The writing of the present day has many distinguishing excellences and faults. The most conspicuous of the latter is, perhaps, a want of simplicity and steadiness of style. Force--startling energy--are too uniformly aimed at by some; others affect continual sarcasm and irony, whatever may be the nature of the occasion. One class of writers are so priggishly curt and epigrammatic as to throw over their lucubrations an uniform air of small impertinence: it would be easy to point out, I think, an incessant illustration of this "school," if one may use the word. Others uniformly affect the trenchant and tremendous, with very big words, and awful accumulations of them. Some seem to aim at a picturesque ruggedness of style--defying rule, and challenging imitation. Very many writers of all classes are so parenthetical and involved in their sentences, that by the time that they have got to the end of a sentence, both they and their readers have forgotten where they set out from, and how the plague they got where they are: looking back breathless and dismayed at a confused series of hyphens entangled among all sorts of exceptions, reservations, and qualifications. This fault, and a grievous one it is, is daily illustrated, and by writers, who, by their carelessness in this matter, do themselves incalculable injustice, rendering apparently turbid the clearest possible stream of reasoning, marring the effect of the most beautiful and apposite illustration, and irritating and confusing the reader. In my opinion, this fault of our public writers is to be traced to the influence of Lord Brougham's style. He has, and always had, a prodigious command of nervous and apposite language, always writing or speaking with a violent _impetus_ upon him; and yet, while crashing along, his versatile and suggestive faculties hurried him incessantly from one side to the other, hither and thither--anticipating _this_, qualifying that, guarding against _this_, reserving that--extruding undesirable implications and inferences, with a sort of wild rapidity and energy--adopting ever-varying fanciful equivalent expressions--crowding, in fact, a dozen considerable sentences into one turbid monster. Yet it must be owned, that in all this he seldom misses his way; his original _impetus_ carries him headlong on to the point at which he had aimed. Not so with his imitators. They start with an imaginary equality of force, of fulness, and variety; but forthwith rush into a strange higgle-piggledy, helter-skelter sort of imposing wordiness, equally bewildering and stupifying to their readers and themselves. No man can fall into this sort of fault who is habituated to leisurely distinctness of thought: he will conceive beforehand with deliberate purpose, and that, _cæteris paribus_, will induce a clear, close, and energetic expression of his thoughts, preventing misapprehension, and convincing even a strongly prejudiced opponent. Shorten your sentences, gentlemen; take one thing