“Fortune whom” is evidently a personification. The use of party in “to the party herself” is now reckoned an Americanism (!) “Engaged in this subject” is evidently antiquated.
We miss in Addison the variety which we found in Ruskin. He does not seem to understand the art of alternating long and short sentences, and following one sentence form by another in quick succession. The fact is, English prose style has made enormous advances since the time of Addison, and we learn more by comparing him with a writer like Ruskin than by deliberately imitating him. At the same time his method is simpler, and since it is so we may find him a good writer to begin our study with. In spite of any little faults we may find with him, he was and is a great writer, and we should be sure we can write as well as he before we reject him.
LETTERS.
By Robert Louis Stevenson.
I.
My Dear Mother,—I am here at last, sitting in my room, without coat or waistcoat, and with both window and door open, and yet perspiring like a terra-cotta jug or a Gruy{è}əre cheese:
We had a very good passage, which we certainly deserved no compensation for having to sleep on the cabin floor and finding absolutely nothing fit for human food in the whole filthy embarkation. We made up for lost time by sleeping on deck a good part of the forenoon. When I awoke, Simpson was still sleeping the sleep of the just, on a coil of ropes and (as appeared afterwards) his own hat; so I got a bottle of Bass and a pipe and laid hold of an old Frenchman of somewhat filthy aspect (fiat experimentum in corpora vii) to try my French upon. I made very heavy weather of it. The Frenchman had a very pretty young wife; but my French always deserted me entirely when I had to answer her, and so she soon drew away and left me to her lord, who talked of French politics, Africa, and domestic economy with great vivacity. From Ostend a smoking hot journey to Brussels! At Brussels we went off after dinner to the Pare. If any person wants to be happy, I should advise the Pare. You sit drinking iced drinks and smoking penny cigars under great old trees.
The band place, covered walks, etc., are all lit up; and you can't fancy how beautiful was the contrast of the great masses of lamplit foliage and the dark sapphire night sky with just one blue star set overhead in the middle of the largest patch. In the dark walks, too, there are crowds of people whose faces you cannot see, and here and there a colossal white statue at the corner of an alley that gives the place a nice, artificial, eighteenth-century sentiment. There was a good deal of summer lightning blinking overhead, and the black avenues and white statues leapt out every minute into short-lived distinctness.
II.
My dear Colvin,—Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning, a slender gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it, may be observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with an active step. The gentleman is R. L. S.; the volume relates to Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays. He descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of the original Pine Street Coffee House, no less; I believe he would be capable of going to the original itself, if he could only find it. In the branch he seats himself at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial, of high Dutch extraction and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good. Awhile ago, and H. L. S. used to find the supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this refection he pays ten cents, or five pence sterling (£0 0s 5d).