the author’s self, with his age and his country, is taken into account.  Appropriateness of treatment to subject it is which lies at the root of all controversy on style:  this is the last and the whole test.  And the fact that none other is requisite, or, more strictly, that all others are but aspects of this one, will very easily be allowed when it is reflected that the subject, to be of an earnest and sincere ideal, must be an emanation of the poet’s most secret soul; and that the soul receives teaching from circumstance, which is the time when and place where.

This premised, it must next be borne in mind that the poet’s conception of his subject is not identical with, and, in the majority of cases, will be unlike, his reader’s.  And, the question of style (manner) being necessarily subordinate to that of subject (matter), it is not for the reader to dispute with the author on his mode of rendering, provided that should be accepted as embodying (within the bounds of grammatical logic) the intention preconceived.  The object of the poet in writing, why he attempts to describe an event as resulting from this cause or this, or why he assumes such as the effect; all these considerations the reader is competent to entertain:  any two men may deduce from the same premises, and may probably arrive at different conclusions:  but, these conclusions reached, what remains is a question of resemblance, which each must determine for himself, as best conscious of his own intention.  To take an instance.  Shakspere’s conception of Macbeth as a man capable of uttering a pompous conceit—­

        ("Here lay Duncan,
  His silver skin laced with his golden blood—­“)

in a moment, to him, and to all present, of startling purport, may be a correct or an impressive conception, or it may be the reverse.  That the rendering of the momentary intention is adequate here there is no reason to doubt.  If so, in what respect is the reader called upon to investigate a matter of style?  He must simply return to the question of whether this point of character be consistent with others imagined of the same person; this, answered affirmatively, is an approval,—­negatively, a condemnation, of intention; the merit of style, in either case, being mere competence, and that admitted irrespectively of the reader’s liking or disliking of the passage per se, or as part of a context.  Why, in this same tragedy of Macbeth, is a drunken porter introduced between a murder and its discovery?  Did Shakspere really intend him to be a sharp-witted man?  These questions are pertinent and necessary.  There is no room for disputing that this scene is purposely a comic scene:  and, if this is certain, the style of the speech is appropriate to the scene, and of the scene, to the conception of the drama?  Is that conception admirable?