Qualis vir, talis oratio.
ERASMI ADAGIA.
Authors are often classed, like painters, according to the school, in which they have been trained, or to which they have attached themselves. But it is not so easy to ascertain this in literature as it is in painting; and if some of the critics who have thus endeavoured to class them, were sent to school themselves and there whipt into a little more learning, so many silly classifications of this kind would not mislead those readers who suppose in the simplicity of their own good faith, that no man presumes to write upon a subject which he does not understand.
Stiles may with more accuracy be classed, and for this purpose metals might be used in literature as they are in heraldry. We might speak of the golden stile, the silver, the iron, the leaden, the pinchbeck and the bronze.
Others there are which cannot be brought under any of these appellations. There is the Cyclopean stile, of which Johnson is the great example; the sparkling, or micacious, possessed by Hazlitt, and much affected in Reviews and Magazines; the oleaginous, in which Mr. Charles Butler bears the palm, or more appropriately the olive branch: the fulminating—which is Walter Landor's, whose conversation has been compared to thunder and lightning; the impenetrable—which is sometimes used by Mr. Coleridge; and the Jeremy-Benthamite, which cannot with propriety be distinguished by any other name than one derived from its unparellelled and unparallellable author.
Ex stilo, says Erasmus, perpendimus ingenium cujusque, omnemque mentis habitum ex ipsâ dictionis ratione conjectamus. Est enim tumidi, stilus turgidus; abjecti, humilis, exanguis; asperi, scaber; amarulenti, tristis ac maledicus; deliciis affluentis, picturatus ac dissolutus; Breviter, omne vitæ simulacrum, omnis animi vis, in oratione perinde ut in speculo repræsentatur, ac vel intima pectoris, arcanis quibusdam vestigiis, deprehenduntur.
There is the lean stile, of which Nathaniel Lardner, and William Coxe may be held up as examples; and there is the larded one, exemplified in Bishop Andrews, and in Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy; Jeremy Taylor's is both a flowery and a fruitful stile: Harvey the Meditationist's a weedy one. There are the hard and dry; the weak and watery; the manly and the womanly; the juvenile and the anile; the round and the pointed; the flashy and the fiery; the lucid and the opaque; the luminous and the tenebrous; the continuous and the disjointed. The washy and the slap-dash are both much in vogue, especially in magazines and reviews; so are the barbed and the venomed. The High-Slang stile is exhibited in the Court Journal and in Mr. Colburn's novels; the Low Slang in Tom and Jerry, Bell's Life in London, and most Magazines, those especially which are of most pretensions.
The flatulent stile, the feverish, the aguish, and the atrabilious are all as common as the diseases of body from which they take their name, and of mind in which they originate; and not less common than either is the dyspeptic stile, proceeding from a weakness in the digestive faculty.
Learned, or if not learned, Dear Reader, I had much to say of stile, but the under written passage from that beautiful book, Xenophon's Memorabilia Socratis, has induced me, as the Latins say, stilum vertere, and to erase a paragraph written with ink in which the gall predominated.
Ἐγὼ δ᾽ οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς, ὦ Αντιφῶν, ὥσπερ ἄλλός τις ἢ ἵππῳ ἀγαθῷ ἢ κυνὶ ἢ ὂρνιθι ἥδεται, οὕτω καὶ ἒτι μᾶλλον ἥδομαι τοῖς φίλοις ἀγαθοῖς· καὶ, ἐάν τι σχῶ ἀγαθὸν διδάσκω, καὶ ἄλλοις σύνιστημι, παρ᾽ ὧν ἂν ἡγῶμαι ὠφελήσεσθαί τι αὐτοὺς εἰς ἀρετήν᾽ καὶ, τοὺς θησαυροὺς τῶν πάλι σοφῶν ἀνδρῶν, οὕς ἐκεῖνοι κατέλιπον ἐν βιβλίοις γράφεντες, ἀνελίττων κοινῆ σὺν τοῖς φίλοις διέρχομαι· καὶ ἄν τι ὁρῶμεν ἀγαθὸν, ἐκλεγόμεθα, καὶ μέγα νομίζομεν κέρδος, ἐὰν ἀλλήλοις ὠφέλιμοι γιγνώμεθα.