hose of whom it has been said, that to them an obligation is
a reason for not doing anything, and there are others who are invariably
led to do the reverse of what they should. The last are perverse, the
first impracticable people. Opposed to the effeminate in disposition
and manners are the coarse and brutal. As those were all softness and
smoothness, these affect or are naturally attracted to whatever is
vulgar and violent, harsh and repulsive in tone, in modes of speech, in
forms of address, in gesture and behaviour. Thus there are some who ape
the lisping of the fine lady, the drawling of the fine gentleman, and
others who all their life delight in and catch the uncouth dialect, the
manners and expressions of clowns and hoydens. The last are governed by
an instinct of the disagreeable, by an appetite and headlong rage for
violating decorum and hurting other people's feelings, their own being
excited and enlivened by the shock. They deal in home truths, unpleasant
reflections, and unwelcome matters of fact; as the others are all
compliment and complaisance, insincerity and insipidity.
We may observe an effeminacy of style, in some degree corresponding to
effeminacy of character. Writers of this stamp are great interliners
of what they indite, alterers of indifferent phrases, and the plague of
printers' devils. By an effeminate style I would be understood to mean
one that is all florid, all fine; that cloys by its sweetness, and tires
by its sameness. Such are what Dryden calls 'calm, peaceable writers.'
They only aim to please, and never offend by truth or disturb by
singularity. Every thought must be beautiful _per se_, every expression
equally fine. They do not delight in vulgarisms, but in common-places,
and dress out unmeaning forms in all the colours of the rainbow. They
do not go out of their way to think--that would startle the indolence
of the reader: they cannot express a trite thought in common words--that
would be a sacrifice of their own vanity. They are not sparing of
tinsel, for it costs nothing. Their works should be printed, as they
generally are, on hot-pressed paper, with vignette margins. The Della
Cruscan school comes under this description, which is now nearly
exploded. Lord Byron is a pampered and aristocratic writer, but he is
not effeminate, or we should not have his works with only the printer's
name to them! I cannot help thinking that the fault of Mr. Keats's
poems was a deficiency in mascu
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