Coherence: Explicit Reference 13

graph the words of explicit reference are printed in italics.

First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation which still I hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most 5 predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like 10 other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened, you 15 know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the

contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magis- 20 trates, or on the balance among the several orders of the State. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have 25

been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in 30 argument defended the excellence of the English Constitution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments and blind usages to reside 35 in a certain body called a House of Commons. They went much further; they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a House of Commons as an immediate represent40 ative of the people, whether the old records had delivered this oracle or not. They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or imme45 diately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist. The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and 50 attached on this specific point of taxing. Lib. erty might be safe, or might be endangered, in twenty other particulars, without their being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its

Paragraph from Burke

15

pulse; and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound. I do not 55 say whether they were right or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case. It is not easy indeed to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries. The fact is, that they did thus apply those general 60 arguments; and your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination, that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common principles.- 65 Burke: On Conciliation with America.

13. On analysis, the logical connection appears to be indicated mainly in three ways: (a) by conjunctions, etc.; (b) by demonstratives; (c) by repetition of important words. With so great a range of choice the student is inexcusable who confines himself to perpetual and and but. For though Burke's nicety of adjustment is a distinguishing mark of his mastery, some care in adjustment must be taken from the beginning, or there will be small progress in composition. Examine also the following paragraph, and compare § 22.

The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials; but 5 potentially, and in shadowy outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men's natures. Upon the secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected, perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so 10 familiar to childhood, of meeting a lion, and, through languishing prostration in hope and the energies of hope, that constant sequel of lying down before the lion, publishes the secret frailty of human nature-reveals its deep15 seated falsehood to itself-records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original 20 temptation in Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual will; once again a snare is presented for tempting him into captivity to a luxury of ruin; once again, as in aboriginal 25 Paradise, the man falls by his own choice; again, by infinite iteration, the ancient earth groans to heaven, through her secret caves, over the weakness of her child: "Nature, from

Paragraph from De Quincey

17

her seat, sighing through all her works," again "gives signs of woe that all is lost;" and again 30 the counter sigh is repeated to the sorrowing heavens for the endless rebellion against God. It is not without probability that in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself the original transgression. In dreams, per- 35 haps under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the treason of 40 the aboriginal fall.-De Quincey: The English Mail-Coach.

14. But observe that by no means all the sentences in the paragraph at 8 12 have explicit reference, that some stand in asyndeton. Moreover, many of these sentences are not less closely connected than the others. Connection they have, but not connectives. Examination will show here the rule that asyndeton occurs: (a) when the succeeding sentence is an expansion, iteration, example, or illustration of the preceding-in other words, when the connection is obvious; (6)