'Professor Roe infers from his experiments,' etc., etc. On an author's decease, and his promotion to the immortality of letters, the title is dropped: we speak of Darwin and Herbert Spencer; but happily still of Sir Alfred Wallace and Sir Joseph Hooker. To the names of foreign authors, as a rule, we do not prefix a title, even during their lives, except in the case of those who are socially known to many of us. Foreign investigators are for the most part but names to us, and to names we owe no formal courtesy.

Spelling. I am one of those who can spell; nevertheless in the matter of spelling I confess myself to be in secret a libertine. Only by social pressure and the printer am I held in subjection; for English spelling is as wasteful and otiose as are German genders and declensions: its vagaries have not the charm of symmetry, the interest of significance, nor the sanction of history. I have a sneaking sympathy with Lady Maria, ""Tis well enough spelt for any person of fashion." Yet even so doughty a knight as Landor found custom too much for single combat; and reformers must wait until some strategical move can be made all along the line. Some candidates, I see, spell' aneurysm with an in place of y; to the use itself I have no objection, but we must bear in mind we are entering upon no trifling task. Are we prepared to write also hidrophobia, dispepsia, analisis, etimology? Unless we are bold enough for this had we not better be content with such anarchy as we have?

Models. In conclusion, the student will probably look to me for some advice concerning the use of great prose writers as models. In this tract if I

have used the word 'style' at all, it has been but trivially and cursorily. On p. 9 I have said that matter and form are as inseparable as skin and bone; and again and again I have urged that slovenly writing is slovenly thinking, and obscure writing, for the most part, confused thinking. To recommend models of style' therefore seems to me to be a counsel of mimicry, and a perpetuation of fallacy. Let the student read by all means, and read widely, not to imitate individual form but to store his mind with ideas of thought and imagination, and with words in all their variety and significance. Let him converse with great authors, in poetry as well as in prose; for poetry is literature at its highest and strongest; and almost all poets-I say 'almost' to avoid contention— have written fine prose. Let him train his mind also to think and imagine continuously without fatigue, as he trains his body to endurance. In current journalism the crafty paragraph writer is but too well aware that his readers cannot think for more than some half-dozen lines together-say for one minute and three-quarters; he stops therefore, leaves a space with a black line across it where his enervated readers may rest, and then starts off again, on the same matter. The more vigorous reader, supposing the matter, or one aspect of it, to be at an end, lightly leaps the gap only to find himself where he was before; and so bumps his shins from

'par' to 'par' of unchanged subject, where he would have run on an even page at his ease. Be assured there is no worse kind of 'style' than snippets.

My advice on models is then: Imitate no one; read to strengthen and enlarge your ideas, your understanding, and your language; try to build in the matter you acquire with that which you had, and to see it, as it were on a plan or model outside yourself; observing where its features are amorphous and its outlines faint. Thus to visualise the matter of thought has become a habit with me, and a very helpful one. On p. 132 is an example of a concept (Burke's) unchastened by the eye of the mind. In the following sentence the author had not seen his thought, or he would never have written:

r If we imagine ourselves standing exactly on a pole of the earth, with a flagstaff fastened in the ground, we should be carried round the flagstaff by the earth's rotation.

(Where was the flagstaff?)

In reading I keep near me the slips of paper described on p. 11, and jot down notes on what I read; not often, I admit, in the form of the author but in the form his matter takes in my own mind. If, with the mind thus edified, an essay be made to produce for one's self; if the essayist, seeing his plan in his eye, will describe it precisely, cogently, and as clearly as he sees it; and if he will then reduce his words and clauses to their simplest and shortest forms, rejecting

not exuberances and superfluities only but also matter alien in that place, however interesting in another, he will find that, in the main, sound matter so conceived makes sound style, and original matter original style. Force, lucidity, unity, simplicity, and economy of expression are virtues which we may all attain; originality will be as God pleases.

I am

Nevertheless, as we may absorb something of style by watching a good cricketer or a good tennis player-especially when we have made ourselves so far as to know where the difficulties are, so no doubt we may improve our composition somewhat by setting the eye now and then for the finish of an author that is, for ease and adroitness rather than for deeper intellectual or imaginative content; furthermore, it is true that for this purpose some authors are more convenient than others. surprised, for example, to see students advised to use Carlyle or Ruskin for this purpose; we might as well try to model our waistcoats and our manners after high priests or oriental kings. In those writers, as in Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Gibbon, or De Quincey, wealth of thought and imagination naturally gave birth to enrichments of form; but I fear that if we take to mimicking these meteors we shall become ourselves models of pretentious inanity. Bacon's Essays are not for imitation-they are too sententious, too aphorismal for us, and even for a Lord Chancellor a little disjointed at times; in less powerful hands such a style would fall into an overwrought conciseness. If we are agreed that scientific

writers must set before themselves the simplest and directest means of expression; and if we must watch the manners of fine composers, let us watch those in whom, as in Pascal, these qualities are eminent. In literature read Dryden (who is quite a modern writer), Sterne in his less fantastic pages, Lamb, Goldsmith, Swift, Johnson (in Boswell or The Lives of the Poets). Paley writes a style which men of science would do well to take note of. The prose of Newman or Church is excellent, but infected with scholastic subtlety, i.e. by a desire for system rather than truth (p. 42). Froude's prose is admirable; and it is perhaps better to know Froudean history, than to know none. In another category I put above all the English Bible and Liturgy; but do not heed the advice to stick to 'Anglo-Saxon' words only; these make for terseness, simplicity, and homeliness; they make for things rather than notions still by its Latin elements our language is endowed also with the swiftness, flexibility, and those more abstract forms of expression without which modern thought would be impossible. Of writers of the day I do not propose Meredith, his wit is too sophisticated; nor Stevenson who is too fastidious, nor Kipling who is to use the untranslatable French word too brutal.'

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Of such examples as come now into my head of graver authors Jebb, John Morley, Goldwin Smith, George Trevelyan, Mackail; of lighter authors Thomas Hardy and Barrie come first into my memory. Of scientific and medical authors read Latham, Watson, Tyndall,