not so unnaturally either; each sentence has
suggested the next, but not one is on the topic. The most anxious
watch must be kept in the selection of material. Some will be admitted
without any question; some will be excluded with a brusqueness almost
brutal. There is a third class, however, that is allied with the
subject, yet it is not so easy to determine whether it should be
admitted or rejected. This class requires the closest questioning. It
must contribute to the strength of the essay, not to its pages, or it
has no place there.

Scale of Treatment.

_There is another condition which must be considered in the selection
of material, the scale of treatment._ If Macaulay had been asked by a
daily paper to contribute a paragraph of five hundred words on Milton,
he could not have introduced all the numerous topics which have their
place in his essay of one hundred pages. He might have mentioned
Milton's poetry and his character, the two main divisions of the
present essay; but Dante and Aeschylus, Puritan and Royalist, would
scarcely have received notice. The second consideration in selecting
material is the purpose and length of the essay, and the consequent
thoroughness with which the subject is to be treated.

_The exhaustiveness with which an author treats any subject depends,
first, on his knowledge._ Any person could write a paragraph on
Milton; Macaulay and Lowell wrote delightful essays on the topic;
David Masson has written volumes about him. These would have been
impossible except to a person who had been a special student of the
subject. Second, the thoroughness of the treatment depends _on the
knowledge of the readers._ For persons acquainted with the record of
the momentous events of Milton's time, it would have been quite
unnecessary, it might be considered even an insult to intelligence, to
go into such details of history. The shortest statement suffices when
the reader is already familiar with the subject and needs only to know
the application in this case. Third, the scale of treatment depends
_on the purpose for which the essay is written._ If a newspaper
paragraph, it is one thing; if for a magazine, it is quite another; if
it is to be the final word on the subject, it may reach to volumes.

An apt illustration of proportion in the scale of treatment has been
given by Scott and Denny in their "Composition-Rhetoric." They suggest
that three maps of the United States, one very large, another hal