26 LITEEAEY VALUES 



remotest way suggested milk. Mr. Hewlett is so in 

 love with a crisp style that he describes his heroine 

 as lying white and twisting on a couch, crisping and 

 uncrisping her little hands. 



Such things come from straining after novelty. 

 They proceed from an unripe taste. Men of real 

 genius and power are at times guilty of such lapses, 

 or go astray in quest of novel images. Walter 

 Bagehot sometimes did. Writing of Sydney Smith, 

 his rhetoric shows its teeth in this fashion : " Writ- 

 ers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders ; 

 Sydney Smith was a molar. He did not run a long 

 sharp argument into the interior of a question ; he did 

 not, in the common phrase, go deeply into it ; but he 

 kept it steadily under the contact of a strong, capable, 

 jawlike understanding, pressing its surface, effacing 

 its intricacies, grinding it down." Such a comparison 

 has the merit of being vivid ; it also has the demerit 

 of an unworthy alliance, — it marries the noble and 

 the ignoble. You cannot lift mastication up to the 

 level of intellectual processes, and to seriously compare 

 the two is to degrade the latter. Sydney Smith him- 

 self could not have been guilty of such bad taste. 



Let me finish this chapter with a bit of prose 

 from Ben Jonson. 



" Some words are to be culled out for ornament 

 and color, as we gather flowers to strow houses or 

 make garlands ; but they are better when they 

 grow to our style ; as in a meadow where, though 

 the mere grass and greenness delight, yet the variety 

 of flowers doth heighten and beautify." 



