It is a venerable custom to knit up the speculative consideration of any subject with the counsels of practical wisdom.  The words of this essay have been vain indeed if the idea that style may be imparted by tuition has eluded them, and survived.  There is a useful art of Grammar, which takes for its province the right and the wrong in speech.  Style deals only with what is permissible to all, and even revokes, on occasion, the rigid laws of Grammar or countenances offences against them.  Yet no one is a better judge of equity for ignorance of the law, and grammatical practice offers a fair field wherein to acquire ease, accuracy and versatility.  The formation of sentences, the sequence of verbs, the marshalling of the ranks of auxiliaries are all, in a sense, to be learned.  There is a kind of inarticulate disorder to which writers are liable, quite distinct from a bad style, and caused chiefly by lack of exercise.  An unpractised writer will sometimes send a beautiful and powerful phrase jostling along in the midst of a clumsy sentence—­like a crowned king escorted by a mob.

But Style cannot be taught.  Imitation of the masters, or of some one chosen master, and the constant purging of language by a severe criticism, have their uses, not to be belittled; they have also their dangers.  The greater part of what is called the teaching of style must always be negative, bad habits may be broken down, old malpractices prohibited.  The pillory and the stocks are hardly educational agents, but they make it easier for honest men to enjoy their own.  If style could really be taught, it is a question whether its teachers should not be regarded as mischief-makers and enemies of mankind.  The Rosicrucians professed to have found the philosopher’s stone, and the shadowy sages of modern Thibet are said, by those who speak for them, to have compassed the instantaneous transference of bodies from place to place.  In either case, the holders of these secrets have laudably refused to publish them, lest avarice and malice should run amuck in human society.  A similar fear might well visit the conscience of one who should dream that he had divulged to the world at large what can be done with language.  Of this there is no danger; rhetoric, it is true, does put fluency, emphasis, and other warlike equipments at the disposal of evil forces, but style, like the Christian religion, is one of those open secrets which are most easily and most effectively kept by the initiate from age to age.  Divination is the only means of access to these mysteries.  The formal attempt to impart a good style is like the melancholy task of the teacher of gesture and oratory; some palpable faults are soon corrected; and, for the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms, a few theatrical postures, not truly expressive, and a high tragical strut, are all that can be imparted.  The truth of the old Roman teachers of rhetoric is here witnessed afresh, to be a good orator it is first of all necessary to