7. If he had a slight overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic-peculiarity, it was more than made up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been, there was something perhaps more than English as well as less than it in his fashion of expression.
8. His flashes of ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often one-sided.
9. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery.
10. That it contains a great deal of quaint and piquant writing is only to say that its writer wrote it.
11. ‘Wild Wales,’ too, because of its easy and direct opportunity of comparing its description with the originals.
12. The capital and full-length portraits.
13. Whose attraction is one neither mainly nor in any very great degree one of pure form.
14. Constantly right in general.
These are merely a few examples of the style of Mr. Saintsbury, a writer who seems quite ignorant of the commonest laws both of grammar and of literary expression, who has apparently no idea of the difference between the pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that,’ and has as little hesitation in ending the clause of a sentence with a preposition, as he has in inserting a parenthesis between a preposition and its object, a mistake of which the most ordinary schoolboy would be ashamed. And why can not our magazine-writers use plain, simple English? Unfriend, quoted above, is a quite unnecessary archaism, and so is such a phrase as With this Borrow could not away, in the sense of ‘this Borrow could not endure.’ ‘Borrow’s abstraction from general society’ may, I suppose, pass muster. Pope talks somewhere of a hermit’s ‘abstraction,’ but what is the meaning of saying that the author of Lavengro quartered Castile and Leon ‘in the most interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant’? And what defence can be made for such an expression as ‘Scott, and other black beasts of Borrow’s’? Black beast for bête noire is really abominable.
The object of my letter, however, is not to point out the deficiencies of Mr. Saintsbury’s style, but to express my surprise that his article should have been admitted into the pages of a magazine like Macmillan’s. Surely it does not require much experience to know that such an article is a disgrace even to magazine literature.