senting each of them for our acceptance
with a placid smile. His commendable desire for lucidity of expression
makes him nervously anxious to avoid any complexity of thought. Each
step of his argument, each shade of meaning, and each fact in his
narrative, must have its own separate embodiment; and every joint and
connecting link must be carefully and accurately defined. The clearness
is won at a price. There is some advantage in this elaborate method of
dissecting out every distinct fibre and ramification of an argument.
But, on the whole, one is apt to remember that life is limited, and that
there are some things in this world which must be taken for granted. If
a man's boyhood fill two volumes, and if one of these (though under
unfavourable circumstances) took six months to revise, it seems probable
that in later years he would have taken longer to record events than to
live them. No autobiography written on such principles could ever reach
even the middle life of the author. Take up, for example, the first
volume of his collected works. Why, on the very first page, having
occasion to mention Christendom in the fifteenth century, should he
provide against some eccentric misconception by telling us that it did
not, at that time, include any part of America? Why should it take
considerably more than a page to explain that when a schoolmaster begins
lessons punctually, and leaves off too late, there will be an
encroachment on the hours of play? Or two pages to describe how a porter
dropped a portmanteau on a flight of stairs, and didn't waken a
schoolmaster? Or two more to account for the fact that he asked a woman
the meaning of the noise produced by the 'bore' in the Dee, instead of
waiting till she spoke to him? Impassioned prose may be a very good
thing; but when its current is arrested by such incessant stoppages, and
the beauty of the English language displayed by showing how many
faultless sentences may be expended on an exhaustive description of
irrelevant trifles, the human mind becomes recalcitrant. A man may
become prolix from the fulness or fervency of his mind; but prolixity
produced by this finical minuteness of language, ends by distressing
one's nerves. It is the same sense of irritation as is produced by
waiting for the tedious completion of an elaborate toilette, and one is
rather tempted to remember Artemus Ward's description of the Fourth of
July oration, which took four hours 'to pass a given point.'