Athens, and all the pother is some little jilting story—­the haughty Roman snuffed at the suppleness.  If such diction had not been usual with good writers at that period, I should not have quoted Blackwall.  Middleton, in his “Life of Cicero,” though a man of classical taste, and an historian of a classical era, could not preserve himself from colloquial inelegances; the greatest characters are levelled by the poverty of his style.  Warburton, and his imitator Hurd, and other living critics of that school, are loaded with familiar idioms, which at present would debase even the style of conversation.

Such was the influence of the elaborate novelty of Johnson, that every writer in every class servilely copied the Latinised style, ludicrously mimicking the contortions and re-echoing the sonorous nothings of our great lexicographer; the novelist of domestic life, or the agriculturist in a treatise on turnips, alike aimed at the polysyllabic force, and the cadenced period.  Such was the condition of English style for more than twenty years.

Some argue in favour of a natural style, and reiterate the opinion of many great critics that proper ideas will be accompanied by proper words; but though supported by the first authorities, they are not perhaps sufficiently precise in their definition.  Writers may think justly, and yet write without any effect; while a splendid style may cover a vacuity of thought.  Does not this evident fact prove that style and thinking have not that inseparable connexion which many great writers have pronounced?  Milton imagined that beautiful thoughts produce beautiful expression.  He says,

  Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
  Harmonious numbers.

Writing is justly called an art; and Rousseau says, it is not an art easily acquired.  Thinking may be the foundation of style, but it is not the superstructure; it is the marble of the edifice, but not its architecture.  The art of presenting our thoughts to another, is often a process of considerable time and labour; and the delicate task of correction, in the development of ideas, is reserved only for writers of fine taste.  There are several modes of presenting an idea; vulgar readers are only susceptible of the strong and palpable stroke:  but there are many shades of sentiment, which to seize on and to paint is the pride and the labour of a skilful writer.  A beautiful simplicity itself is a species of refinement, and no writer more solicitously corrected his works than Hume, who excels in this mode of composition.  The philosopher highly approves of Addison’s definition of fine writing, who says, that it consists of sentiments which are natural, without being obvious.  This is a definition of thought rather than of composition.  Shenstone has hit the truth; for fine writing he defines to be generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts and a laboured style.  Addison was not insensible to these charms, and he felt the seductive art of Cicero when he said, that “there is as much difference in apprehending a thought clothed in Cicero’s language and that of a common author, as in seeing an object by the light of a taper, or by the light of the sun.”