Our thoughts, our opinions, are like apples on the tree: they must take time to ripen; and when they are ripe, how easily they fall! A mere nudge brings them down. How easily the old man talks; how full he is of wisdom! Time was when his tongue was tied; he could not express himself; his thoughts were half formed and unripe; they clung tightly to the bough. Set him to writing, and with great labor he produced some crude, half-formed notions of his own, mixed with the riper opinions of the authors he had read. But now his fruit has matured and it has mellowed; it has color and flavor; and his conversation abounds in wisdom. VI The standard of style of the last century was more aristocratic than is the standard of to-day. The important words with Hume, Blair, Johnson, Bolingbroke, as applied to style, were elegance, harmony, ornament; and the chief of these was elegance: the composition must make the impression of elegance, as to-day we demand the impression of the vital and the real. Even the homely is more suited to the genius of democracy than is the elegant. Perhaps the word is distasteful to modern ears from its conventional associations or its appropriation by milliners and dressmakers. One would not care to write inelegantly, but would rather his page did not suggest the word at all, as he would have his home or his dress suggest the quieter, humbler, more serviceable virtues. In the old story of Bruce’s saying, the style may be said to be homely. “I doubt I have killed the comyn.” “Ye doubt?” replies Kirkpatrick; “I mak siccar.” Hume puts this into elegant language in this wise: “Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, one of Bruce’s friends, asking him soon after if the traitor was slain, ‘I believe so,’ replied Bruce. ‘And is that a matter,’ cried Kirkpatrick, ‘to be left to conjecture? I will secure him.’” This is polite prose, dressed-up prose, but its charm for us is gone. VII