new map, and a perfect map, of the whole region. It will then become possible for the first time to overlook the whole geography of the adjacencies. An entire theory of the difficulties being before the student, it will, at length, be possible to aid his efforts by ample practical suggestions. Of these we shall ourselves offer the very plainest, viz. those which apply to the mechanology of style. For these there will be an easy opening they will not go beyond the reasonable limits disposable for a single subject in a literary journal. As to the rest, which would (Germanly speaking) require a 'strong' octavo for their full exposition, we shall hold ourselves to have done enough in fulfilling the large promise we have made the promise of marking out for subsequent cultivation and development all the possible subdivisions and sections amongst the resources of the rhetorician; all the powers which he can employ, and therefore all the difficulties which he needs to study; the arts by which he can profit, and, in correspondence with them, the obstacles by which he will be resisted. Were this done, we should no longer see those incoherent sketches which are now circulating in the world upon questions of taste, of science, of practical address, as applied to the management of style and rhetoric: the public ear would no longer be occupied by feeble Frenchmen -Rollin, Rapin, Batteux, Bonhours, Du Bos, and id genus omne; nor by the elegant but desultory Blair; nor by scores of others who bring an occasional acuteness or casual information to this or that subsection of their duty, whilst (taken as general guides) they are universally insufficient: - No; but the business of

rhetoric, the management of our mother-tongue in all offices to which it can be applied, would become as much a matter of systematic art, as regular a subject for training and mechanic discipline, as the science of discrete quantity in Arithmetic, or of continuous quantity in Geometry. But will not that be likely to impress a character of mechanic monotony upon style, like the miserable attempts at reforming handwriting? Look at them; touch them; or, if you are afraid of soiling your fingers, hold them up with the tongs; they reduce all characteristic varieties of writing to one form of blank identity, and that the very vilest form of scribbling which exists in Europe, viz. to the wooden scratch (as if traced with a skewer) universally prevailing amongst French people. Vainly would Aldorisius apply his famous art, (viz. the art of deciphering a man's character from handwriting,) to the villanous scrawls which issue from this modern laboratory of pseudo-calligraphy. All pupils under these systems write alike the predestined thief is confounded with the patriot or martyr; the innocent young girl with the old hag that watches country wagons for victims. In the same indistinguishable character, so far as this reforming process is concerned, would Joseph Hume sign a motion for retrenching three half-crowns per annum from the orphan daughter of a man who had died in battle; and Queen Adelaide write a subscription towards a fresh church for carrying on war, from generation to generation, upon sin and misery.

Now, if a mechanic system of training for Style would have the same levelling effects as these false

calligraphies, better by far that we should retain our old ignorance. If art is to terminate in a killing monotony, welcome the old condition of inartificial simplicity! So say you, reader: aye, but so say we. This does not touch us: - The mechanism we speak of will apply to no meritorious qualities of style, but to its faults, and, above all, to its awkwardnesses; in fact, to all that now constitutes the friction of style; the needless joltings and retardations of our fluent motion. As to the motion itself, in all that is positive, in its derivation, in its exciting impulses, in its speed, and its characteristic varieties, it will remain unaffected. The modes of human feeling are inexhaustible; the forms by which feeling connects itself with thought are indefeasibly natural; the channels through which both impress themselves upon language are infinite. All these are imperturbable by human art: they are past the reach of mechanism: you might as well be afraid' that some steam-engine- Atlas, suppose, or Samson, (whom the Germans call Simpson,) - should perfidiously hook himself to the earth's axis, and run away with us to Jupiter. Let Simpson do his worst, we defy him. And so of style: in that sense, under which we all have an interest in its free movements, it will for ever remain free. It will defy art to control it. In that sense, under which it ever can be mechanized, we have all an interest in wishing that it should be so. Our final object therefore is a meritorious one, with no intermixture of evil. This being explained, and our course onwards having been mapped out, let us now proceed with our work, first recapitulating in direct juxtaposition with each other the points of our future

1. Greek and Latin literature we shall examine only for the sake of appraising or deducing the sort of ideas which they had upon the subject of style. It will appear that these ideas were insufficient. At the best they were tentative. 2. From them, however, may be derived a hint, a dim suggestion, of the true question in arrear; and, universally, that goes a great way towards the true answer. 'Dimidium facti,' says the Roman proverb, qui benè cæpit, habit.' To have made a good beginning is one half of the work. Prudens interrogatio, says a wise modern; to have shaped your question skilfully, is, in that sense, and with a view to the answer, a good beginning. 3. Having laid this foundation towards an answer, we shall then attempt the answer itself. 4. After which, that is, after removing to the best of our power such difficulties to the higher understanding as beset the subject of style, rhetoric, composition, having (if we do not greatly delude ourselves) removed the one great bar to a right theory of style, or a practical discipline of style, we shall leave to some future work of more suitable dimensions the filling up of our outline. Ourselves we shall confine to such instant suggestions practical, popular, broadly intelligible, as require no extensive preparation to introduce them on the author's part; no serious effort to understand them on the reader's. Whatever is more than this will better suit with the variable and elastic proportions of a separate book, than with the more rigid proportions of a miscellaneous journal.

Coming back, then, for hasty purposes, to Greek literature, we wish to direct the reader's eye upon a

remarkable phenomenon in the history of that literature, and subsequently of all human genius; not so remarkable, but that multitudes must have noticed it, and yet remarkable enough to task a man's ingenuity in accounting for it. The earliest known occasion, on which this phenomenon drew a direct and strong gaze upon itself, was in a little historical sketch composed by a Roman officer during the very opening era of Christianity. We speak of the Historia Romana, written and published about the very year of the Crucifixion by Velleius Paterculus in the court of Tiberius Cæsar, the introduction to which presents us with a very interesting outline of general history. The style is sometimes clumsy and unwieldy, but nervous, masculine, and such as became a soldier. In higher qualities, in thoughtfulness, and the spirit of finer observation, it is far beyond the standard of a mere soldier; and it shows, in common with many other indications lying on the face of Roman society at that era, how profoundly the great struggles that had recently convulsed the world must have terminated in that effect which followed in the wake of the French Revolution ; viz..in a vast stimulation to the meditative faculties of mant The agitation, the frenzy, the sorrow of the times, reacted upon the human intellect, and forced men into meditation. Their own nature was held up before them in a sterner form. They were compelled to contemplate an ideal of man, far more colossal than is brought forward in the tranquil aspects of society; and they were often engaged, whether they would or not, with the elementary problems of social philosophy. Mere danger forced a man into thoughts which else