I quote De Quincey because he has written more, and more profoundly as well as more copiously, on style than any writer I know.  To this point,—­the adaption of style to subject,—­he returns, laying down with clearness and truth the law which should here govern.  In a paper on Schlosser’s “Literary History of the Eighteenth Century” he reaffirms—­what cannot be too strongly insisted on—­the falsity of the common opinion that Swift’s style is, for all writers, a model of excellence, showing how it is only fitted to the kind of subjects on which Swift wrote, and concluding with this characteristic passage:  “That nearly all the blockheads with whom I have at any time had the pleasure of conversing upon the subject of style (and pardon me for saying that men of the most sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz., poetry and style, to talk most like blockheads) have invariably regarded Swift’s style not as if relatively, (i.e., given a proper subject), but as if absolutely good—­good unconditionally, no matter what the subject.  Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the dean had been required to write a pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh’s immortal apostrophe to Death, or to many passages in Sir Thomas Brown’s ‘Religio Medici’ and his ‘Urn-Burial,’ or to Jeremy Taylor’s inaugural sections of his ‘Holy Living and Dying,’ do you know what would have happened?  Are you aware what sort of a ridiculous figure your poor bald Jonathan would have cut?  About the same that would be cut by a forlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if suddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival of Belshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords.”

That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of high excellence ought to be a truism.  Through a certain equilibrium among his faculties, and assiduous literary culture, such a one may excel colleagues who move on the same bounded plane; but that is all.  From the shallowest utterance, where, thoughts and feelings lying just below the surface, there can be no strong lights and shadows, no splendid play in the exposition, styles range, with the men who make them, through all degrees of liveliness and significance and power, up to that simple grandeur which conceals a vast volume of thought, and implies a divine ruling of multiplicity.

In a good style, on whatever degree it stands, there must be a full marriage between word and thought, so clean an adjustment of expression to material as to leave no rough edges or nodes.  The words must not be too big or too shiny for the thought; they must not stand out from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter.  A style can hardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, was sometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting.

A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer be one; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a free sympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; his subject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject.  That he be sincere is not enough; he must be cordial; then he will be magnetic, attractive.  You must love your work to do it well.