aulay's essay has been seen. In Burke it is yet more
logical and exact. However beautiful a piece may be, however naturally
one thought grows out of another, as though it were always so and
could be no other way, be sure it is so because of some man's thought,
on account of careful planning. And it may be said without a chance of
contradiction that when an essay has been well planned it is half
done, and that half by far the harder. "We can hardly at the present
day understand what Menander meant, when he told a man who inquired as
to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not having yet
written a single line, because he had constructed the action of it in
his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that the merit of his
piece depended on the brilliant things which arose under his pen as he
went along." The brilliant things are but the gargoyles and the
scrolls, the ornaments of the structure; and when so brilliant as to
attract especial attention, they divert the mind from the total effect
much as a series of beautiful marbles set between those perfect
columns would have ruined the Parthenon. It was not in any single
feature--not in pediment, column, or capital, not in frieze,
architrave, or tympanum--that its glorious beauty lay, but in the
simple strength and the harmonious symmetry of the whole, in the
general plan. Webster planned his orations, Newman planned his essays,
Carlyle planned his Frederick the Great. Their works are not a
momentary inspiration; they are the result of forethought, long and
painstaking. The absolute essential in the structure of an essay, that
without which it will fail to arrive anywhere, that compared to which
all ornament, all fine writing, is but sounding brass and a tinkling
cymbal, that absolute essential is the total effect secured by making
a plan.

Mass the End.

The principles governing the arrangement of material are Mass and
Coherence. Both are equally essential, but in practice some questions
regarding Mass are settled first. _The important positions in an essay
are the beginning and the end; of these the more important is the
end._ In this place, then, there shall be those sentences or those
paragraphs which deserve that distinction. Here frequently stands the
theme, the conclusion of the whole matter, that for which the
composition was constructed. So that if one wished to know the theme
of an essay, he would be justified in looking at its conclusion to