sh. Most of them, unhappily,
are filled in the news columns at least with a strange jargon found
nowhere else, spoken by no one and never used in daily life by those
who every night furnish it to the compositors. It is happily
compounded in about equal parts of turgid fine writing, vulgar
jauntiness and indiscriminate slang.

I can best show my meaning by example. A writer in a newspaper wished
to state that a man who had once caused excitement by a book of
temporary interest and who, after the days of his notoriety were over,
lived a long and checkered career, had killed himself. This is the way
he said it:

His life's work void of fruition and dissipated into
emptiness, his fondest hopes and ambitions crumbled and
scattered, shunned as a fanatic, and unable to longer wage
life's battle, Hinton Rowan Helper, at one time United
States consul general to Buenos Ayres, yesterday sought the
darkest egress from his woes and disappointments--a
suicide's death.

In an unpretentious lodging-house in Pennsylvania avenue,
near the Capitol, the man who as much, if not more than any
other agitator, is said to have blazed the way to the Civil
War, the writer who stirred this nation to its core by his
anti-slavery philippics, and the promoter with the most
gigantic railroad enterprise projected in the history of the
world, was found gript in the icy hand of death. The brain
which gave birth to his historic writings had willed the
stilling of the heart which for three-quarters of a century
had palpitated quick and high with roseate hopes.

That passage, taken at hazard from a newspaper, is intended, I think,
to be fine writing of an imposing and dramatic kind. Why could not
the writer have written it, a little more carefully perhaps, but still
in just the language which he would have used naturally in describing
the event to his wife or friend? Simply stated, it would have been far
more solemn and impressive than this turgid, insincere account with
its large words, its forced note of tragedy and its split infinitive.
Let me put beneath it another description of a death-bed:

The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold
and slow, and were retreating to their last citadel, the
heart--rallied back,--the film forsook his eyes for a
moment,--he looked up wishfully into my Uncle Toby's
face,--then cast a look up