o the
work itself, to attune the mind into a harmony of tone.[A]

[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," vol. i., for an article on
Prefaces.]

* * * * *

STYLE.

Every period of literature has its peculiar style, derived from some
author of reputation; and the history of a language, as an object of
taste, might be traced through a collection of ample quotations from the
most celebrated authors of each period.

To Johnson may be attributed the establishment of our present refinement,
and it is with truth he observes of his "Rambler," "That he had laboured
to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from
colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations, and
that he has added to the elegance of its construction and to the harmony
of its cadence." In this description of his own refinement in style and
grammatical accuracy, Johnson probably alluded to the happy carelessness
of Addison, whose charm of natural ease long afterwards he discovered. But
great inelegance of diction disgraced our language even so late as in
1736, when the "Inquiry into the Life of Homer" was published. That
author was certainly desirous of all the graces of composition, and his
volume by its singular sculptures evinces his inordinate affection for his
work. This fanciful writer had a taste for polished writing, yet he
abounds in expressions which now would be considered as impure in literary
composition. Such vulgarisms are common--the Greeks _fell to their old
trade_ of one tribe expelling another--the scene is always at Athens, and
all the _pother_ is some little jilting story--the haughty Roman _snuffed_
at the suppleness. If such diction had not been usual with good writers at
that period, I should not have quoted Blackwall. Middleton, in his "Life
of Cicero," though a man of classical taste, and an historian of a
classical era, could not preserve himself from colloquial inelegances; the
greatest characters are levelled by the poverty of his style. Warburton,
and his imitator Hurd, and other living critics of that school, are loaded
with familiar idioms, which at present would debase even the style of
conversation.

Such was the influence of the elaborate novelty of Johnson, that every
writer in every class servilely copied the Latinised style, ludicrously
mimicking the contortions and re-echoing the sonorous nothings of our
great lexicographer; the novelist of