This offering no resistance, this ease and limpidity--a getting rid of all friction in the written page--herein certainly lies the secret of much that is winsome in literature. How little friction the mind encounters in Addison, in Lamb, or in the best of our own prose writers; and how much in Meredith, and the later writings of Henry James! Is not friction to be got rid of as far as possible in all departments of life? One does not want his shoes to pinch, nor his coat to bind, neither does he want to waste any strength on involved sentences, or on cryptic language. Did you ever try to row a boat in water in which lay a sodden fleece of newly fallen snow? I find the reading of certain books like that. Some of Browning’s poems impede my mind in that way. Force of impact--that is another matter; that warms and quickens the mind. Browning’s “How they brought the Good News from Ghent” makes the mind hot by its rush and power. There is no mere mechanical friction of elliptical sentences and obscure allusions here. Yes, the style that does not tire us is better than the style that does. Thus Arnold’s style is better than Walter Pater’s, because it is easier to follow; it is not so conscious of itself; it is not so obviously studied. Pater studied words; Arnold studied ideas. Pater sacrificed the more familiar democratic traits of language--ease, simplicity, flexibility, transparency--to his passion for the more choice aristocratic features,--the perfumed, the academic, the highly wrought. Again, I find Arnold’s style less fatiguing than Lowell’s, because it has more current, more continuity of thought, and is freer from _concetti_ and mere surface sparkle. I find Swinburne’s prose more tiresome than that of any contemporary British critic, because of its inflated polysyllabic character, and his poetry more cloying than that of any other poet, because of its almost abnormal lilt and facility; it has a pathological fluidity; it seems as though, when he begins to write verse, his whole mental structure is in danger of melting down and running away in mere words. His heat is that of fever; his inspiration borders on delirium. We never tire of Addison by reason of his style, or of Swift or of Lamb or of our own Irving or Hawthorne or Warner. It is probably as rare to find a French writer whose style tires the reader as it is to find a German whose style does not. As M. Brunetière well says, French literature is a social literature, German is philosophic, and English individualistic. It is the business of the first to be agreeable, of the second to be profound, of the third to be original. Who does not tire of Strauss sooner than of Renan, of Macaulay sooner than of Sainte-Beuve?