of our national decadence. The "Oxford English Dictionary" has
not yet unfolded the last of its coils, which yet are ample enough to
enfold us in seven words for every three an active man can grapple with.
Yet the warning has point, and a particular point, for those who aspire
to write poetry: as Francis Thompson has noted in his Essay on Shelley:--

Theoretically, of course, one ought always to try for the best word.
But practically, the habit of excessive care in word-selection
frequently results in loss of spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit
of always taking the best word too easily becomes the habit of always
taking the most ornate word, the word most removed from ordinary
speech. In consequence of this, poetic diction has become latterly a
kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the precise
combinations into which the pieces will be shifted. There is, in fact,
a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of Poetry, whose
prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to the poetic purple....
Against these it is time some banner should be raised.... It is at any
rate curious to note that the literary revolution against the despotic
diction of Pope seems issuing, like political revolutions, in a
despotism of his own making;

and he adds a note that this is the more surprising to him because so
many Victorian poets were prose-writers as well.

Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose should maintain
fresh and comprehensive a poet's diction, should save him from falling
into the hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should
react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by
taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping
him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For
it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits
of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the
stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood.

In diction, then, let us acquire all the store we can, rejecting no coin
for its minting but only if its metal be base. So shall we bring out of
our treasuries new things and old.

Diction, however, is but a part of Style, and perhaps not the most
important part. So I revert to the larger question, 'What is Style? What
its [Greek: to ti en einai], its essence, the law of its being?'

N