failure must never think of style, and should
sedulously abstain from reading Shakespeare, Bacon, Hooker, Walton,
Gibbon, and other English and foreign classics. He can hardly be too
reckless of grammar, and should always place adverbs and other words
between "to" and the infinitive, thus: "Hubert was determined to
energetically and on all possible occasions, oppose any attempt to
entangle him with such." Here, it will be noticed, "such" is used as a
pronoun, a delightful flower of speech not to be disregarded by authors
who would fail. But some one may reply that several of our most popular
novelists revel in the kind of grammar which I am recommending. This is
undeniable, but certain people manage to succeed in spite of their own
earnest endeavours and startling demerits. There is no royal road to
failure. There is no rule without its exception, and it may be urged
that the works of the gentlemen and ladies who "break Priscian's head"--as
they would say themselves--may be successful, but are not literature. Now
it is about literature that we are speaking.

In the matter of style, there is another excellent way. You need not
neglect it, but you may study it wrongly. You may be affectedly self-
conscious, you may imitate the ingenious persons who carefully avoid the
natural word, the spontaneous phrase, and employ some other set of terms
which can hardly be construed. You may use, like a young essayist whom I
have lovingly observed, a proportion of eighty adjectives to every sixty-
five other words of all denominations. You may hunt for odd words, and
thrust them into the wrong places, as where you say that a man's nose is
"beetling," that the sun sank in "a cauldron of daffodil chaos," and the
like. {2} You may use common words in an unwonted sense, keeping some
private interpretation clearly before you. Thus you may speak, if you
like to write partly in the tongue of Hellas, about "assimilating the
_ethos_" of a work of art, and so write that people shall think of the
processes of digestion. You may speak of "exhausting the beauty" of a
landscape, and, somehow, convey the notion of sucking an orange dry. Or
you may wildly mix your metaphors, as when a critic accuses Mr. Browning
of "giving the irridescence of the poetic afflatus," as if the poetic
afflatus were blown through a pipe, into soap, and produced soap bubbles.
This is a more troublesome method than the mere picking up of every
newspaper common