WAYS AND WORDS OF MEN OF LETTERS.* TJIIS book is

a sort of literary plum-pudding compounded by an expert caterer, and the public will probably testify their approval of it, by as large a consumption of this dainty dish as they have made of others previously set before them by the same hand. For our own part, we can certify that the plums, currants, and other toothsome ingredients are of excellent quality and well mixed ; and although, like Tiny Tim's mother, we may have some doubts about the flour, we will not deny that our palate has been pleased. The art Of literary composition, and the lives habits, and fortunes

of literary men are the topics which Mr. lives, discusses and illustrates in the present volume—a volume that may be described as a collection of aria arranged and organized within the framework of an original treatise. This last-mentioned part of the book, though not without merit, appears to us to be open to some ob- jections, as we have already hinted ; but the whole cannot fail to be acceptable as a clever digest of many volumes which a busy world must either read by deputy or read not all. Everybody delights in biography, and the means of gratifying that taste have been poured forth in the present age in great abundance, but also in so crude a shape and mixed up with such a mass of superfluous matter, as hardly to be available for everyday use. " Since the days of D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, says Mr. Pycroft, "the accumulated letters, memoirs, and biographies of fifty years have remained comparatively lost to all but the few fortunate men who have abundant leisure" for such reading. Some abatement must be made from this assertion in consideration of what has been done by Quarterly Reviewers, by Dr. Doran, and others ; but after all there remains a great deal of delving and sifting to be done in those diggings. Therefore, do we bid Mr. Pycroft good speed with the shovel and the cradle ; and the more so, because he intimates that, if the present volume be favourably received, it will probably prove to be the first of a series. Let us begin our inspection of his work with a look at one one or two of the nuggets

he has turned up.

"The poet Rogers used to tell a story of the brevity of Talleyrand's cor- respondence; for once a lady wrote to him in highflown terms of grief, in- forming him of the death of her husband, and expecting a letter of condo- lence in return; but the only answer was- " Helas, Madame ! "'Votes affeetionne, he.,

" TALLEYBAND.'

"In less than a year, the same lady wrote that she had married again, to which his laconic reply was- " ' Oh, oh, Madame ! " Votre affectionne, he.,

" ' TALLEYRAND.' " Equally laconic, and more kindly, were the letters that passed. between Garrick's widow and Edmund Kean, after the old lady had seen the latter's performance of a part in which her husband was matchless—" My dear sir—You can't play Abel Dragger. Yours, very faithfully, C. GARRICK." "My dear Madam—I know it. Yours, very faithfully, Einturin KEAN." Speaking of errors of the press, Mr. Pycroft relates a conversation he had with

a printer— "Really," said the printer, "gentlemen should not place such unlimited confidence in the eyesight of our hard-worked and half-blinded reader of proofs; for I am ashamed to say that we utterly ruined one poet through a ludicrous misprint." "Indeed! and what was the unhappy line ? " "Why, sir, the poet intended to say, "'See the pale martyr in a sheet of fire ; '

instead of which we made him say,

See the pale martyr with his shirt on fire.'

Of course, the reviewers made the most of a blunder so entertaining to their readers, and the poor gentleman was never heard of more in the field of literature."

Mr. Pyoroft notices as one of the moat singular errors, whether it be clerical or typographical, the passage quoted by Dr. John- son in his Dictionary as an authority, under the verb "to sit,"— " Asses are ye that sit in judgment (Judges, v. 10)." The verse is—" Speak, ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit in judgment, and walk by the way." We regret to say that neither these shocking examples nor the printer's warning have availed with our author to save his present volume from several gross errors, clerical or typographical. To which of the two classes are we to

assign this vile misreading of a line of Burns— "Now Tam ! 0 ! had they been queens?"

Queens were never as plentiful as blackberries in Ayrshire, but it could turn out many a bevy of " queens, a' strappin hizzies in their teens." Mr. Pycroft makes Lord Brougham speak of "the Milo pro Lige.rio" as one of Cicero's orations. This is almost as good as Moliere s "acute nonsense "—

" Mahameta per jourdina,

Per defender Palestina.'

In the course of his remarks on the art of composition, our an- ther gives some good, and some very questionable advice. He duly insists on the necessity of thinking out what one has to say before committing it to paper, and recommends by precept and weighty examples the practice of elaborate mental composition ; but he goes far to neutralize all this good counsel when he says, "Bet here we must interpose one very necessary caution ; namely, that the time to seek for the best word is not when we

• Ways and Words of Men of Letters. By the Reverend James Pycroft, B.A. Author of "Twenty Years in the Church," 8r.c. Published by Booth. are writing, but rather when we are reviewing add correcting our pages. While in the act of writing or of speaking, it is neces- sary to think chiefly of what we are going to say, and to let the words come of themselves ; otherwise, if we stop at every line to pick and choose our expressions, our style will lose in fluency far more than it will gain in phrases." Advice of a more dangerous tendency could hardly be given to a young writer, and he that follows it implicitly can hardly escape becoming a sloven in style. Let him by all means revise his manuscript ; it may be long be- fore he can produce one which will not need severe castigation ; but let him labour from the outset to make it as perfect as he can in its first casting, relying as little as possible on subsequent patching and mending ; for thus alone can he hope ultimately to achieve a faultless fluency. In recommending the contrary prac- tice, Mr. Pycroft betrays the shallowness and inaccuracy of his notions respecting style, for he evidently labours under the com- mon delusion that style is separable from thought, that it is an adventitious ornament which may be varied at pleasure, while the thoughts it covers remain unchanged. In the act of writing, he says, we are to think chiefly of what we are going to say, and let the words come of themselves. To unpractised writers, they will not come of themselves, unless they relate to ponderable facts and external realities, which, as De Quineey has said, are intel- ligible in almost any language, are self-explained and self-sus- tained; but, continues that subtle and accurate thinker, "the more closely any exercise of mind is connected with what is in- ternal and individual in the sensibilities, that is, with what is philosophically termed subjective, precisely in that degree, and the more subtly, does the style or the embodying of the thoughts cease to be a mere separable ornament, and, in fact, the mere does the manner become confluent with the matter." De Quincey then quotes as the weightiest thing he ever heard on the subject of style, the poet Wordsworth's remark, that it is in the highest degree =philosophic to call language or diction the dress of thoughts ; he would call it the incarnation of thoughts. "Never," says De Quineey, "In one word was so profound a truth con- veyed."

In justice to Mr. Pycroft, it must be owned that, if he some- times lays down erroneous doctrine, he seldom fails to supply its antidote. Thus, after telling us that if we stop at every line to pick and choose our expressions, our style will lose in fluency (page 12), will become stiff and unnatural (page 49), he pro- duces this splendid example in direct contradiction to his own theory- " The authoress of Jane Eyre," says her biographer, "wee remarkably felicitous in her choice of words. Still she possessed no such talent as eoua dispense with a nice discrimination in selecting words. One set of words was the truthful mirror of her thoughts : no others, however apparently identical in meaning, would do. She would wait patiently searching for the right term, till it presented itself to her. This care," says her bio- grapher, "makes her style present the finish of mosaic. Each component part, however small, has been dropped into the right place, and she never wrote down a sentence until she clearly understood what she wanted to say, had deliberately chosen the words, and had arranged them in the right or- der. Her manuscript might show the erasure of an entire sentence, but rarely the alteration of any of the words."

The best use, then, which Mr. Pycroft's readers can make of the advice he gives them, labelled "a very necessary caution," is to take care and dis4ey it with all their might. On the other hand, they cannot too strenuously practice the golden rule he gives them soon after—" Trust your paper less, and your mind more "—a rule which he justifies and explains as follows-

" One of the greatest masters of composition we have ever had the plea- sure of knowing, evolved his mighty powers during a season of temporary blindness. From the experience of this gentleman, there is little doubt but the pen is used too much by authors, and mental composition too little to do full justice to their abilities. We should accustom ourselves to sketch our subject less on material tablets, and far more on the tablets of the mind. In this quarter lies an intellect, a mine which yet remains to be worked—a. powerful, though a dormant faculty—which, we have good reason for say- ing, admits of a degree of growth and development almost incredible to those who have not seen mental composition, like mental arithmetic, fairly tried by a gradual course of systematic exercise."

Mr. Morphy, the American chess-player, who won eight games at the same time, though contending blindfold against the best players in Europe, is an astonishing example of the degree to which the power of mental combination may be developed. Other instances have come under Mr. Pycroft's notice, and with them a knowledge of the means by which the wonderful result was ob- tained. Being struck with the acuteness and general intelligence of some twenty pupils belonging to one school, he ascertained that the master laid great stress on mental arithmetic as a means of sharpening the faculties. There were few pupils in the whoa who were not quite equal to the task of mentally multiplying or dividing by one figure a number represented by ten figures. Some of the clever pupils could do the same thing with fourteen at fifteen figures, some even with a row of from twenty to twenty five, and one of them, who was afterwards the second Wrangler of his year, had operated correctly upon a row of no less than thirty-five figures. All this marvellous facility had been acquired by a little daily practice continued during the years of educa- tion, the exercise beginning with two or three figures, and gradu- ally increasing in complexity. It is quite conceivable that, by means of analogous exercises, any man of average capacity might acquire a power like that possessed by one whom the Re- viewer of Lord Brougham's Lives of Men of Letters speaks of ex one of the tws most graceful prose works on a large scale in our own time, adding, that he had so extraordinary a memorythat he. could finish a chapter during a ride, and then set it down so as hardly to need revision.