These passages have almost exactly the same number of words,--the former one hundred and fifteen and the latter one hundred and seventeen,--but a glance at the printed page shows that Irving's words take up one fifth more space than Lee's do. The reason is that Irving uses twenty-six words of more than two syllables, and Lee, aside from place-names, only two. Although both passages are written in analysis of American conditions, Irving, who is discussing the past, employs abstract or general words--to use the nouns alone, words like _discovery_, _anecdotes_, _peculiarity_, _civilisation_, _sentiment_, _qualities_, _magnificence_; Lee, who is looking to the future, uses definite and picturesque terms like _faces_, _street_, _buildings_, _eyes_, _panorama_, _towers_, _footfalls_,--uses these words even though he admits the idea he is dealing with cannot be pictured. Again, Irving cast his one hundred and fifteen words into three sentences averaging nearly forty words in length, and Lee put his into six, averaging a fraction less than twenty. Finally, all Irving's sentences are "loose," or so built that the reader may rest or even stop with a completed sense before he comes to the end; but four out of six in Lee's passage are "periodic," or so constructed that you must read to the end or be left hanging in mid-air. It would, of course, be forcing the issue absurdly far to insist or even suggest that so broad a comparison would apply without exception to the writers of a hundred years ago and of to-day, but in general there is a fair deduction to be drawn. Irving belonged to a group who were still addressing an eighteenth-century audience, an audience made up of "gentle readers"--men who enjoyed the rhythmical flow of a courtly and elegant style, who felt that there was a virtue in purity and beauty of diction apart from any idea the diction was supposed to express; but the modern reader esteems literature as a means rather than an end. It must catch and hold his attention; it must be clear and forcible first, and elegant as a secondary matter; and its words and sentences must be chosen and put together as a challenge to a reader in the midst of a restless, driving, twentieth-century world. With these facts in mind one may say, if he will, that Washington Irving was stiff and formal, but he should say this as marking a difference and not a necessary inferiority in Irving.