sections of his 'Holy Living and Dying,' do you know what would have
happened? Are you aware what sort of a ridiculous figure your poor
bald Jonathan would have cut? About the same that would be cut by a
forlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if
suddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival of
Belshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords."

That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of high
excellence ought to be a truism. Through a certain equilibrium among
his faculties, and assiduous literary culture, such a one may
excel colleagues who move on the same bounded plane; but that is all.
From the shallowest utterance, where, thoughts and feelings lying just
below the surface, there can be no strong lights and shadows, no
splendid play in the exposition, styles range, with the men who make
them, through all degrees of liveliness and significance and power, up
to that simple grandeur which conceals a vast volume of thought, and
implies a divine ruling of multiplicity.

In a good style, on whatever degree it stands, there must be a full
marriage between word and thought, so clean an adjustment of
expression to material as to leave no rough edges or nodes. The words
must not be too big or too shiny for the thought; they must not stand
out from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter. A style can
hardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, was
sometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting.

A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer be
one; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a free
sympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; his
subject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject. That he be