rd 'patience,' at once he solidifies it in tangible stone.

Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who have
written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim--to prefer the
concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the
definite to the vague--as a canon of rhetoric. Whately has much to say on
it. The late Mr E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke
(prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens to
scholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim by
setting a passage from Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America"
alongside a passage of like purport from Lord Brougham's "Inquiry into
the Policy of the European Powers." Here is the deadly parallel:--

BURKE.

In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the
extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern AEgypt and
Arabia and Curdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion
in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism
itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience
as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and
the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is
derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders.

BROUGHAM.

In all the despotisms of the East, it has been observed that the
further any part of the empire is removed from the capital, the more do
its inhabitants enjoy some sort of rights and privileges: the more
inefficacious is the power of the monarch; and the more feeble and
easily decayed is the organisation of the government.

You perceive that Brougham has transferred Burke's thought to his own
page: but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke's
vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold on
the mind?

'This particularising style,' comments Mr Payne, 'is the essence of
Poetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy it
produces. Brougham's passage is excellent in its way: but it pales before
the flashing lights of Burke's sentences. The best instances of this
energy of style, he adds, are to be found in the classical writers of the
seventeenth century. 'When South says, "An Aristotle was but the rubbish
of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise," he communicates
more effectually the notion of the difference between the intel