7. The average man has no idea of the real meaning of the common adjective phrase “deaf and dumb.”

8. "Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley ; and I am apt to think there are a good many other things concerning which their knowledge might be largely increased without becoming burdensome.

9. Bibbs's was a gloomy little heaven up one flight, and Bibbs a bald and cranky little god of fiddles, with whiskers half as long as himself and white as snow.

10. I dare say that I had already read my uncle's letter a hundred times, and I am sure that I knew it by heart; none the less I took it out of my pocket and, sitting on the side of the lugger, I went over it again with as much attention as if it were for the first time.

3. Write extempore introductions for any subject selected from the list of subjects for themes under 2. If the work is done in the class-room the introductions may be read, compared, and criticised.

13. The Body.-Little remains to be said about the body of the composition as a whole. The important matters have been provided for in the gathering and arranging of material. The writer has simply to develop in order the topics of his outline, adding illustrations wherever they seem to be demanded. Methods of development will be discussed in detail in the chapter on paragraphs. We need pause here only to supplement what has been said about the arrangement of the topics, with a consideration of such matters as must be attended to in the actual writing.

1. Unity has been insisted upon. This unity must be preserved by a constant centralization of ideas. No matter how far one may be led in the development of certain aspects of his subject, the subject itself should never be forgotten. It is the central point, and it should be returned to again and again in one form or other, often in the very words of the title.

Carlyle, in his lecture on "The Hero as Man of Letters," treats of Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns. But this lecture is only one of a series, the general subject of which is "Heroes and Hero-worship." Accordingly, while Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns are oftenest spoken of as Men of Letters, Great Men, Great Souls, Gifted Souls, Lions, and the like, they are also spoken of with almost regular recurrence as Literary Heroes. And their quality of Sincerity, Truth, Splendor, Worth, Greatness, Manhood, appears also with a certain regularity as Heroism.

Note, in the following descriptive sketch, how skilfully the subject is kept in view from first to last:

BROTHER NAYLOR.

He rode a mule, gaunt, heavy-eyed, leaden-footed-a veritable caricature of a mule, whose sharp protruding joints gave him the appearance of a grotesque hat-rack. So long-legged was the rider that he was forced to turn his toes up to prevent their touching the ground. His feet dangled with every motion of the mule, for the saddle was without stirrups. Those feet hung down many inches below the wide, baggy trousers, and the reddish woollen hose that encased his thin ankles made them look absurdly like bologna sausages. A ministerial coat floated out behind, and the irreverent wind played many a mad prank with that rusty, black drapery. Long, bony, claw-like hands clutched the bridle, giving it an occasional flap to encourage the mule into a less deliberate gait. His face, thin, sallow, and triangular, looked as if it were a total stranger to wholesome food. "Shade of the departed Ichabod Crane! Has he been reincarnated?" I exclaimed. “What did ye ask, honey?” inquired Mrs. Silsbee. The angel of discretion, who withheld her blessing at my birth, hovered near just long enough to inspire me to change my question to the more intelligible one, "Who is that man?" She hurried to the window and replied, "That there is Brother Naylor. He's our preacher down to Big Spring Church, and I tell ye what, he is done forgot more than most preachers ever knowed." As she watched the departing figure a smile of loving reverence illumined her worn,

aged face, restoring for a moment the beauty of her lost youth, and, transfigured in the light of that smile, “Brother Naylor" disappeared from view.

This method of calling up at the end, explicitly or otherwise, the subject as introduced in the beginning is one of the most common and most effective means of securing unity.

2. The unity of theme should be reënforced by harmony of tone. Every composition has its "pitch," which should be preserved throughout. It may be oratorical and impassioned, it may be argumentative and calm, it may be scientific and technical, it may be literary and colloquial; but whatever it is it should be consistent.

A few illustrations of the want of harmony within the limits of a single sentence will suffice to make this clear. One young essayist writes: "I am awakened every bright morning by the loud whistle of a Sturnella magna that perches on a rail of the pasture-fence opposite my window," and the reader scarcely represses a smile. Again:

Imagine such a play as "Julius Cæsar" or Henry the Fourth' being acted in a round wooden building open to the sky in the audience part of the house, although the stage was covered by a hanging roof.

The appeal at the outset here is to the emotions, an appeal
which is supported by the descriptive elements "wooden"
and "
open to the sky." But the word "round" and the
precise details toward the close convey information purely.
They do not heighten our sense of the meagreness of theat-
rical facilities in Shakespere's day. It is a mixture of
poetic and prosaic matter, and the effect is somewhat like
the effect experienced on reading the well-known apostrophe
to the Thames in Denham's "Cooper's Hill":

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,

Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.

Macaulay was sometimes so insensible to harmony of tone as to allow the intrusion of a hard fact or a petty and precise detail to mar an eloquent passage. In describing the trial of Warren Hastings he writes thus:

Every step in the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our constitution were laid; or far away, over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left.

Many examples of a similar incongruity can be found in the news columns of daily papers. The practice of surrounding the simple facts of news with ceremony and ostentation, of seeking out the dramatic features and putting them foremost, and of serving up the whole in a mock-literary style has grown so much of late that it is the custom in newspaper offices to speak of these accounts as "stories." The effect is often little short of ridiculous. Take a speci

men:

“I'll go in!” said Captain John McAndrews of Chemical No. 4. It was his way to go in where danger was, if life or property was to be saved. The four-story brick building of the Union Paper Company, at 738 Wentworth Street, was all abaze. Its thin walls were tottering. There was danger at every point."

This begins well, according to the standard of sensational novels. But even the standard of sensational novels would hardly admit the intrusion here of such prosaic details as "four-story brick building," "738 Wentworth Street." The clash is due to the writer's desire to write eulogy and the necessity of writing news. The proper method would have been to tell the simple facts first, and then, if circumstances warranted, pay a tribute to the fireman's heroism in a separate account.

3. Occasionally an essay has unity without sequence. The relation of the parts to the central theme may be close, like the relation of the spokes of a wheel to the hub, but there is no further connection between the parts. Many of Emerson's essays are framed in this manner. But the construction is not common. Usually the parts are not only centralized, but they also sustain a relation one to another somewhat like the links of a chain. This relation was discussed under the name of logical sequence. When this relation exists there are commonly outward marks, in the form of relation-words and -phrases, to indicate it. The use of these outward marks affords clearness and ease of transition, and gives the essay its general coherence.

A glance at almost any printed page will discover illustrations. Successive paragraphs in the latter part of Macaulay's Lord Clive" show the following transitional

sentences:

But a great and sudden turn in affairs was at hand. .

It was impossible, however, that even the military establishment

At length the state of things in Bengal began to excite .
This feeling manifested itself in the strongest manner
Clive rose

From Ruskin's "Unto this Last":

And these are not, observe, merely moral or pathetic attributes of riches . .

And therefore, the idea that directions can be given for the gaining of wealth..

...

It has been shown that the chief value and virtue of money.

Trite enough, the reader thinks . .

But farther. . .

So, also, the power of our wealth...

Finally. Since the essence of wealth . . .

Nevertheless, it is open, I repeat, to serious question..

...