l beginnings of t because these dless disregard s greatly to im ew. as it applies to s true. More do well, before trying to alter it, to make sure that th is not already in it some point where it may actu end strongly. But the rule tells the whole story have yet to find the composition that may not advantage end with words that deserve distinction --a So we come to the third phase of the principl Mass in whole compositions. In the textbooks I h found this somewhat dryly formulated thus: Due portion should obtain between principal and subo nate matters. In simple English I conceive thi mean that, generally speaking, what is most import may conveniently be treated at most length. In ography, for example, a kind of writing that stud often have to try, the first question is why the ject is worth writing about at all. During the past years it has been my misfortune to read, I sho guess, from five hundred to a thousand undergradu accounts of the life of Daniel Webster. Now, Webs I conceive, is worth writing about for three differ reasons he was a great orator, and a very not lawyer, and a great statesman. Any or all of th phases of his character might properly occupy greater part of any account of his life. But wha my opinion should be passed over hastily is what a great number of the undergraduate composition treated at the greatest length; namely, the not exceptional circumstances of his childhood and yo I remember one theme which covered perhaps a do pages of carefully written manuscript, of which but two were devoted to an elaborate account how the infant s father, plied 1, our purpose Mr. Herndon NOW saw and knew a great deal. Of Herndon's three umes, then, almost if not quite two are devoted to earlier part of Lincoln's career. Into the third ume is compressed, in very general form, all that ma Lincoln's name a household word; but this mass of Herndon's book, far from being faulty, seems to admirable. What Herndon had to tell, what nob else knew, was precisely that personal detail of ea life which the other books and other writers, for w of knowledge, passed over. A truer title would h been the "Early Life of Lincoln." A better b might have ended at the moment when Lincoln came a public character. But, given Herndon's p pose, Herndon's book is, in its main masses, very composed, for the very reason that it gives most spa and so attracts most notice, to what most deser distinction. An interesting composition from this point of v is the chapter in "Vanity Fair" which tells of the bat of Waterloo. In point of fact, I rather think Tha eray had never seen a great battle, and was too prud an artist to venture on the description of a very table kind of thing which he knew only from hears He lays his scene in Brussels, then, and tells w great vividness and detail the story of the panic the not essentially a different thing from any ot scene of general excitement and confusion and terr a great deal nearer the ordinary experience of hum beings than any form of battle, murder, or sudd made this panic is Waterloo: every now and then you hear the growling of the cannon, and feel, hovering not far off, the dreadful shadow of Bonaparte. Soin my little Tauchnitz edition - he writes for twentytwo pages, dwelling at greatest length on that part of his subject which he was best able to treat, and leaving in the reader's mind what every writer really wishes to leave there a deep sense of reality and of power. But this has not told his whole story. the last page and a half he tells very briefly what had been doing in the field all this time; and in his very last paragraph-and the very last words of it-he tells the fact which makes the passage an essential part of his story. Here is the paragraph, and it is so placed that in the total effect of the chapter it remains the chief point of the whole: In "No more firing was heard at Brussels: the pursuit The darkness came down on the field rolled miles away. and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart." For skilful massing that chapter has always impressed me as notable. It is the space given to Brussels that emphasizes the part of the story which Thackeray could tell best; it is the placing of that single sentence about George Osborne - not even a lu o relative clause-which leaves it once proportions of our work becomes more import and more delicate than before. On our managem of it depends to an amazing degree what effects produce with given material. It cannot be conside too carefully. And nothing has so assisted my sideration of it as that simple device with cards t show me, as I arrange them in different ord what different effects are at any moment within power. So we come to the principle of Coherence: that relation of each part of a composition to its neighb should be unmistakable. In sentences and in pa graphs, we shall remember, we found that this ma of coherence depended on one or more of three vices the actual order in which we arranged the pa of our compositions; uniformity of constructions; the use of connectives. In whole compositions th three devices remain important; but the first and third are more so than the second. The simplest of considering them, perhaps, is to revert to the tle packs of cards that I have said are so useful deciding questions of mass. In arranging these is not enough that we should give most space what we wish most to impress on the reader, or at the beginning and the end the matters we w chiefly to emphasize. It is almost equally import that we arrange the separate parts of our comp tions in this case, the separate paragraphs-in order that shall as far as possible indicate th mutual relations |