You must borrow me Garagantua’s mouth,

had been applied to him because he used “big words, which require the mouth of a giant to pronounce them.”  It was not, however, the mere bigness of the words that distinguished his style, but a peculiar love of putting the abstract for the concrete, of using awkward inversions, and of balancing his sentences in a monotonous rhythm, which gives the appearance, as it sometimes corresponds to the reality, of elaborate logical discrimination.  With all its faults the style has the merits of masculine directness.  The inversions are not such as to complicate the construction.  As Boswell remarks, he never uses a parenthesis; and his style, though ponderous and wearisome, is as transparent as the smarter snip-snap of Macaulay.

This singular mannerism appears in his earliest writings; it is most marked at the time of the Rambler; whilst in the Lives of the Poets, although I think that the trick of inversion has become commoner, the other peculiarities have been so far softened as (in my judgment, at least), to be inoffensive.  It is perhaps needless to give examples of a tendency which marks almost every page of his writing.  A passage or two from the Rambler may illustrate the quality of the style, and the oddity of the effect produced, when it is applied to topics of a trivial kind.  The author of the Rambler is supposed to receive a remonstrance upon his excessive gravity from the lively Flirtilla, who wishes him to write in defence of masquerades.  Conscious of his own incapacity, he applies to a man of “high reputation in gay life;” who, on the fifth perusal of Flirtilla’s letter breaks into a rapture, and declares that he is ready to devote himself to her service.  Here is part of the apostrophe put into the mouth of this brilliant rake.  “Behold, Flirtilla, at thy feet a man grown gray in the study of those noble arts by which right and wrong may be confounded; by which reason may be blinded, when we have a mind to escape from her inspection, and caprice and appetite instated in uncontrolled command and boundless dominion!  Such a casuist may surely engage with certainty of success in vindication of an entertainment which in an instant gives confidence to the timorous and kindles ardour in the cold, an entertainment where the vigilance of jealousy has so often been clouded, and the virgin is set free from the necessity of languishing in silence; where all the outworks of chastity are at once demolished; where the heart is laid open without a blush; where bashfulness may survive virtue, and no wish is crushed under the frown of modesty.”