earnestly wish to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. Phidias, the great Athenian sculptor, said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb, because the modelling clay yielded to its careless touch a grace of sweep which it refused to the utmost pains of others. So he who has thoroughly possessed himself of his thought will not have to hunt through his dictionary for apt and expressive words,—a method which is but an outside remedy for an inward defect,—but will find language eagerly obedient to him, as if every word should say,
“Bid me discourse; I will enchant thine ear,”
and fit expressions, as Milton says, “like so many nimble and airy servitors, will trip about him at command, and, in well-ordered files, fall aptly into their own places.” It was the boast of Dante that no word had ever forced him to say what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say what it would not; and so will every writer, who as vividly conceives and as deeply feels his theme, be able to conjure out of words their uttermost secret of power or pathos.
The question has been sometimes discussed whether the best style is a colorless medium, which, like good glass, only lets the thought be distinctly seen, or whether it imparts a pleasure apart from the ideas it conveys. There are those who hold that when language is simply transparent,—when it comes to us so refined of all its dross, so spiritualized in its substance that we lose sight of it as a vehicle, and the thought stands out with clearness in all its proportions,—we are at the very summit of the literary art. This is the character of Southey’s best prose, and of Paley’s writing, whose statement of a false theory is so lucid that it becomes a refutation. There are writers, however, who charm us by their language, apart from the ideas it conveys. There is a kind of mysterious perfume about it, a delicious aroma, which we keenly enjoy, but for which we cannot account. Poetry often possesses a beauty wholly unconnected with its meaning. Who has not admired, independently of the sense, its “jewels, five words long, that, on the stretched forefinger of all time, sparkle forever”? There are passages in which the mere cadence of the words is by itself delicious to a delicate ear, though we cannot tell how and why. We are conscious of a strange, dreamy sense of enjoyment, such as one feels when lying upon the grass in a June evening, while a brook tinkles over stones among the sedges and trees. Sir Philip Sidney could not hear the old ballad of Chevy Chase without his blood being stirred as by the sound of a trumpet; Boyle felt a tremor at the utterance of two verses of Lucan; and Spence declares that he never repeated particular lines of delicate modulation without a shiver in his blood, not to be expressed. Who is not sensible of certain magical effects, altogether distinct from the thoughts, in some of Coleridge’s weird verse, in Keats’s “Nightingale,” and in the grand harmonies of Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Ruskin, and De Quincey?
Perspicuity, or transparency of style, is, undoubtedly, the first law of all composition; but it may be doubted whether vividness, which was the ruling conception of the Greeks with regard to this property of style, is not quite as essential. Style, it has been well said, “is not only a medium; it is also a form. It is not enough that the thoughts be seen through a clear medium; they must be seen in a distinct shape. It is not enough that truth be visible in a clear, pure air; the atmosphere must not only be crystalline and sparkling, but the things in it must be bounded and defined by sharply cut lines.”[25]
A style may be as transparent as rock-water, and yet the thoughts be destitute of boldness and originality. The highest degree of transparency, however, can be attained only by the writer who has thoroughly mastered his theme, and whose whole nature is stirred by it. As that exquisite material through which we gaze from our windows on the beauties of nature, obtains its crystalline beauty after undergoing the furnace,—as it was melted by fire before the rough particles of sand disappeared,—so it is with language. It is only a burning invention that can make it transparent. A powerful imagination must fuse the harsh elements of composition until all foreign substances have disappeared, and every coarse, shapeless word has been absorbed by the heat, and then the language will brighten into that clear and unclouded style through which the most delicate conceptions of the mind and the faintest emotions of the heart are visible.
How many human thoughts have baffled for generations every attempt to give them expression! How many opinions and conclusions are there, which form the basis of our daily reflections, the matter for the ordinary operations of our minds, which were toiled after perhaps for ages, before they were seized and rendered comprehensible! How many ideas are there which we ourselves have grasped at, as if we saw them floating in an atmosphere just above us, and found the arm of our intellect just too short to reach them; and then comes a happier genius, who, in a lucky moment, and from some vantage ground, arrests the meteor in its flight, and, grasping the floating phantom, drags it from the skies to earth; condenses that which was but an impalpable coruscation of spirit; fetters that which was but the lightning-glance of thought; and, having so mastered it, bestows it as a perpetual possession and heritage on mankind!
The arrangement of words by great writers on the printed page has sometimes been compared to the arrangement of soldiers on the field; and if it is interesting to see how a great general marshals his regiments, it is certainly not less so to see how the Alexanders and Napoleons of letters marshal their verbal battalions on the battle-fields of thought. Foremost among those who wield despotic sway over the domain of letters, is my Lord Bacon, whose words are like a Spartan phalanx, closely compacted,—almost crowding each other, so close are their files,—and all moving in irresistible array, without confusion or chasm, now holding some Thermopylæ of new truth against some scholastic Xerxes, now storming some ancient Malakoff of error, but always with “victory sitting eagle-winged on their crests.” A strain of music bursts on your ear, sweet as is Apollo’s lute, and lo! Milton’s dazzling files, clad in celestial panoply, lifting high their gorgeous ensign, which “shines like a meteor, streaming to the wind,” “breathing united force and fixed thought,” come moving on “in perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders.” Next comes Chillingworth, with his glittering rapier, all rhetorical rule and flourish, according to the schools,—passado, montanso, staccato,—one, two, three,—the third in your bosom. Then stalks along Chatham, with his two-handed sword, striking with the edge, while he pierces with the point, and stuns with the hilt, and wielding the ponderous weapon as easily as you would a flail. Next strides Johnson with elephantine tread, with the club of logic in one hand and a revolver in the other, hitting right and left with antithetical blows, and, “when his pistol misses fire, knocking you down with the butt end of it.” Burke, with lighted linstock in hand, stands by a Lancaster gun; he touches it, and forth there burst, with loud and ringing roar, missiles of every conceivable description,—chain shot, stone, iron darts, spikes, shells, grenadoes, torpedoes, and balls, that cut down everything before them. Close after him steals Jeffrey, armed cap-a-pie,—carrying a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping-knife in the other,—steeped to the eye in fight, cunning of fence, master of his weapon and merciless in its use, and “playing it like a tongue of flame” before his trembling victims. There is Brougham, slaying half-a-dozen enemies at once with a tremendous Scotch claymore; Macaulay, running under his opponent’s guard, and stabbing him to the heart with the heavy dagger of a short, epigrammatic sentence; Hugh Elliot, cracking his enemies’ skulls with a sledge-hammer, or pounding them to jelly with his huge fists; Sydney Smith, firing his arrows, feathered with fancy and pointed with the steel of the keenest wit; Disraeli, armed with an oriental scimitar, which dazzles while it kills; Emerson, transfixing his adversaries with a blade of transcendental temper, snatched from the scabbard of Plato; and Carlyle, relentless iconoclast of shams, who “gangs his ain gait,” armed with an antique stone axe, with which he smashes solemn humbugs as you would drugs with a pestle and mortar.