isfy the reason and taste,- that is his business. Mr. Palgrave, on the other hand, feels himself to be speaking before a promiscuous multitude, with the few good judges so scattered through it as to be powerless; therefore, he has no calm confidence and no self-control; he relies on the strength of his lungs; he knows that big words impose on the mob, and that, even if he is outrageous, most of his audience are apt to be a great deal more 80.*

Again, the most successful English book of last season was certainly Mr. Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea. Its style was one of the most renowned things about it, and yet how conspicuous a fault in Mr. Kinglake's style is this over-charge of which I have been speaking! Mr. James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, says, I believe, that the highest achievement of the human intellect is what he calls "a good editorial." This is not quite so; but, if it were so, on what a height would Mr. Kinglake stand! I have already spoken of the Attic and the Asiatic styles; besides these, there is the Corinthian style. That is the style for "a good editorial," and Mr. Kinglake has really reached perfection in it. It has not the warm glow, blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life, as the Attic style has; it has not the over-heavy richness and encumbered gait of the Asiatic style; it has glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness without charm. Its characteristic is, that it has no soul; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make its points, to damage its adversaries, to be admired, to triumph. "His features put on that glow which, seen in men of his race

* When I wrote this I had before me the first edition of Mr. Pal

grave's Handbook. I am bound to say that in the second edition much strong language has been expunged, and what remains, softened.

race known by the kindling gray eye, and the light, stubborn, crisping hair-discloses the rapture of instant fight." How glittering that is, but how perfectly frosty! "There was a salient point of difference between the boulevards and the hillsides of the Alma. The Russians were armed." How trenchant that is, but how perfectly unscrupulous! This is the Corinthian style; the glitter of the East with the hardness of the West; "the passion for tinsel," some one, himself a Corinthian, said of Mr. Kinglake's style, "of a sensuous Jew, with the savage spleen of a dyspeptic Englishman." I do not say this of Mr. Kinglake's style,-I am very far from saying it. To say it is to fall into just that hard, brassy, overstretched style which Mr. Kinglake himself employs so far too much, and which I, for my part, reprobate. But when a brother Corinthian of Mr. Kinglake's says it, I feel what he means.

A style so bent on effect at the expense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so little studious of the charm of the great models; so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be said to have the note of provinciality. Yet Mr. Kinglake's talent is a really eminent one, and so in harmony with our intellectual habits and tendencies, that, to the great bulk of English people, the faults of his style seem its merits; all the more needful that criticism should not be dazzled by them, but should try closely this, the form of his work. The matter of the work is a separate thing; and, indeed, this has been, I believe, withdrawn from discussion, Mr. Kinglake declaring that this must and shall stay as it is, and that he is resolved, like Pontius Pilate, to stand by what he has written. And here, I must say, he seems to me to be quite right. On the breast of the huge Mississippi of

falsehood called history, a foam-bell more or less is of no consequence. But he may, at any rate, ease and soften his style.

We must not compare a man of Mr. Kinglake's literary talent with writers like M. de Bazancourt. We must compare him with M. Thiers. And what a superiority in style has M. Thiers from being formed in a good school, with severe traditions, wholesome restraining influences! Even in this age of Mr. James Gordon Bennett, his style has nothing Corinthian about it; its lightness and brightness make it almost Attic. It is not quite Attic, however; it has not the infallible sureness of Attic taste. Sometimes his head gets a little hot with the fumes of patriotism, and then he crosses the line, he loses perfect measure, he declaims, he raises a momentary smile. France condemned "à être l'effroi du monde dont elle pourrait être l'amour,” — Cæsar, whose exquisite simplicity M. Thiers so admires, would not have written like that. There is, if I may be allowed to say so, the slightest possible touch of fatuity in such language, — of that failure in good sense which comes from too warm a selfsatisfaction. But compare this language with Mr. Kinglake's Marshal St. Arnaud - "dismissed from the pres" of Lord Raglan or Lord Stratford, "cowed and pressed down" under their "stern reproofs," or under "the majesty of the great Elchi's Canning brow and tight, merciless lips!" The failure in good sense and good taste there reaches far beyond what the French mean by fatuity; they would call it by another word,a word expressing blank defect of intelligence, a word for which we have no exact equivalent in English; bête. It is the difference between a venial, momentary, goodtempered excess, in a man of the world, of an amiable

ence

and social weakness, - vanity; and a serious, settled, fierce, narrow, provincial misconception of the whole relative value of one's own things and the things of others. So baneful to the style of even the cleverest man may be the total want of checks.

In all I have said, I do not pretend that the examples given prove my rule as to the influence of academies ; they only illustrate it. Examples in plenty might very likely be found to set against them; the truth of the rule depends, no doubt, on whether the balance of all the examples is in its favor or not; but actually to strike this balance is always out of the question. Here, as everywhere else, the rule, the idea, if true, commends itself to the judicious, and then the examples make it clearer still to them. This is the real use of examples, and this alone is the purpose which I have meant mine to serve. There is also another side to the whole question, as to the limiting and prejudicial operation which academies may have; but this side of the question it rather behoves the French, not us, to study.

The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about the establishment of an Academy in this country, and perhaps I shall hardly give him the one he expects. But nations have their own modes of acting, and these modes are not easily changed; they are even consecrated, when great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced Shakespeare and Milton, when it has even produced Barrow and Burke, it cannot well abandon its traditions; it can hardly begin, at this late time of day, with an institution like the French Academy. I think academies with a limited, special, scientific scope, in the various lines of intellectual work academies like that of Berlin, for instance we with time may, and probably

shall, establish. And no doubt they will do good; no doubt the presence of such influential centres of correct information will tend to raise the standard amongst us for what I have called the journeyman-work of literature, and to free us from the scandal of such biographical dictionaries as Chalmers's, or such translations as a recent one of Spinoza, or, perhaps, such philological freaks as Mr. Forster's about the one primeval language. But an academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest literary opinion, a recognized authority in matters of intellectual tone and taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps we ought not to wish to have it. But then every one amongst us with any turn for literature will do well to remember to what shortcomings and excesses, which such an academy tends to correct, we are liable; and the more liable, of course, for not having it. He will do well constantly to try himself in respect of these, steadily to widen his culture, severely to check in himself the provincial spirit; and he will do this the better the more he keeps in mind that all mere glorification by ourselves of ourselves or our literature, in the strain of what, at the beginning of these remarks, I quoted from Lord Macaulay, is both vulgar, and, besides being vulgar, retarding.