hest degree of elegant and pregnant
implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the greatest
gain to sense and vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases from their
(so-called) natural order is luminous for the mind; and it is by the
means of such designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be
most pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most
perspicuously bound into one.

The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an
elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of
the art of literature. Books indeed continue to be read, for the
interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality is poorly
represented, but still it will be there. And, on the other hand, how
many do we continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only
merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted to mention Cicero; and
since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will. It is a poor diet for the
mind, a very colourless and toothless "criticism of life"; but we enjoy
the pleasure of a most intricate and dexterous pattern, every stitch a
model at once of elegance and of good sense; and the two oranges, even
if one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable grace.

Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though in
verse also the implication of the logical texture is a crowning beauty,
yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think that here was a
death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from that, it is but a new
illustration of the principle involved. For if the versifier is not
bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has
been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the
essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely
alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi)
regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in
the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not
matter on what principle the law is based, so it be a law. It may be
pure convention; it may have no inherent beauty; all that we have a
right to ask of any prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the
writer, and that what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too
hard. Hence it comes that it is much easier for men of equal facility to
write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably interesting prose; for in
prose the pattern itself has