you think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are men
who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong
understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their
contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity,
will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in
most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a
style which for their purposes is effective. Of this class Jeffrey,
Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not winged
minds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into
an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent,
illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finer
insight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even when
most vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, by
imaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not by
freshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius,
creativeness. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers had
appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," Brougham, one of its founders and
controllers, protested that if that man were permitted to write any
more he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of the
Review were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitrary
proceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying the
instinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius.

Not less than men of talent men of genius need to cultivate style;
nay, from the copiousness and variousness of their material, and from
its very inwardness, the molds into which it is to be thrown need the
finest care. Coleridge, rich and incomparable as he is, would have
made many of his prose pages still more effective by a studious
supervision; and De Quincey tells us what labor his periods sometimes
cost him. The following advice, given in a letter from Maurice de