school appears, the votaries of artificial embellishment and elaborate diction; at once magisterially pompous and familiarly pointed; concise and swelling; sparkling and solid; massy and light. Sometimes they condense ideas, by throwing into one vast thought several intermediate ones; sometimes their rotundity of period is so arranged, that the mind, with the ear, seems to rise on a regular acclivity. The glare of art betrays itself; while sometimes the thoughts are more subtile than substantial, more airy than penetrating; the expressions new, and the ideas old. This school abounds with mannerists; such are Johnson, Hawkesworth, Robertson, and Gibbon.

When this taste for ornamented prose prevails, a fourth school arises, composed of a humbler race; a generation of imitators. As it is less difficult to collect words than to create ideas, this race becomes versed in all the mysteries of diction; trivial thoughts are ridiculously invested by magnificent expressions; and they consider that blending the most glaring colours, without harmony or design, is an evidence of higher art. They colour like the distracted painter in Bedlam, who delighted in landscapes of golden earths and vermilion skies. They tell us that their colours are vivid, and we only perocive that they are bestowed upon chimeras. These fantastic novelties flourish in the warmth of a fashionable circle, but once placed in the open air, are killed by the popular gale. Writers of this class are not to be mentioned, as they are all dead authors, though, as men, they may still live.

Every period of literature has its peculiar style, derived from some author of reputation; and the history of a language, as an object of taste, might be traced, as has been attempted by Godwin, through a collection of ample quotations, from the most celebrated authors of each period. We should as rarely find an original style as an original ge

nius, and we should be enabled to perceive the almost insensible variations which at length produce an original style.

Those who have long been attached to the first school of natural elegance, with all its imperfections, abhor the ostentatious opulence of the third, and are more inclined to favour the second. Thus Cicero complains that he was reproached by his contemporaries for too florid a style; yet afterwards, in Quintilian's time, the style of Cicero is censured for dryness and deficiency of ornament. Such is the usual progress of style in every literary nation; and if we insert the name of Addison instead of Cicero, and Johnson instead of Quintilian, it be

comes our own.

The third school is, however, the most popular, for the public has greater refinement than in the preceding periods.

Some distinguish between taste and refinement; this distinction is not very obvious. Refinement is only a superior taste, according to those who are fond of embellished diction; but it is considered as a vicious taste, by the advocates for simplicity of language. They differ in their acceptation of the term, and the former therefore smile, when the latter censure refinement of diction.

By

Refinement in style is of no remote date. The prose of Pope is nearly as refined as his verse; and this taste he appears to have borrowed from some of the French writers, particularly from Fontenelle, whose reputation was then very high, and who has carried the bel esprit to its finest excess. the bel esprit is meant a manner of writing which displays unexpected turns of thought; the art of half concealing a sentiment, that the reader may have the pleasure of guessing it; brilliant allusions, epigrammatic points, and delicate strokes: a mode of writing as dan gerous as pleasing, yet adapted to concise compositions. No prosaic writer, in Pope's day, approached

his refinement; the best writers then, and for some time after, are blemished with colloquial barbarisms and feeble expressions. Steele, Tillotson, and others, have written with a slovenly carelessness; Addison and Dryden delight by an agreeableness of manner. When Addison describes the powers of beauty, his suavity, grace, and mellifluence give new conceptions of our language; and Dryden has mellow richness, enchanting negligence, and facility of thought. They alike threw into their style a gaiety of fancy, which is equivalent to all the charms of refined expression, and yet are they by no means free from impurities of style. To Johnson may be attributed the establishment of our present refinement; and it is with truth he observes of his Rambler, "that he had laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations, and that he has added to the elegance of its construction, and to the harmony of its cadence." This refinement in style Johnson appears partly to have borrowed from the most elegant French writers, whose beauties he has sometimes transposed and frequently imitated, as Gibbon and Hume have more evidently done. All the refinements of style exist among that refining people, and the Lectures of Blair are often judicious repetitions of what may be found in their critics, or happy examples which are drawn from their writers. Refinement in style, with many, includes in the very term a censurable quality in composition. But this criticism is unjust. Refinement may indeed be vicious, as simplicity may be; refinement is not less offensive to a reader of taste, when it rises into affectation, than simplicity sinking into insipidity. But we must not confound refinement of style with its puerile excess, nor is it just to censure refinement because it differs from simplicity.

Amidst these complications of taste some argue in favour of a na

tural style, and reiterate the opinion of many great critics, that proper ideas will be accompanied by proper words. But this observation, though supported by the first authorities, is not perhaps sufficiently clear. Writers may think justly and write offensively; and a pleasing style may accompany a vacuity of thought. Does not this evident fact prove that style and thinking have not that inseparable connection which many great writers have pronounced? Milton perhaps imagined that his beautiful thoughts were naturally allied to beautiful expression when he says,

Then feed on thoughts that voluntary

move

Harmonious numbers.

But are there not beautiful conceptions which may not voluntary move beautiful expressions? Writing is justly called an art; and experience confirms what Rousseau says, that it is not an art easily acquired. Thinking may be the foundation of style; but it is not the superstructure; it is not the ornaments. The art of presenting our thoughts to others is often a work of some time and labour; and the delicate task of correction, reserved only for writers of fine taste, proves that there are several modes of clothing ideas; vulgar readers are only susceptible of rough and palpable strokes; but there are many shades of sentiment, which to seize on and to paint is the pride and the labour of a fine writer.

In the third school we observe a race of writers who may be called mannerists in style. Such writers, however great their powers, rather excite the admiration than the affec tion of a man of taste; because their habitual art dissipates that illusion of sincerity which we love to believe is the impulse which places the pen in the hand of an author. Two eminent literary mannerists are Cicero and Johnson. We know these great men considered their eloquence as a deceptive art; of any subject it had been indifferent

to them which side to adopt; and, in reading their elaborate works, our ear is more frequently gratified by the ambitious magnificence of their diction, than our heart penetrated by the pathetic enthusiasm of their sentiments.

The sophistry of Johnson in conversation appears to have been his favourite amusement; but Cicero is more censurable, since, in the most solemn acts of life, and before the tribunal of justice, he confesses to have protected and saved the life of many a criminal by the power of his eloquence. This, indeed, will be considered as no crime in modern courts, where, without his eloquence, they share his guilt. Plutarch gives one anecdote relative to the orator's exultation. He said to Munatius, "Dost thou think thou wast acquitted for thy own sake, and not because I threw a veil over thy manifest crimes, so that the court could not perceive thy guilt?" Writers who are not mannerists, but who seize the appropriate tone of their subject, appear to feel a conviction of what they attempt to persuade their reader. It is impossible to imitate with uniform felicity the noble simplicity of a pathetic writer; while the peculiarities of a mannerist are so far from being difficult, that they are displayed with nice exactness by middling writers, who, though their own natural manner had nothing interesting, have attracted notice by such imitations. We may apply to some monotonous mannerists these verses of Boileau :

It may perhaps surprise some, that, among the literary refinements of the present age, may be counted above forty different styles, as appears by a rhetorical dictionary. The facility of acquiring a style produces our numerous authors; and hence we abound with writers, but have few thinkers. A style deficient in thought cannot form a perfect composition; for we may compare style to the mechanic or executive part of painting, while thinking is the fine ideal or inventive. And this distinction, if just, will settle a question long agitated, whether there is any distinction between style and thought. Raphael, who excelled in the ideal, was not so perfect in some part of the mechanic as Titian; and we might venture to say, that Johnson, who excelled in the mechanic, did not equal the ideal of Addison.

Webb, an advocate for simplicity, has two lines on the style of Hooker, the last of which has great felicity of conception :

Thy language is chaste, without aims

He censures refinement as a studied advantage in the manner, without an adequate motive in the thought. Allison considers every composition as defective, in which the expression of the art is more striking than the expression of the subject, or in which the beauty of design prevails over the beauty of character or expression. A judicious critic would not have the style withdraw the attention from the thought.

I mean not to oppose the warm admirers of simplicity. A beautiful simplicity itself is a species of refinement; and no writer more solicitously corrected his works than Hume, who excels in this mode of composition. But is it not an evident error in men of taste to form a passion for any peculiar style, since all the intermediate species of diction between simplicity and refine

ment are equally beautiful when they are suitable to the subject? We often enquire if an author's style is beautiful or sublime; we should rather desire to know whether it is proper. These varieties of diction, which the advocates for simplicity consider as so many aberrations from rectitude of thinking, form, on the contrary, the very existence of just thought. Simplicity, however pure, can never cause the strong emotions of an ornamented diction; an ornamented diction can never give the rapid and lively graces of gaiety; nor can a rapid style embellish flowery and brilliant conceptions. Every style is excellent if it be proper, and that style is most proper which can best convey the intentions of the author to his reader.

There appears, in every style, a certain point, beyond which, or which not attained, it is defective. The simplicity of the first school degenerates into frigidity and vapidness; the beauty of the second protracts into languor and tediousness; and the grandeur of the third swells into turgidity and vacuity. But though this point may be difficult to describe, a fine tact long practised instantaneously discovers it. We soon decide on the style of an author, but not on his thoughts; and we often find that the one may be excellent, while the other has nothing uncommon.

Hume, who has all the refinement of simplicity, highly approves of Addison's definition of fine writing, who says, that it consists of sentiments which are natural, without being obvious. This is surely no definition of fine writing, but of fine thinking. The elegant author has omitted the magical graces of diction; the modulation of harmonious cadences; the art of expressing, with delicacy, delicate ideas, and painting sublime conceptions in the magnificence of language. Shenstone has hit upon the truth, for fine writing he defines to be generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts

and a laboured style. Addison was not insensible to these charms, and he felt the seductive art of Cicero when he said, that "there is as much difference in apprehending a thought clothed in Cicero's language, and that of a common author, as in seeing an object by the light of a taper, or by the light of the sun." This is not less true than finely expressed; and what shows style to be independent of thinking is, that even common thoughts are found to give pleasure, when adorned by expression.

I must therefore dissent from the admired definition of Addison, because it does not define its object. In this age of taste, or refinement if you please, a composition which should consist of natural, yet not obvious, sentiments. would fail to attract, if unadorned by the felicities of diction. Simplicity may be too obvious, and refinement too obtrusive; whatever is obvious disgusts, whatever is obtrusive offends. We may apply to style in general the beautiful description which Milton gives of Eve presenting herself to Adam,

Not OBVIOUS, not OBTRUSIVE she.

It appears that the advocates for simplicity of style are not sufficiently sensible to the varieties of diction. What would they think if we should venture to say, that style may have a marvellous influence over the human mind? Longinus makes a musical arrangement of words a part of the sublime; and he adds, that many have acquired the reputation of fine writers, whose chief merit consisted in the charm of their periods. This observation every man of taste knows to be just. We have writers who, without exhibiting much vigour of conception, or energy of genius, delight by a magical delicacy. Such a writer is Melmoth, whose style, in Fitzosborne's Letters, has peculiar suavity and amenity, without either depth of thinking or vigour of expression;

and their merits were, therefore, entirely lost on the athletic powers, and the artificial taste for style, of Johnson, who spoke with contempt of those beautiful compositions. An eloquent style has a pathetic influence on the mind. Men of taste, who are unbiassed by any particular style, can alone be sensible to its finest strokes, and are often in raptures when others are insensible. The practised eye in painting sees pictures the uninitiated can never be hold. An ancient artist, contemplating the famous Helen of Zeuxis, felt all the enthusiasm of extreme sensibility; when another wondered at his raptures he said, "Could you take my eyes, you would be as much delighted."

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style; facts, scientific discoveries, and every kind of information, may be seized by all, but an author's diction cannot be taken from him. Hence, very learned writers have been neglect ed, while their learning has not been lost to the world, by having been given by finer writers. It is, therefore, the duty of an author to learn to write as well as to learn to think; and this art can alone be obtained by familiarising himself to those felicitous expressions which paint and embellish his sensations, which give a tone congruous to the subject, and which invest our thoughts with all the illusion, the beauty, and motion of lively perception or pathetic eloquence.

For the Literary Magazine. THE REFLECTOR.

NO. VII.

January 1st, 1806.

THE new year has just commenced; I am awake at the very moment when the end of the last and

the beginning of this unite; I hear the loud noise of guns fired in celebrating the beginning of this important period. To many, this seems to be a joyful occasion. Can they be glad that another year of their lives is gone? Do they rejoice that the "life's fitful fever" approaches nearer to its termination? or are they happy that one more year of enjoyment has passed, and another is probably begun? Perhaps they delight in the prospect of another year, which hope promises to produce more enjoyment than the preceding; perhaps they are joyful and grateful for having successfully combated all the difficulties which marked its progress; perhaps they celebrate it from the antiquity of the custom; and, perhaps, from all these motives combined. The most ancient nations, of whom history has preserved any traces, seem to have celebrated the return of certain fixed periods. It is, perhaps, useless to enquire into the origin of this custom; yet we know it is still followed by those who value ancient customs more than the dictates of good sense. It is easy to account for the celebration of the return of certain periods. There are some which bring to the mind some pleasing remembrance; the birth of a son, the day of marriage, the salvation of a state, a great victory over its enemies, a providential deliverance from calamity, or its emancipation from bondage. Thus the Swiss preserve the remembrance of many eventful portions of their history, and thus we recal that day to recollection which gave us birth as an independent people. In cases like these, the adherence to an ancient custom is subservient to useful purposes; but whether there is a good reason, and a natural one, for celebrating the beginning of a year, or not, I am unable to say, and too indolent to enquire.

I hear the bells, in joyful jingle, welcoming that stranger, whose life has just commenced, and whose end is fixed in the records of that bald, winged, imaginary being, whose