pause well before you take up any model of style. On your style often
depends your own character,--almost always the character given you by the
world. If you adopt the lofty style,--if you string together noble
phrases and swelling Sonora,--you have expressed, avowed, a frame of mind
which you will insensibly desire to act up to; the desire gradually
begets the capacity. The life of Dr. Parr is Dr. Parr's style put in
action; and Lord Byron makes himself through existence unhappy for having
accidentally slipped into a melancholy current of words. But suppose you
escape this calamity by a peculiar hardihood of temperament, you escape
not the stamp of popular opinion. Addison must ever be held by the
vulgar the most amiable of men, because of the social amenity of his
diction; and the admirers of language will always consider Burke a nobler
spirit than Fox, because of the grandeur of his sentences. How many wise
sayings have been called jests because they were wittily uttered! How
many nothings swelled their author into a sage, ay, a saint, because they
were strung together by the old hypocrite nun,--Gravity!

THE END.