ce as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest
experience--an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant,
descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. Its beauties will
be not exclusively "pedestrian": it will exert, in due measure, all the
varied charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12]
or Michelet, or Newman, at their best, gives its musical value to every
syllable.*

The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he .
proposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the
scholarly conscience--the male conscience in this matter, as we must
think it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent
limits real scholarship to men. In his self-criticism, he supposes
always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily,
considerately, though without consideration for him, over the ground
which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the
material in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the
sculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and contending
tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its
own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary
recognition of which scholarship consists. A writer, full of a matter
he is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws,
the limitations of vocabulary, structure, and the like, as a
restriction, but if a [13] real artist will find in them an
opportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties of his
medium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of sensibility,
of refined usage. Exclusiones debitae--the exclusions, or rejections,
which nature demands--we know how large a part these play, according to
Bacon, in the science of nature. In a somewhat changed sense, we might
say that the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of those
rejections demanded by the nature of his medium, the material he must
use. Alive to the value of an atmosphere in which every term finds its
utmost degree of expression, and with all the jealousy of a lover of
words, he will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majority
of those who use them to efface the distinctions of language, the
facility of writers often reinforcing in this respect the work of the
vulgar. He will feel the obligation not of the laws only, but of those
affinities, avoidances, those mere preferences, o