Have faith enough in your own individuality to keep it resolutely down for a year or two.  A man has not much intellectual capital who cannot treat himself to a brief interval of modesty.  Premature individualism commonly ends either in a reaction against the original whims, or in a mannerism which perpetuates them.  For mannerism no one is great enough, because, though in the hands of a strong man it imprisons us in novel fascination, yet we soon grow weary, and then hate our prison forever.  How sparkling was Reade’s crisp brilliancy in “Peg Woffington"!—­but into what disagreeable affectations it has since degenerated!  Carlyle was a boon to the human race, amid the lameness into which English style was declining; but who is not tired of him and his catchwords now?  He was the Jenner of our modern style, inoculating and saving us all by his quaint frank Germanism, then dying of his own disease.  Now the age has outgrown him, and is approaching a mode of writing which unites the smoothness of the eighteenth century with the vital vigor of the seventeenth, so that Sir Thomas Browne and Andrew Marvell seem quite as near to us as Pope or Addison,—­a style penetrated with the best spirit of Carlyle, without a trace of Carlylism.

Be neither too lax nor too precise in your use of language:  the one fault ends in stiffness, the other in slang.  Some one told the Emperor Tiberius that he might give citizenship to men, but not to words.  To be sure, Louis xiv. in childhood, wishing for a carriage, called for mon carrosse, and made the former feminine a masculine to all future Frenchmen.  But do not undertake to exercise these prerogatives of royalty until you are quite sure of being crowned.  The only thing I remember of our college text-book of Rhetoric is one admirable verse of caution which it quoted:—­

  “In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
  Alike fantastic, if too new or old;
  Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
  Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

Especially do not indulge any fantastic preference for either Latin or Anglo-Saxon, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars and sings; we can spare neither.  The combination gives an affluence of synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can show.

While you utterly shun slang, whether native-or foreign-born,—­(at present, by the way, our popular writers use far less slang than the English,)—­yet do not shrink from Americanisms, so they be good ones.  American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle, Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary instincts to create the new words it needs.  To be sure, the inelegancies with which we are chiefly reproached are not distinctively American:  Burke uses “pretty considerable”; Miss Burney says, “I trembled a few”; the English Bible says “reckon,”