The Liberty of Prophesying
is an admirable work, in many respects, and calculated to produce a much greater effect on the many than Milton's treatise on the same subject: on the other hand, Milton's is throughout unmixed truth; and the man who in reading the two does not feel the contrast between the single-mindedness of the one, and the
strabismus
in the other, is — in the road of preferment.
General Dedication of the Polemical Discourses[1]
Vol. vii. p. ix.
And the breath of the people is like the voice of an exterminating angel, not so killing but so secret.
That is, in such wise. It would be well to note, after what time 'as' became the requisite correlative to 'so,' and even, as in this instance, the preferable substitute. We should have written 'as' in both places probably, but at all events in the latter, transplacing the sentences 'as secret though not so killing;' or 'not so killing, but quite as secret.' It is not generally true that Taylor's punctuation is arbitrary, or his periods reducible to the post-Revolutionary standard of length by turning some of his colons or semi-colons into full stops. There is a subtle yet just and systematic logic followed in his pointing, as often as it is permitted by the higher principle, because the proper and primary purpose, of our stops, and to which alone from their paucity they are adequate, — that I mean of enabling the reader to prepare and manage the proportions of his voice and breath.