place that floats into your mind, but it is equally
certain to lead--where you want to go. By combining the two fashions a
great deal may be done. Thus you want to describe a fire at sea, and you
say, "the devouring element lapped the quivering spars, the mast, and the
sea-shouldering keel of the doomed _Mary Jane_ in one coruscating
catastrophe. The sea deeps were incarnadined to an alarming extent by
the flames, and to escape from such many plunged headlong in their watery
bier."

As a rule, authors who would fail stick to one bad sort of writing;
either to the newspaper commonplace, or to the out of the way and
inappropriate epithets, or to the common word with a twist on it. But
there are examples of the combined method, as when we call the trees
round a man's house his "domestic boscage." This combination is
difficult, but perfect for its purpose. You cannot write worse than
"such." To attain perfection the young aspirant should confine his
reading to the newspapers (carefully selecting his newspapers, for many
of them will not help him to write ill) and to those modern authors who
are most praised for their style by the people who know least about the
matter. Words like "fictional" and "fictive" are distinctly to be
recommended, and there are epithets such as "weird," "strange," "wild,"
"intimate," and the rest, which blend pleasantly with "all the time" for
"always"; "back of" for "behind"; "belong with" for "belong to"; "live
like I do" for "as I do." The authors who combine those charms are rare,
but we can strive to be among them.

In short, he who would fail must avoid simplicity like a sunken reef, and
must earnestly seek either the commonplace or the _bizarre_, the slipshod
or the affected, the newfangled or the obsolete, the flippant or the
sepulchral. I need not specially recommend you to write in
"Wardour-street English," the sham archaic, a lingo never spoken by
mortal man, and composed of patches borrowed from authors between Piers
Plowman and Gabriel Harvey. A few literal translations of Icelandic
phrases may be thrown in; the result, as furniture-dealers say, is a
"made-up article."

On the subject of style another hint may be offered. Style may be good
in itself, but inappropriate to the subject. For example, style which
may be excellently adapted to a theological essay, may be but ill-suited
for a dialogue in a novel. There are subjects of which the poet says

_Ornari res ipsa