8 L. A. Sherman, 



torical habit and method been, as we may say, synthetic. 

 Each writer, like Chaucer in the sentence from the Prologue 

 above quoted, strove to rnass his meaning and then express 

 it in a sentence which should span its entire content. Now 

 the rhetorical instinct shows a tendency to analysis. Instead 

 of congesting the meaning proposed for expression Macaulay 

 dissects it, summoning back to his conception as he proceeds 

 to write only so much at a time as he may amply realize in a 

 single view, then making out of the product in each case a 

 complete period. ' One mind-full at a time for the author, 

 and the same embodied in each sentence for the reader' is 

 actually the rule that Macaulay obeys. And as the reader is 

 manifestly at a disadvantage in the transaction as regards the 

 author, the impulse was fortunately to reduce and simplify 

 the imagery, — whether direct or symbolic, — to be con- 

 structed by the imagination of the former, to whom the 

 meaning will be most likely new. Thus is a margin saved 

 for extra clearness and energy. Yet nothing of this is done 

 consciously for the sake of the reader, but wholly to satisfy 

 a certain something in the author's mind. This impulse to 

 analyze and energize, — to keep the author's meaning out of 

 the reach of the reader save one notion at a time, leads 

 Macaulay especially in his earlier compositions to go against 

 the fashion of his day and fall foul of the semicolon as a help 

 to thouocht. Hence such sentences as these are not infre- 

 quent : " Like the former he was timid and pliable, artful and 

 mean. But like the latter he had a country." — " Shallow is 

 a fool. But his animal spirits supply, to a certain degree, 

 the place of cleverness." — "There are errors in these works. 

 But they are errors which a writer, situated like Machiavelli, 

 could scarcely avoid." ^ 



^ This method of punctuation is manifestly truer to the thought, and will 

 perhaps prevail in time. W.e are naturally about as loath to give up the eighteenth- 

 century punctuation as its standard spelling. As to the excuse of subordinate con- 

 junctions for making semicolon clauses, we can go back and learn something from 

 old Homer. When a sentence is to follow as the explanation of the preceding 

 statement, it is his favorite practice to introduce it without a 'because' or 'since,' 



126 



