erve the occasion_; to say what you
have to say without impertinence or ill-timed excess. You would not
harangue a drawing-room or a subcommittee, or be facetious at a funeral,
or play the skeleton at a banquet: for in all such conduct you would be
mixing up things that differ. Be cheerful, then: for this desire of yours
to be appropriate is really the root of the matter. Nor do I ask you to
accept this on my sole word, but will cite you the most respectable
witnesses. Take, for instance, a critic who should be old enough to
impress you--Dionysius of Halicarnassus. After enumerating the qualities
which lend charm and nobility to style, he closes the list with
'appropriateness, which all these need':--

As there is a charming diction, so there is another that is noble;
as there is a polished rhythm, so there is another that is
dignified; as variety adds grace in one passage, so in another it
adds fulness; _and as for appropriation, it will prove the chief
source of beauty, or else of nothing at all_.

Or listen to Cicero, how he sets appropriateness in the very heart of his
teaching, as the master secret:--

Is erit eloquens qui poterit parva summisse, modica temperate, magna
graviter dicere.... Qui ad id quodcunque decebit poterit accommodare
orationem. Quod quum statuerit, tum, ut quidque erit dicendum, ita
dicet, nec satura jejune, nec grandia minute, nec item contra, sed
erit rebus ipsis par et aequalis oratio.

'Whatever his theme he will speak as becomes it; neither meagrely
where it is copious, nor meanly where it is ample, nor in _this_ way
where it demands _that_; but keeping his speech level with the
actual subject and adequate to it.'

I might quote another great man, Quintilian, to you on the first
importance of this appropriateness, or 'propriety'; of speaking not only
to the purpose but _becomingly_--though the two as (he rightly says) are
often enough one and the same thing. But I will pass on to what has ever
seemed, since I found it in one of Jowett's 'Introductions' to Plato, the
best definition known to me of good style in literature:--

The perfection of style is variety in unity, freedom, ease,
clearness, the power of saying anything, and of striking any note in
the scale of human feelings, without impropriety.

You see, O my modest friend! that your gamut needs not to be very wide,
to begin with. The point is