ey distract the
attention with images alien to the general impression, just as crude
colourists vex the eye with importunate splendours. Nay, even good
writers sometimes sacrifice the large effect of a diffusive light to
the small effect of a brilliant point. This is a defect of taste
frequently noticeable in two very good writers, De Quincey and Ruskin,
whose command of expression is so varied that it tempts them into
FIORITURA as flexibility of voice tempts singers to sin against
simplicity. At the close of an eloquent passage De Quincey writes :--

"Gravitation that works without holiday for ever and searches every
corner of the universe, what intellect can follow it to its fountains?
And yet, shyer than gravitation, less to be counted on than the
fluxions of sun-dials, stealthier than the growth of a forest, are the
footsteps of Christianity amongst the political workings of man."

The association of holidays and shyness with an idea so abstract as
that of gravitation, the use of the learned word fluxions to express
the movements of the shadows on a dial, and the discordant suggestion
of stealthiness applied to vegetable growth and Christianity, are so
many offences against simplicity. Let the passage be contrasted with
one in which wealth of imagery is in accordance with the thought it
expresses:--

"In the edifices of man there should be found reverent worship and
following, not only of the spirit which rounds the pillars of the
forest, and arches the vault of the avenue--which gives veining to the
leaf and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates
animal organisation but of that also which reproves the pillars of the
earth, and builds up her barren precipices into the coldness of the
clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale
arch of the sky; for these and other glories more than these refuse not
to connect themselves in his thoughts with the work of his own hand;
the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some
Cyclopoan waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory
arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of fortress
towns; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a melancholy
mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the images of
nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay
into which chambered cities melt in their mortality." [Ruskin].

I shall notice but two points