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"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."

"Or ravished with the whistling of a name,
See Cromwell damned to everlasting fame.”

§ 254. IN PROSE.

Among prose writers, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, and Emerson are epigrammatic beyond all others.

"On him who scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small things, will perish by little and little. Goethe's Tasso is very likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richard III. oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each other."-Emerson. “What hath he done?' is the divine question which searches men and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world, nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and Washington; but there can never be any doubt concerning the respective ability of human beings when we seek the truth. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor Christianized the world, nor abolished slavery."-EMERSON.

The style of Macaulay may also be called epigrammatic :

"The sovereign whom James most resembled was, we think, Claudius Cæsar. Both had the same feeble and vacillating temper; the same childishness; the same coarseness; the same poltroonery. Both were men of learning. Both wrote and spoke, not indeed well, but still in a manner in which it seems almost incredible that men so foolish should have written or spoken."

"The regent was in many respects the fac-simile of our Charles the Second. Like Charles, he was a good-natured man, utterly destitute of sensibility. Like Charles, he had good natural talents, which a deplorable indolence rendered useless to the state. Like Charles, he thought all men corrupt and indolent; and yet did not dislike them for being so. His opinion of human nature was Gulliver's; but he did not regard human nature with Gulliver's horror. He thought that he and his fellow-creatures were Yahoos; and he thought a Yahoo, a very agreeable kind of animal."

"The Castilian of those times was to the Italian what the Roman in the days of the greatness of Rome was to the Greek. The conqueror had less ingenuity, less taste, less delicacy of perception than the conquered; but far more pride, firmness, and courage, a more solemn demeanor, a stronger sense of honor."

Burke's style is full of epigrammatic passages:

"I would rather sleep in the corner of a little country churchyard than in the tomb of the Capulets."

"The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family; for our friends; for our God; for our country; for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime."

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'Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society."

Epigrammatic passages abound in the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes :

"Boston State House is the hub of the solar universe. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar."

The following is from Daniel Webster's speech on Hamil

ton:

"He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of public credit, and it sprang upon its feet."

$ 255. FAULTS ARISING FROM THE EPIGRAMMATIC STYLE.

The epigrammatic style is highly artificial, and although it is used with great success by writers of genius, its employment is nevertheless attended with peculiar disadvantages, the chief of which is the tendency to sacrifice truth for the sake of effect. Where the writer is perpetually balancing word against word, or seeking after novelties in thought and expression, or striving to give to every sentence its own individual point and sparkle, it is not surprising that he should give to many things an undue importance, and end with throwing around his work a general air of extravagance.

In poetry this danger is far less than in prose, for poetry is confessedly in some sort one of the fine arts; and being an art, its movement is made in accordance with many artificial rules. The license which is present in poetry does not exist in prose. The poet, like the artist, may study effects; he may aim after the ideal rather than literal fact; and thus it may a necessity for him to transcend the actual truth of things. But nothing of this kind is open to the prose writer. Rhetoric, even as belles-lettres, cannot go so far as this, and knows nothing of that license which poetry enjoys. And thus, while

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the poet may indulge freely in hyperbole, the prose writer must be very guarded in his dealings with extravagant language.

An illustration of this extravagance can be found in the character of Napoleon by Charles Phillips, from which a few sentences may be taken as examples of the whole :

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There was no creed that he did not profess, there was no opinion that he did not promulgate."

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Nature had no obstacles that he did not surmount, space no opposition that he did not spurn."

"Amid all these changes he stood immutable as adamant."

"The victorious veteran glittered with his gains, and the capital, gorgeous with the spoils of art, became the miniature metropolis of the universe."

All this is very extravagant and very tawdry, particularly the last sentence-"victorious veteran," "glittered with gains," "miniature metropolis."

The imitators of Emerson, now happily less numerous than formerly, afford examples of the evil results which appear when such a style is employed by those who think that in imitating the form of a master they may rival the master himself. Emerson may move with ease and grace under his panoply; but the feeble army of imitators fall beneath the load. Out of this affectation of a most difficult style there arises the great fault of phrase-making.

The French are fond of antithesis, and the epigrammatic style is far more common with them than with us. With them it has been carried to a great excess, and the faults of extravagance and phrase-making are common. Even men of genius are not free from these faults, for Victor Hugo, in his later works, has shown far more of the extravagance, the puerility, and the absurdity of the epigrammatic style than of its beauty and force. In his address to the Prussians at the time of the siege of Paris he gave utterance to the ravings of a madman; but the popular taste seemed to support him; for M. Ollivier, in the agonies of France, could find nothing better to give to his countrymen than a series of miserable phrases, where the clink and tinkle of childish rhymes and weak antitheses were sent forth to prepare a nation for its most tremendous conflict: "To Prussian audacity let us oppose French tenacity."

CHAPTER XIV.

OTHER QUALITIES OF STYLE ASSOCIATED WITH VIVACITY.

§ 256. CLASSICAL STYLE.

THE term "classical" is sometimes applied to a style which abounds in allusions to the classical literature of Greece and Rome, or to events in their history. Such allusions are frequent in the writings of Burke, and may be illustrated by the following passage:

"It is the spirit of the English Constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to its minutest member."

The allusion here is to the well-known lines of Virgil:

"Spiritus intus alit; totamque infusa per artus

Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."

But a truer definition of the classical style is that which makes it such a style as is most in accordance with the genius of the language, and serves to exhibit its highest qualities.

Addison, Goldsmith, and Irving; De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Thackeray, are classical writers of English.

If we compare Thackeray with Dickens, we shall find that the former writes the best English, and is distinguished by a truly classical style, namely, one which is in accordance with the best standards, and one which Addison himself might have envied, while the other is full of faults and inaccuracies, which, even though his wonderful genius may triumph over them, will yet prevent him from ranking with the great masters. If we compare De Quincey with Carlyle, we shall find that the latter has chosen for himself a form of expression which, though full of energy, is yet decidedly eccentric and unfit for imitation; while the former may be said to have attained the first rank in the variety and splendor of his rhetoric, in the purity of his

English, and in the instructive lessons which his style may convey to all who study it.

$257. THE SUGGESTIVE STYLE.

The suggestive style indicates that form of writing in which statements are made in an indirect way by means of hints, implications, or suggested meanings. It is often associated with innuendo and double entendre; and it enters into the nature of the figures metalepsis and significatio. But its more extended use in literature goes beyond these limited departments. Passages full of suggested meaning are found in all the more concise writers, for true conciseness is that in which the sentence shall convey to the mind something more than what is really expressed; but a suggestive style need not be a concise one. Gibbon employs this style more largely than

any other writer.

The uses of this style are various, and may be summed up as follows:

1. To give greater effect to statements. A suggested meaning often has greater force than a direct statement. It comes as a new discovery, made independently by the mind of the reader; and men are more impressed by that which they find out for themselves than by that which is directly told them.

"The Latin clergy, who erected their tribunal on the ruins of the civil law, have modestly accepted, as the gift of Constantine, the independent jurisdiction which was the fruit of time, of accident, and of their own industry."-GIBBON.

Here there is a suggestion of the donation of Constantine, and of the great use made of this and of other forgeries during the Middle Ages.

"The grateful applause of the clergy has consecrated the memory of a prince who indulged their passions and promoted their interest."-GIBBON.

Here there is a suggestion that the clergy were mere timeservers and flatterers.

2. Sometimes this style is employed so as to make indirect mention of men and things, which are thereby presented in a more striking light:

"Were I ambitious of any other patron than the public, I would inscribe

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