the suggestive pages of Emerson and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and De Quincey. The analytical instinct and habit are so pronounced that what is seen is seen clearly, and expressed clearly, and must be accepted or rejected on the face of it as it reads. One may open the essays of the author quite at will to find emphatic endorsement of this habit of clear and clean deliverance of thought. When he writes that "Johnson is big, but Shakespeare is great;" that "Marlowe's Tambourlaine is a strange compound of inspiration and desperation;" that "the first condition of true expression is an effort of mind that restrains, rather than stimulates, fluency;" and that "grit is in the grain of character," we have what the Old English called, telling sentences, carrying their own meaning and cogency with them, and quite without the need of comment.

Much of that pithy, pungent, and antithetical bluntness that is found in Whipple is directly traceable to that acute discernment of mind before whose open vision the truth was vividly palpable. Analytical acuteness in style and authorship has its faults, and may easily be pushed to dangerous extremes, by which its very purpose is defeated. Its excellence, however, consists in this, that it is an ever-present protest against the superficial and obscure; reminds the writer of his errors in the line of the irrelevant, and goes far to lay a safe and stable basis for the best results in literary art. Analysis, moreover, it cannot be too strongly urged, is a mental, and not a merely verbal or dialectic, function; a positive exercise of intellect as an organ of discernment. In treating of the critical quality of Whipple's Prose, special mention must be made of its Candor and Conscientiousness. So ingenuous and impartial was he in the formation and utterance of his judgments, that, in the current acceptation of the term, he was scarcely a critic at all. As an American author has said, "He was intellectual sympathy incarnate," "writing," as Whittier tells us, "with conscience always at

his elbow, and never sacrificing his real convictions for the sake of epigram." That cynicism, and censoriousness, and dogmatic pride of opinion, which has been so frequently exhibited, from the days of the Edinburgh Reviewers to those of Carlyle, is conspicuously absent. So striking is this fairness of dealing, and so strong the author's desire to bring to light the better side of that which came under his censorhip, that such a narrow and bitter critic as Poe failed to appreciate it, as he writes of him, "He has been infected with that boast of heresy-the cant of critical Boswellismby dint of which we are to shut our eyes to all autorial blemishes, and to open them, like owls, to all autorial merits." What more desirable eulogium could be given upon our author's catholicity and moral justness as a critic, than that thus reluctantly given by a poet who wrote so many of his opinions of others with his pen dipped deep in gall, and spoke of "Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists" with contemptuous disdain? It is under the influence of this genial spirit that Whipple condemns the historian Hallam as too unsympathetic. One of his papers is suggestively named, "The Economy of Invective," in which he pleads for its necessary but moderate and kindly exercise. Readers of his review of Matthew Arnold are well aware as to how he deals well-deserved blows at that imperious autocrat of English criticism, in his "moral and intellectual superciliousness." He cannot brook that high conceit with which this English critic assumes the place of a censor and satirizes the Philistines without mercy.

This is not to say that Whipple is not an independent critic, with his own views and his own way of stating them. No critic of his day was more courageous than he. He speaks of Agassiz and Sumner, of Choate and Emerson, as he does, because in science and politics and jurisprudence and literature they did, respectively, their own thinking, and spoke to men straight out from their innermost convictions.

If any one has serious doubts on this point, he has but to read such papers as "The Sale of Souls," "Mental and Moral Pauperism," and "Intellectual Health and Disease," to have all misgivings removed. But Whipple was charitable and appreciative, as well as decisive, and always gave the benefit of the doubt to the subject of his criticism. Those who knew him the best speak of his "singular lowliness" of spirit; of that modesty of bearing and opinion which made him so attractive as a friend; of that "shyness at the core of his being," to which he refers in speaking of Edward Everett, and assert that "he valued only what fault could be found with him."

There are few, if any, passages in his collected works more beautiful in this regard than those we find at the close of his Elizabethan Literature, in which, after reviewing as a critic the different authors of that notable era, the thought of his own imperfections as a man and an author rises vividly to view, and he humiliates himself in penitence and conscious shame at the feet of those whom he has deigned to judge, and who have long since passed, as all must surely pass, into the open presence of the "only infallible critic and judge of works and men." If this is charity and humility at the expense of "even-handed justice," would that English and American Letters had a larger infusion of it.

Before we dismiss the Style of Whipple, on its critical side, it should be especially noted that he was, first and last, a literary critic. A rapid glance at the character of the themes which he chose is sufficient to justify such an assertion. Of the nine volumes of his works, there are no less. than five that are distinctively in the line of literary criticism, while each of the remaining four is so largely imbued with this spirit as to make its final effect upon the reader literary in its type and measures. Essays upon "Everett" and "Agassiz," on "Religious and Scientific Theories" and Young Men in History," while not so pervasively literary

as those on Bacon and Wordsworth and the Old English Dramatists, are sufficiently so to mark them as the written product of a critic who always gave to his criticisms a literary cast, and, as he himself strikingly states it, kept within the "artistic region of principles."

In fine, Whipple never loses sight of the author, in his function as a critic; always subordinates the examination of literary product in the origination of such product; vitally connects the critical and the creative, and ever seeks to confirm the impression that criticism is a means, and not an end, and never reaches its best and most fruitful functions save when it stimulates the authors of a nation to new and nobler endeavors in literary art.

II. We come to a second and equally notable feature of the style of Whipple, in its Solidity.

It is substantial and weighty throughout; possessed of much of that suggestiveness on which he placed such high value in the writings of Shakespeare and others. He exhibits, thus, the first feature of the Intellectual Style, in the emphasis of subject-matter over the form or manner in which it is expressed. He had, as a man and a writer, what one of his New England admirers has called, "massive good sense." We can state our meaning at this point in no better way than by saying, that it was quite impossible for Whipple to give utterance to the nonsensical or insignificant. In the strictest etymological usage, he was a sensible writer, full of sense, "immersed in matter," as he affirms was true of Bacon, so that no reader can peruse his pages sympathetically save in a reflective and somewhat inquisitive state of mind. Hence it is that he confined his attention to prose, rather than to verse, and, even in the sphere of prose itself, emphasized those forms and features of it that are meditative and instructive, rather than those lighter forms which have mainly to do with the attractive and pleasurable. However entertaining much of his authorship may be, such a purpose was

never with him a primary one, so eager was he to raise somewhat by his pen the existing level of intelligence, and incite his readers to thoughtful activity.

A

One of the most striking proofs of this eminently didactic and substantial quality of the style before us is the fact, that, from almost any page of the several volumes of the author, extracts may be taken which are full of mental meaning. In this respect, he is similar in his style to many authors who on other grounds are decidedly his superiorsto Matthew Arnold and Emerson, Holmes and Lowell. few of these quotable passages must suffice. Of Agassiz he says, "A naturalist pure and simple, he rose into supernaturalism in the most natural way," and "that to be ten minutes in his company was to obtain the strongest argument for the immortality of the soul." Of men of genius he finely remarked, that "they have no fear of death because their souls are thoroughly alive; the idea of death never occurs to a live mind." "How many go down to the grave,” he adds, "without having known, during a long life, what thought is.

"Error and immorality-two words for one thing, for error is the immorality of the intellect, and immorality the error of the heart." "Great poems are the creations of great individualities." "Great characters are those within whom the celestial city is actually organized." "The moment a scientific man begins to bluster about his discoveries and call them, my truth, it is all over with him." Writing of the pure-minded Hooker, he says, "We feel that he has communed with all the principles he communicates."

Such are a few of these salient and seminal utterances, -concise and condensed up to the limit of verbal and mental terseness; so matterful as to demand serious study on the part of the reader, as also, in their fertility of suggestion, to repay any measure of attention which is given them. At this point, it would not be amiss to characterize the style under criticism as the teaching style-the art and language