o not throw
a dozen vague epithets at a thing, in the hope that some one of them
will fit; but study each phrase so carefully that the most ingenious
critic cannot alter it without spoiling the whole passage for everybody
but himself. For the same reason do not take refuge, as was the
practice a few years since, in German combinations, heart-utterances,
soul-sentiments, and hyphenized phrases generally; but roll your thought
into one good English word. There is no fault which seems so hopeless as
commonplaceness, but it is really easier to elevate the commonplace
than to reduce the turgid. How few men in all the pride of culture can
emulate the easy grace of a bright woman's letter!

Have faith enough in your own individuality to keep it resolutely down
for a year or two. A man has not much intellectual capital who cannot
treat himself to a brief interval of modesty. Premature individualism
commonly ends either in a reaction against the original whims, or in a
mannerism which perpetuates them. For mannerism no one is great enough,
because, though in the hands of a strong man it imprisons us in novel
fascination, yet we soon grow weary, and then hate our prison forever.
How sparkling was Reade's crisp brilliancy in "Peg Woffington"!--but
into what disagreeable affectations it has since degenerated! Carlyle
was a boon to the human race, amid the lameness into which English style
was declining; but who is not tired of him and his catchwords now? He
was the Jenner of our modern style, inoculating and saving us all by his
quaint frank Germanism, then dying of his own disease. Now the age has
outgrown him, and is approaching a mode of writing which unites the
smoothness of the eighteenth century with the vital vigor of the
seventeenth, so that Sir Thomas Browne and Andrew Marvell seem quite as
near to us as Pope or Addison,--a style penetrated with the best spirit
of Carlyle, without a trace of Carlylism.

Be neither too lax nor too precise in your use of language: the one
fault ends in stiffness, the other in slang. Some one told the Emperor
Tiberius that he might give citizenship to men, but not to words. To be
sure, Louis XIV. in childhood, wishing for a carriage, called for _mon
carrosse_, and made the former feminine a masculine to all future
Frenchmen. But do not undertake to exercise these prerogatives of
royalty until you are quite sure of being crowned. The only thing I
remember of our college text-book of Rhetoric