to free speech may startle by its abruptness, but it may startle some from somnolence. Many writers introduce extemporaneous remarks for no other reason than to arouse their hearers from that state of listlessness or reverie, which has been encouraged by the uninterrupted flow of "graceful paragraphs."

3. Another method of preparing a discourse is the method of what is called easy writing; the committing of one's thoughts to paper without any or without much premeditation. The writing may be strictly extemporaneous, or it may be intermediate between the extemporaneous and the elaborate composition. When we speak here of elaborate composition, we include not merely the mental exercise which the author goes through in penning his discourse, but also the hard work which precedes his use of the pen. He may have so carefully arranged his thoughts and selected his words that when he commits them to paper he may work easily and rapidly. When the poet Wordsworth had inwardly digested as many lines as his memory could carry he committed them to paper by the hands of an amanuensis. He cannot be said, therefore, to have written extempore nor easily; rather, he wrote memoriter and after careful thought.1

1 Wherever this poet went he seems to have been preparing himself for his literary labors: "He had taken the Allfoxden House, near Stowey, for one year (during the minority of the heir), and the reason why he was refused a continuance, by the ignorant man who had the letting of it, arose (as Mr. Coleridge informed me) from a whimsical cause, or rather a series of causes. The I wiseacres of the village had, it seemed, made Mr. Wordsworth the subject of their serious conversation. One said that he had seen him wander about by night, and look rather strangely at the moon! and then he roamed over the hills like a partridge.' Another said: 'He had heard him mutter, as he walked, in some outlandish brogue that nobody could understand.' Another said: 'It's useless to talk, Thomas, I think he is what people call a wise man (a conjurer).' Another said: 'You are every one of you wrong; I know what he is: we have all met him tramping away toward the sea; would any man in his senses take all that trouble to look at a parcel of water? I think he carries on a snug business in the smuggling line, and in these journeys is on the lookout for some wet cargo.' Another very significantly said: 'I know that he has got a private still in his cellar, for I once passed his house, at a little better than a hundred yards distance, and I could smell the spirits, as plain as an ashen fagot at Christmas.' Another said: 'However that was, he is surely a desperd French Jacobin for he

But what men technically denominate easy writing is that which excludes the severe preliminary study, and is either extemporaneous writing, or some degree of approximation toward it. On this method we may remark:

A. In the general, the more nearly a writer approaches to the elaborate method, so much the more fully does he gain the advantages and expose himself to the evils of it; and the further he recedes from this method, so much the less of its advantages does he gain and so much the more does he escape from some of its evils.

B. The easier the writing is, so much the less useful and the more hurtful it may be to the writer. The less useful; for if he can write extempore, he can (exceptions aside) learn to speak extempore, and by speaking extempore he can avoid the waste of his time and health in bending over his writing-desk, and can devote himself to such reading as will be more profitable than his easy writing. The more hurtful; for by this extemporary penmanship he encourages that species of mental indolence which consists in combining a semblance of activity with an abstinence from hard work.

C. The easier the writing is, so much the less useful it may be to those who persevere in listening to it. It has damped the ardor of the man who speaks; for he utters words which have lost their first glow, he utters them with a languor, like that in which he penned them; he wrote them when he was thinking of his pen and ink rather than of his parishioners; and as Sheridan profanely said that “easy writing makes hard reading," so it may be emphatically said that easy writing makes hard hearing and facile sleeping. Dr. Wayland remarks: "Men seem to suppose that what is written must, of course, be sound sense. I confess I have not always found it so; and I have been sometimes tempted to ask: would a preacher be willing to look his audience in

is so silent and dark that nobody ever heard him say one word about politics.' And thus these ignoramuses drove from their village a greater ornament than will ever again be found amongst them."- Cottle's Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, Vol. I. pp. 319, 320.

the face and utter such common-place truisms as he delivers from a manuscript, looking on his paper "?1

The habit of easy writing is thus characterized by Thomas Carlyle :

"In the way of writing no great thing was ever, or will ever be, done with ease, but with difficulty! Let ready writers with any faculty in them lay this to heart. Is it with ease, or not with ease, that a man shall do his best in any shape; above all, in this shape, justly named, of 'soul's travail,' working in the deep places of thought, embodying the true out of the obscure and possible, environed on all sides with the uncreated false? Not so, now or at any time. The experience of all men belies it; the nature of things contradicts it. Virgil and Tacitus, were they ready writers? Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity, but not till he had thought with intensity. Long and sore had this man thought, as the seeing eye may discern well, and had dwelt and wrestled amid dark pains and throes; though his great soul is silent about all that. It was for him to write rapidly at fit intervals, being ready to do it. And herein truly lies the secret of the matter: such swiftness of mere writing, after due energy of preparation, is doubtless the right method; the hot furnace having long worked and simmered, let the pure gold flow out at one gush. It was Shakespeare's plan- no easy writer he, or he had never been a Shakespeare. Neither was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with ease; he did not attain Shakespeare's faculty, one perceives, of even writing fast after long preparation, but struggled while he wrote. Goethe, also, tells us he had nothing sent him in his sleep'; no page of his but he knew well how it came there. It is reckoned to be the best prose, accordingly, that has been written by any modern. Schiller, as an unfortunate, unhealthy man, könnte nie fertig werden, never could get done.' The noble genius of him struggled not wisely, but too well, and wore his life itself heroically out. Or did Petrarch write easily? Dante sees himself growing grey over his Divine Comedy, in stern, solitary death-wrestle with it, to prevail over it, and do it, if his uttermost faculty may; hence too it is done and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures forevermore among men. No; creation, one would think, cannot be easy. Your Jove has severe pains and fire-flames in the head out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for manufacture, that is a different matter, and may become easy or not easy, according as it is taken up. Yet of manufacture, too, the general truth is that, given the manufacturer, it will be worthy in direct proportion to the pains bestowed on it, and worthless always, or nearly so, with no pains. Cease, therefore, O ready writer, to brag openly of thy rapidity and facility; to thee (if thou be in the manufacturing line), it is a benefit, an increase of wages; but to me it

1 The Ministry of the Gospel, v. 12.

is sheer loss, worsening of my pennyworth. Why wilt thou brag of it to me? Write easily, by steam, if thou canst contrive it, and canst sell it; but hide it like virtue."1

2

We do not deny that there are exceptional cases, in which a man may be justified in writing easily what but for some. economical reason ought to be spoken extempore. Dean Stanley says of Dr. Arnold's sermons: "However much they may have occupied his previous thoughts, they were written almost invariably between the morning and afternoon service; and, though often under such stress of time that the ink of the last sentence was hardly dry when the chapel-bell ceased to sound, they contain hardly a single erasure, and the manuscript volumes remain as accessible a treasure to their possessors as if they were printed." Powerful as these sermons were when read, they would have been more powerful, if the man who could write them so rapidly had been able to deliver them without his notes; and, useful as they now are, a smaller number of them would probably be more useful, if the labor which was extended over the many had been concentrated on the few. Some aged clergymen have left at their death five or six thousand manuscript sermons, all faithfully written out. If all the care expended on the thousands had been devoted to as many hundreds of sermons, they might now be of

some use.

One of the formidable arguments against written sermons has originated from this fatal facility of composition. "A written preparation is a lazy substitute for that severe mental effort which would be necessary for extemporizing." "The habit of constant writing without much of any excitement" tends "to produce tameness of thought." 3 This objection is removed by the plan of elaborate composition as described in § 2. I. 1. An argument for that plan, is that it combines the excitement of extemporaneous with the accuracy of written discourse.

1 Westminster Review, Vol. xxviii. pp. 338, 339.

2 Memoir of Arnold, chap. iii.

8 Quarterly Christian Spectator, Vol. v. p. 535.

ARTICLE VII.

NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

PUBLICATIONS OF REV. ALEXANDER B. GROSART.

Some of our readers may be pleased to see the titles of works (constituting the Fuller Worthies' Library) edited by Rev. A. B. Grosart, pastor of St. George's United Presbyterian church, Blackburn, Lancashire, England. Mr. Grosart is a genuine lover of books, and especially of old books. The larger part of the works which he has edited are not published, but merely printed. Of the books printed on large sheets there were, originally, only one hundred and six copies; of the books printed on small sheets, only one hundred and fifty-six copies. They are edited with great care and skill, and some of them superbly printed. Mr. Grosart is yet engaged on his enterprise, and is preparing editions of other works which promise to be highly interesting. Of the volumes which he has already printed the following, in addition to the Selections from the Writings of Jonathan Edwards noticed on pages 191-193, are now before

us:

The Poems of Thomas Washbourne, D.D. 8vo. pp. 236.—Mr. Grosart's Memorial, Introduction, and Notes occupy 43 pages. · The antiquarian will be interested in the minutiae of this and the other Introductions of the "Library."

The Poems of Sir John Beaumont, Bart. 8vo. pp. 397.-The strong religious feeling of Sir John is expressed in such lines as the following, in his poem on Sin:

"The sinner will destroy God, if he can;

Oh, what hath God deserved of thee, poor man,

That thou should'st boldly strive to pull him down

From his high throne, and take away his crown."- p. 91.

The Works in Verse and Prose of Sir John Davies. - The volume of his poems is the only one yet received by us. 8vo. pp. 477. The Poems of Giles Fletcher, B.D. 8vo. pp. 243. To these poems are prefixed Mr. Grosart's Memorial, Introduction, and Notes. pp. 86. The Poems of Joseph Fletcher, M.A., Rector of Wilby, Suffolk. 8vo. pp. 258.

The Poems of Phineas Fletcher, B.D., Rector of Hilgay, Norfolk, in four large octavo volumes. The first volume contains Mr. Grosart's Memoir of the Fletchers; an Essay on their Poetry; an Essay on the