express itself in concrete images; a genial nature will smile in pleasant firms and inuendos; a rapid, unhesitating, imperious mind will deliver its quick incisive phrases; a full deliberating mind will overflow in ample paragraphs laden with the weight of parentheses and qualifying suggestions.  The style which is good in one case would be vicious in another.  The broken rhythm which increases the energy of one style would ruin the Largo of another.  Both are excellencies where both are natural.

We are always disagreeably impressed by an obvious imitation of the manner of another, because we feel it to be an insincerity, and also because it withdraws our attention from the thing said, to the way of saying it.  And here lies the great lesson writers have to learn—­namely, that they should think of the immediate purpose of their writing, which is to convey truths and emotions, in symbols and images, intelligible and suggestive.  The racket-player keeps his eye on the ball he is to strike, not on the racket with which he strikes.  If the writer sees vividly, and will say honestly what he sees, and how he sees it, he may want something of the grace and felicity of other men, but he will have all the strength and felicity with which nature has endowed him.  More than that he cannot attain, and he will fall very short of it in snatching at the grace which is another’s.  Do what he will, he cannot escape from the infirmities of his own mind:  the affectation, arrogance, ostentation, hesitation, native in the man will taint his style, no matter how closely he may copy the manner of another.  For evil and for good, le style est de L’HOMME meme.

The French critics, who are singularly servile to all established reputations, and whose unreasoning idolatry of their own classics is one of the reasons why their Literature is not richer, are fond of declaring with magisterial emphasis that the rules of good taste and the canons of style were fixed once and for ever by their great writers in the seventeenth century.  The true ambition of every modern is said to be by careful study of these models to approach (though with no hope of equalling) their chastity and elegance.  That a writer of the nineteenth century should express himself in the manner which was admirable in the seventeenth is an absurdity which needs only to be stated.  It is not worth refuting.  But it never presents itself thus to the French.  In their minds it is a lingering remnant of that older superstition which believed the Ancients to have discovered all wisdom, so that if we could only surprise the secret of Aristotle’s thoughts and clearly comprehend the drift of Plato’s theories (which unhappily was not clear) we should compass all knowledge.  How long this superstition lasted cannot accurately be settled; perhaps it is not quite extinct even yet; but we know how little the most earnest students succeeded in surprising the secrets of the universe by reading