Do not despise any honest propitiation, however small, in dealing with your editor.  Look to the physical aspect of your manuscript, and prepare your page so neatly that it shall allure instead of repelling.  Use good pens, black ink, nice white paper and plenty of it.  Do not emulate “paper-sparing Pope,” whose chaotic manuscript of the “Iliad,” written chiefly on the backs of old letters, still remains in the British Museum.  If your document be slovenly, the presumption is that its literary execution is the same, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding.  An editor’s eye becomes carnal, and is easily attracted by a comely outside.  If you really wish to obtain his good-will for your production, do not first tax his time for deciphering it, any more than in visiting a millionnaire to solicit a loan you would begin by asking him to pay for the hire of the carriage which takes you to his door.

On the same principle, send your composition in such a shape that it shall not need the slightest literary revision before printing.  Many a bright production dies discarded which might have been made thoroughly presentable by a single day’s labor of a competent scholar, in shaping, smoothing, dovetailing, and retrenching.  The revision seems so slight an affair that the aspirant cannot conceive why there should be so much fuss about it.

  “The piece, you think, is incorrect; why, take it;
  I’m all submission; what you’d have it, make it.”

But to discharge that friendly office no universal genius is salaried; and for intellect in the rough there is no market.

Rules for style, as for manners, must be chiefly negative:  a positively good style indicates certain natural powers in the individual, but an unexceptionable style is merely a matter of culture and good models.  Dr. Channing established in New England a standard of style which really attained almost the perfection of the pure and the colorless, and the disciplinary value of such a literary influence, in a raw and crude nation, has been very great; but the defect of this standard is that it ends in utterly renouncing all the great traditions of literature, and ignoring the magnificent mystery of words.  Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables.  The statue is not more surely included in the block of marble than is all conceivable splendor of utterance in “Worcester’s Unabridged.”  And as Ruskin says of painting that it is in the perfection and precision of the instantaneous line that the claim to immortality is made, so it is easy to see that a phrase may outweigh a library.  Keats heads the catalogue of things real with “sun, moon, and passages of Shakspeare”; and Keats himself has left behind him winged wonders of expression which