worn by the original actors. Though the more subtile fashion to which we have given the name "good use" changes more slowly, it changes just as surely; and to a certain degree it follows fashion itself. The most curious example of this I have lately come across is in a song familiar to most of us:

"Yankee Doodle came to town

A-riding on a pony,

He stuck a feather in his hat,

And called him macaroni.”

Now, why he should have described himself as a nutritious article of diet popular in Southern Europe I could never imagine until I happened to notice Sir Benjamin Backbite's impromptu verses in the "School for Scandal," a play produced just before the American Revolution :

"Sure, never were seen two such beautiful ponies;
Other horses are clowns, but these macaronies.
To give them this title I'm sure is not wrong,
Their legs are so slim and their tails are so long."

Apparently the macaroni was a dandy in tights and very long coat-tails. The embattled farmers

with feathers in their hats were derisively likened to him, just as a country fellow on a cart-horse is some. times hailed to-day as a "dude on horseback." And a panorama of men's fashion-plates from Sheridan's time to ours would show a series of figures, each of which might have been described all along as an exquisite or a man of fashion; but for each of which, as

it appears specifically different from the rest, a new and transient name arises: macaroni, for example, buck, dandy, swell, dude.

Perhaps, however, the most suggestive example of good use reputable, national, and present—is a fact within the personal experience of every one of us. When we write letters, we begin them with the adjective dear. Now, the occasions when we mean by this word to express even the smallest degree of personal affection are so rare that at such moments we often feel called upon to change the word to dearest, or very dear, or darling. There is another form of address in all respects but one decidedly more expressive of what we really mean,- Friend. Yet none of us begins a letter "Friend Tompkins." And the only reason why none of us commits this unpardonable sin is that cus tom, fashion, good use, forbids. So nowadays w are no longer "Obedient, Humble Servants," but "Truly" or "Sincerely or or "Faithfully Yours, not because either phrase was ever literally true, but simply and solely because, nobody knows why, good use once sanctioned one form, and now sanctions the others.

I have dwelt thus long on good use because, as I have said more than once already, good use is inevi tably the basis of all good style. Whoever strays from it is first "original," then eccentric, then obscure, then unintelligible. Whoever writes a totally foreign language is of course unintelligible, but unintelligible only because in every word he formulates,

and sometimes in every mark he puts down, he serenely violates every rule of the reputable, national, and present use that makes modern English the thing it is. But unless I have sadly missed my purpose, I have shown you reason to see that in the last sentence I used word by no means felicitous. "Every rule," I wrote, "of good use;" but the very essence of good use is that it is not a system of rules, but a constantly shifting state of fact. Rules, dictionaries, grammars, can help us to discover it, just as fashion-plates and manuals of etiquette may help us to dress ourselves and to behave properly at table. But in the one case, as in the others, there is no more absolute rule than the one which prudent people habitually exemplify; namely, that a wise man should keep good company, and use good sense.

So far, in order to emphasize at once the laxity and the tyranny of good use, I have been asking you to consider style as a series of letters so joined together as to make words. And I hope that our consideration of the subject has been close enough to fix in our minds the fact that the chief reason why style impresses us as a thing possessed of very subtile qualities is that human consent has agreed to associate with those palpably material facts, arbitrary sounds and the arbitrary marks that stand for them, certain more or less definite phases of that eternally immaterial reality to which we give the name "thought." I shall ask you now, in imagination, to turn once more to a printed page, or better still, to a printed

book, — and ask yourselves whether we have as yet seen all that is therein visible.

A number of black marks we found these words to be, grouped together and occasionally repeated. A little closer inspection will show us that, in any modern piece of printing or writing, these groups of black marks to which we give the naine "words" are themselves grouper, by means of spaces and of other black marks, which we call punctuation, in masses which even to the most untrained eye are more or less independent. In other words, anybody, whether he understand English or not, can see that any piece of style consists not of an indefinite series of independent words, but of a series of words intelligently composed, a word which means neither more nor less than put together. The Latin term, as a single word, is the more convenient. We need a name for the visible groups in which the words that make up style are arranged. The best and simplest word I know is compositions.

In a printed book or a properly written manuscript, we shall soon observe that more than one kind of composition is visible. The book or the manuscript itself is a complete composition; it is generally made up of a considerable number of visibly distinct parts to which we give the name "chapters;" these in turn are made up of a number of somewhat less distinct parts which we call "paragraphs; these in turn of parts still less, but still visibly, distinct, which we call "sentences." Or, to

state the matter conversely, all style consists of words, composed in sentences, composed in paragraphs, composed in larger groups to which we may for our purposes give the name "whole compositions."

The question which now presents itself to whoever has grasped the fact that good use, and good use alone, is what gives significance to the words of which all style primarily consists, takes a very definite form. Are compositions, like words, governed by good use? Or may we, in composing words, act with more independence than in choosing them? In that case, are there any general principles of composition by which we may to advantage govern our conduct?

The simplest way of answering this question, I think, is to answer it backward in the first place, to inquire what general principles of composition might rationally be laid down if there were no such troublesome thing as good use to interfere with us; and then to inquire how far the action of these principles is balked in practice by good use.

And here we come to what has appeared to me the fault of almost every textbook of Rhetoric I have examined. These books consist chiefly of directions as to how one who would write should set about composing. Many of these directions are extremely sensible, many very suggestive. But in every case these directions are appallingly numerous. It took me some years to discern that all which have so far come to my notice could be grouped under one of