order and proportion. Ben Jonson, who if not in all respects a great poet, was certainly a very good critic, said of Donne that he was the most truly a poet of any man in that time (a time that included Shakespeare), but that he would perish for want of being understood,- a remark which time has fully justified, and which I never could help sorrowfully applying to a writer of our own day, Mr. Browning. Style is that expression of a just thought in prose, or of a thought infused with imaginative passion in poetry, which is precisely adequate-neither more nor less. I have often thought that a happy image of it is an Italian girl with a jar of water on her head. The necessity of an exact balance gives dignity and something which may almost be called repose, to every motion. If the jar be of classical outline, as it often is, our pleasure is heightened. So in the matter of expression. The first requisite is (as Mrs. Glasse says in her receipt for jugged hare-first catch your hare) to catch your thought or feeling as the case may be, perhaps I ought rather to say be caught by it. Let that be honest, manly and sincere. Then the problem is, like that of the girl with the water jar, to bring it home to your reader without spilling over. Now the study of literature is in great measure a study of style, and this if followed on true principles will react upon the character-will make us less tolerant of extravagance of mind, of loose statment, of inaccurate thought and of that faulty expression which is more often an indication of some or all of these than we are willing to allow.

V.Piers Ploughman.In Dante we have had an example of a great national poet, and as contrasts are more striking than parallels-if, indeed, when we treat of so wayward a thing as human nature it be possible to find two lines of life that run parallel-I turned from him to Petrarch and the sentimentalists. The comparison enables us to feel more keenly the difference between real heartwood and veneer, between a poem made out of a true life, and a false life attempted to be made into a poem. I shall turn back today to a poem as sincere as that of Dante-in some senses as national as his, but which fails of effect because it is deficient in art; whose images are as vivid as Dante's, but differ in this that they are all presented on the plane of the actual and not the ideal, that the painting is Dutch and not Italian. The poem I speak of is Piers Ploughman's Visions.

VI.Montalgne.Essay writers of the old fashioned Tatler school were wont to catch at some hint offered by their daily walk as a point from which to wind off the yarn of their discourse, and at the same time supply the material for their spinning. Montaigne set the example of this method, though he commonly found in his library the peg on which to hang his inspired twaddle, and must have his wits shaken up and put in motion by stumbling over some jutting sentence in a book he was loitering through. Or sometimes it was a derangement in his own bodily economy that set his fancy going, and it is wonderful into what a fairyland of agreeable and even profound suggestion he contrived to blunder, through the bypath of a pain in the stomach or a fall from his horse. Montaigne more than any other, perhaps, carried the substance of his thread, as the spider does, in himself, and each of his Essays is a kind of web wherein to entangle every winged thing (of the smaller kind) that comes along, while he, sitting at the centre, feels from all quarters the faintest vibration that gives promise of mental food. Not a chance mote can be driven against it by the wind that does not send a thrill to the brain along some one of these subtile intellectual fibres stretched seemingly at random in every direction, yet bound one to the other by flying buttresses of almost invisible association, and coming together in the middle point where sits the alert spinner himself.