A bystander advised.  One of those omnipresent
                       characters who, as if
                       in pursuance of some
                       previous arrangement,
                       are certain to be
                       encountered in the
                       vicinity when an accident
                       occurs, ventured
                       the suggestion.

He died.  He deceased, he passed
                       out of existence, his
                       spirit quitted its
                       earthly habitation,
                       winged its way to
                       eternity, shook off
                       its burden, etc.

In one sense this is nothing new.  The school of Pope in verse ended by wire-drawing its phrase to such thinness that it could bear no weight of meaning whatever.  Nor is fine writing by any means confined to America.  All writers without imagination fall into it of necessity whenever they attempt the figurative.  I take two examples from Mr. Merivale’s ’History of the Romans under the Empire,’ which, indeed, is full of such.  ’The last years of the age familiarly styled the Augustan were singularly barren of the literary glories from which its celebrity was chiefly derived.  One by one the stars in its firmament had been lost to the world; Virgil and Horace, etc., had long since died; the charm which the imagination of Livy had thrown over the earlier annals of Rome had ceased to shine on the details of almost contemporary history; and if the flood of his eloquence still continued flowing, we can hardly suppose that the stream was as rapid, as fresh, and as clear as ever.’  I will not waste time in criticising the bad English or the mixture of metaphor in these sentences, but will simply cite another from the same author which is even worse.  ’The shadowy phantom of the Republic continued to flit before the eyes of the Caesar.  There was still, he apprehended, a germ of sentiment existing, on which a scion of his own house, or even a stranger, might boldly throw himself and raise the standard of patrician independence.’  Now a ghost may haunt a murderer, but hardly, I should think, to scare him with the threat of taking a new lease of its old tenement.  And fancy the scion of a house in the act of throwing itself upon a germ of sentiment to raise a standard! I am glad, since we have so much in the same kind to answer for, that this bit of horticultural rhetoric is from beyond sea.  I would not be supposed to condemn truly imaginative prose.  There is a simplicity of splendor, no less than of plainness, and prose would be poor indeed if it could not find a tongue for that meaning of the mind which is behind the meaning of the words.  It has sometimes seemed to me that in England there was a growing tendency to curtail language into a mere