"The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all other arts, structure is all important, felt or painfully missed, everywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning, and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition of literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of the artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity of _mind_ in style." These are words which the writer should have always present to his memory, if he has something serious that he wants to say, or if he wishes to express himself in the classic and perfect manner. But if it is his fate merely to be obliged to say something, in the course of his profession, or if he is bid to discourse for the pleasure of readers in the Underground Railway, I fear he will often have to forget Mr. Pater. It may not be literature, the writing of _causeries_, of Roundabout Papers, of rambling articles "on a broomstick," and yet again, it _may_ be literature! "Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden"--Mr. Pater charges heavily against these. The true artist "knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to which any _diversion_, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject . . . In truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be lying somewhere, according to Michel Angelo's fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone." Excellent, but does this apply to every kind of literary art? What would become of Montaigne if you blew away his allusions, and drove him out of "the allusive way," where he gathers and binds so many flowers from all the gardens and all the rose-hung lanes of literature? Montaigne sets forth to write an Essay on Coaches. He begins with a few remarks on seasickness in the common pig; some notes on the Pont Neuf at Paris follow, and a theory of why tyrants are detested by men whom they have obliged; a glance at Coaches is then given, next a study of Montezuma's gardens, presently a brief account of the Spanish cruelties in Mexico and Peru, last--_retombons a nos coches_--he tells a tale of the Inca, and the devotion of his Guard: _Another for Hector_!