If the title of the present paper be seriously studied it will prove puzzling to the average critic. It is a charming sentence, rich in possibilities of meaning. The last two words, like the tail of a bee, bear honey and poison on the same spike, or in sacs close by. Which shall you receive, a sweet drop or an enraging prick? What, indeed, does “saying nothing” mean? And nothing well said, does that mean a well-said nothing? or shall we understand that anything has been poorly said? Behold how easily a pen slips into hopeless obscurities of mere ink! I see that I am gone wool-gathering, and that my verbal distinctions just attempted do not distinguish. Was it Horace who said this?— “Non in caro nidore voluptas summa, sed in te ipso est.” The “precious smack,” however, goes a long ways when there is nothing else to be had. The art of saying nothing well is the art of the bore or the art of the decadent, as you may interpret it. But a voice at my elbow quietly suggests that the distinction is still without a difference. The decadent, being always a bore, whether he has a precious smack or a smack of preciousness, has the art of saying nothing well and everything ill. The good old days, when men who wrote were impressed with the value of original thought, were hard on brains, but easy on dictionaries. A tremendous idea was set for all time in a few words grabbed at random from a scant vocabulary. Even after “art for art’s sake” had come to stay, the great early poets were stingy in their verbal dealings with art. It is surprising to note how meagre is the vocabulary of Sappho, or of Theocritus, or of Pindar. And yet what incomparable riches of expression! The masters were in a flux of imagination, and to them a word had no value beyond its fitness to stand as a perfect sign of what the brain originated. But not so with us; we chase the word for the word’s sake. We imagine that there is something precious in verbal style quite independent of what it may be used upon. A cheese, although rotten, is made sweet enough, we think, by being wrapped in an artistic poster. We are quite familiar with the phrase “good literature,” which has come to mean nothing and that wordy, or a good thing and that well written, according to the individual taste of the critic deciding the matter. But most generally we now take for granted that there is really nothing worth saying on account of its intrinsic value. As a new woman said of her kind the other day, “Oh, the female form is but a clothes-horse nowadays. A woman is suggested, not seen, by what she wears,” we may well say of thought: it is a mere word-rack, a peg upon which to hang attractive diction. Not unfrequently the thought is quite dispensed with and the phrasing hangs upon nothing.