Frederic Harrison, in a recent address on style, is cautious in recommending the young writer to take thought of his style. Let him rather take thought of what he has to say; in turning his ideal values into the coin of current speech he will have an exercise in style. If he has no ideal values, then is literature barred to him. Let him cultivate his sensibilities; make himself, if possible, more quickly responsive to life and nature about him; let him try to see more clearly and feel more keenly, and connect his vocabulary with his most radical and spontaneous self. Style can never come from the outside,--from consciously seeking it by imitating the manner of favorite authors. It comes, if at all, like the bloom upon fruit, or the glow of health upon the cheek, from an inner essential harmony and felicity. In a well known passage Macaulay tells what happened to Miss Burney when she began to think about her style, and fell to imitating Dr. Johnson; how she lost the “charming vivacity” and “perfectly natural unconsciousness of manner” of her youthful writings, and became modish and affected. She threw away her own style, which was a “tolerably good one,” and which might “have been improved into a very good one,” and adopted “a style in which she could attain excellence only by achieving an almost miraculous victory over nature and over habit. She could cease to be Fanny Burney; it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson.” It is giving too much thought to style in the more external and verbal aspects of it, which I am here considering, that leads to the confounding of style with diction, and that gives rise to the “stylist.” The stylist shows you what can be done with mere words. He is the foliage plant of the literary flower garden. An English college professor has recently exploited him in a highly wrought essay on Style. Says our professor, “The business of letters is twofold, to find words for meaning and to find meaning for words.” It strikes me that the last half of this proposition is not true of the serious writer, of the man who has something to say, but is true only of what is called the stylist, the man who has been so often described as one having nothing to say, which he says extremely well. The stylist’s main effort is a verbal one, to find meaning for words; he does not wrestle with ideas, but with terms and phrases; his thoughts are word-begotten and are often as unsubstantial as spectres and shadows.