ld the type and mould of all written language to be spoken language.
There are more reasons for demurring to the soundness of the latter
doctrine, than can conveniently be made to fill a digression here. For
one thing, spoken language necessarily implies one or more listeners,
whereas written language may often have to express meditative moods and
trains of inward reflection that move through the mind without trace of
external reference, and that would lose their special traits by the
introduction of any suspicion that they were to be overheard. Again,
even granting that all composition must be supposed to be meant, by the
fact of its existence, to be addressed to a body of readers, it still
remains to be shown that indirect address to the inner ear should follow
the same method and rhythm as address directly through impressions on
the outer organ. The attitude of the recipient mind is different, and
there is the symbolism of a new medium between it and the speaker. The
writer, being cut off from all those effects which are producible by the
physical intonations of the voice, has to find substitutes for them by
other means, by subtler cadences, by a more varied modulation, by firmer
notes, by more complex circuits, than suffice for the utmost perfection
of spoken language, which has all the potent and manifold aids of
personality. In writing, whether it be prose or verse, you are free to
produce effects whose peculiarity one can only define vaguely, by saying
that the senses have one part less in them than in any other of the
forms and effects of art, and the imaginary voice one part more. But the
question need not be laboured here, because there can be no dispute as
to the quality of Macaulay's prose. Its measures are emphatically the
measures of spoken deliverance. Those who have made the experiment,
pronounce him to be one of the authors whose works are most admirably
fitted for reading aloud. His firmness and directness of statement, his
spiritedness, his art of selecting salient and highly coloured detail,
and all his other merits as a narrator, keep the listener's attention,
and make him the easiest of writers to follow.

Although, however, clearness, directness, and positiveness are master
qualities and the indispensable foundations of all good style, yet does
the matter plainly by no means end with them. And it is even possible
to have these virtues so unhappily proportioned and inauspiciously mixed
with other tu