“Style,” says De Quincey, “has two separate functions—–­first, to brighten the intelligibility of a subject which is obscure to the understanding; secondly, to regenerate the normal power and impressiveness of a subject which has become dormant to the sensibilities. . . . .  Decaying lineaments are to be retraced and faded colouring to be refreshed.”  To effect these purposes we require a rich verbal memory from which to select the symbols best fitted to call up images in the reader’s mind, and we also require the delicate selective instinct to guide us in the choice and arrangement of those symbols, so that the rhythm and cadence may agreeably attune the mind, rendering it receptive to the impressions meant to be communicated.  A copious verbal memory, like a copious memory of facts, is only one source of power, and without the high controlling faculty of the artist may lead to diffusive indecision.  Just as one man, gilted with keen insight, will from a small stock of facts extricate unapparent relations to which others, rich in knowledge, have been blind; so will a writer gifted with a fine instinct select from a narrow range of phrases symbols of beauty and of power utterly beyond the reach of commonplace minds.  It is often considered, both by writers and readers, that fine language makes fine writers; yet no one supposes that fine colours make a fine painter.  The COPIA VERBORUM is often a weakness and a snare.  As Arthur Helps says, men use several epithets in the hope that one of them may fit.  But the artist knows which epithet does fit, uses that, and rejects the rest.  The characteristic weakness of bad writers is inaccuracy:  their symbols do not adequately express their ideas.  Pause but for a moment over their sentences, and you perceive that they are using language at random, the choice being guided rather by some indistinct association of phrases, or some broken echoes of familiar sounds, than by any selection of words to represent ideas.  I read the other day of the truck system being “rampant” in a certain district; and every day we may meet with similar echoes of familiar words which betray the flaccid condition of the writer’s mind drooping under the labour of expression.

Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality.  In a lower sphere many are remarked as writers although they may lay no claim to distinction as thinkers, if they have the faculty of felicitously expressing the ideas of others; and many who are really remarkable as thinkers gain but slight recognition from the public, simply because in them the faculty of expression is feeble.  In proportion as the work passes from the sphere of passionless intelligence to that of impassioned intelligence, from the region of demonstration to the region of emotion, the art of Style becomes more complex, its necessity more imperious.  But