in itself, and all culminate in the conclusion; they do not complicate the thought, or puzzle us, they only heighten expectation].  In such an age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior.  At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies.  In some heathen countries they would have been exposed while infants.  In Christendom they would, six hundred years earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister.  But their lot had fallen on a time when men had discovered that the strength of the muscles is far inferior in value to the strength of the mind.  It is probable that among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers that were marshalled round Neerwinden, under all the standards of Western Europe, the two feeblest in body were the hunchbacked dwarf, who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of England.”

The effect of Climax is very marked in the drama.  Every speech, every scene, every act, should have its progressive sequence.  Nothing can be more injudicious than a trivial phrase following an energetic phrase, a feeble thought succeeding a burst of passion, or even a passionate thought succeeding one more passionate.  Yet this error is frequently committed.

In the drama all laws of Style are more imperious than in fiction or prose of any kind, because the art is more intense.  But Climax is demanded in every species of composition, for it springs from a psychological necessity.  It is pressed upon, however, by the law of Variety in a way to make it far from safe to be too rigidly followed.  It easily degenerates into monotony.

V. The law of variety.

Some one, after detailing an elaborate recipe for a salad, wound up the enumeration of ingredients and quantities with the advice to “open the window and throw it all away.”  This advice might be applied to the foregoing enumeration of the laws of Style, unless these were supplemented by the important law of Variety.  A style which rigidly interpreted the precepts of economy, simplicity, sequence, and climax, which rejected all superfluous words and redundant ornaments, adopted the easiest and most logical arrangement, and closed every sentence and every paragraph with a climax, might be a very perfect bit of mosaic, but would want the glow and movement of a living mind.  Monotony would settle on it like a paralysing frost.  A series of sentences in which every phrase was a distinct thought, would no more serve as pabulum for the mind, than portable soup freed from all the fibrous tissues of meat and vegetable would serve as food for the body.  Animals perish from hunger in the presence of pure albumen; and minds would lapse into idiocy in the presence of unadulterated thought.  But without invoking extreme cases, let us simply remember the psychological fact that it is as easy