of separate thoughts imbedded in his strange whimsicality and humour.
Lastly, there is the perennial charm of style, which is never a
separate quality, but rather the amalgam and issue of all the mental
and moral qualities in a man's possession, and which bears the same
relation to these that light bears to the mingled elements that make up
the orb of the sun. And style, after all, rather than thought, is the
immortal thing in literature. In literature, the charm of style is
indefinable, yet all-subduing, just as fine manners are in social life.
In reality, it is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you
say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single
irradiating word. "But Shadwell never _deviates_ into sense," for
instance. Young Roscius, in his provincial barn, will repeat you the
great soliloquy of Hamlet, and although every word may be given with
tolerable correctness, you find it just as commonplace as himself; the
great actor speaks it, and you "read Shakspeare as by a flash of
lightning." And it is in Montaigne's style, in the strange freaks and
turnings of his thought, his constant surprises, his curious
alternations of humour and melancholy, his careless, familiar form of
address, and the grace with which everything is done, that his charm
lies, and which makes the hundredth perusal of him as pleasant as the
first.

And on style depends the success of the essayist. Montaigne said the
most familiar things in the finest way. Goldsmith could not be termed
a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of
dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban
villa. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when
thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be
called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new. Love
is an old story enough, but in every generation it is re-born, in the