of his medium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of
sensibility, of refined usage. Exclusiones debitae--the exclusions,
or rejections, which nature demands--we know how large a part these
play, according to Bacon, in the science of nature. In a somewhat
changed sense, we might say that the art of the scholar is summed up
in the observance of those rejections demanded by the nature of his
medium, the material he must use. Alive to the value of an
atmosphere in which every term finds its utmost degree of expression,
and with all the jealousy of a lover of words, he will resist a
constant tendency on the part of the majority of those who use them
to efface the distinctions of language, the facility of writers often
reinforcing in this respect the work of the vulgar. He will feel the
obligation not of the laws only, but of those affinities, avoidances,
those mere preferences, of his language, which through the
associations of literary history have become a part of its nature,
prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license, many a
gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive. His
appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in
literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed
illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the
unlearned. Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and
renunciation, having for the susceptible reader the effect of a
challenge for minute consideration; the attention of the writer, in
every minutest detail, being a pledge that it is worth the reader's
while to be attentive too, that the writer is dealing scrupulously
with his instrument, and therefore, indirectly, with the reader
himself also, that he has the science of the instrument he plays on,
perhaps, after all, with a freedom which in such case will be the
freedom of a master.