So masterly a handling of the figures which usage and taste prescribe to learned writers is rare indeed.  The ordinary small scholar disposes of his baggage less happily.  Having heaped up knowledge as a successful tradesman heaps up money, he is apt to believe that his wealth makes him free of the company of letters, and a fellow craftsman of the poets.  The mark of his style is an excessive and pretentious allusiveness.  It was he whom the satirist designed in that taunt, Scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter—­“My knowledge of thy knowledge is the knowledge thou covetest.”  His allusions and learned periphrases elucidate nothing; they put an idle labour on the reader who understands them, and extort from baffled ignorance, at which, perhaps, they are more especially aimed, a foolish admiration.  These tricks and vanities, the very corruption of ornament, will always be found while the power to acquire knowledge is more general than the strength to carry it or the skill to wield it.  The collector has his proper work to do in the commonwealth of learning, but the ownership of a museum is a poor qualification for the name of artist.  Knowledge has two good uses; it may be frankly communicated for the benefit of others, or it may minister matter to thought; an allusive writer often robs it of both these functions.  He must needs display his possessions and his modesty at one and the same time, producing his treasures unasked, and huddling them in uncouth fashion past the gaze of the spectator, because, forsooth, he would not seem to make a rarity of them.  The subject to be treated, the groundwork to be adorned, becomes the barest excuse for a profitless haphazard ostentation.  This fault is very incident to the scholarly style, which often sacrifices emphasis and conviction to a futile air of encyclopaedic grandeur.

Those who are repelled by this redundance of ornament, from which even great writers are not wholly exempt, have sometimes been driven by the force of reaction into a singular fallacy.  The futility of these literary quirks and graces has induced them to lay art under the same interdict with ornament.  Style and stylists, one will say, have no attraction for him, he had rather hear honest men utter their thoughts directly, clearly, and simply.  The choice of words, says another, and the conscious manipulation of sentences, is literary foppery; the word that first offers is commonly the best, and the order in which the thoughts occur is the order to be followed.  Be natural, be straightforward, they urge, and what you have to say will say itself in the best possible manner.  It is a welcome lesson, no doubt, that these deluded Arcadians teach.  A simple and direct style—­who would not give his all to purchase that!  But is it in truth so easy to be compassed?  The greatest writers, when they are at the top of happy hours, attain to it, now and again.  Is all this tangled contrariety of things