In his mature writings the composition is less faulty than the diction, which is certainly too Johnsonian. The composition is a little bald and often diffuse; but the meaning of each sentence is always clear, and in economical writing that is the first of virtues. In a work of imagination we may desire to have the greatest number of the greatest ideas put into each sentence; but a scientific treatise is more often concerned with a single truth in its full development; and the perpetual recurrence of the same phrases in different connections is unavoidable, in proportion to the thoroughness of the discussion. Great variety of language would either imply in the writer or cause in the reader some confusion of thought. It is not surprising, then, to find Malthus saying substantially the same thing in nearly the same words, whether he is presenting his views on Population directly in a book on the subject, or placing them in their economical context in a book on Political Economy, or touching them incidentally in a Corn Law pamphlet or _Quarterly_ article, or answering questions about them before a Commons Committee. His abundant metaphors in the first essay[980] had simply led to misunderstanding; and he deliberately renounced fine writing for high thinking, present popularity for permanent usefulness.[981] The first essay was the turning-point in his literary life. Except the pamphlets on Haileybury College, all his later writings are economical. His personal history, being uneventful, was, like a time of dull annals, presumably happy. The fine portrait of him by Linnell,[982] taken in his old age, gives a pleasing impression, not only of mildness and firmness, but of serene contentment, without any trace of physical suffering or physical defect, though it is certain he had the latter.[983] In person he was tall and “elegantly formed.”[984] 1799 is the year of his first Continental journey.[985] In January 1800 his father died, at the age of seventy. In the same year appeared the tract on _The High Price of Provisions_. In 1802 Malthus was again on the Continent.[986] In June 1803 he published the second (or quarto) essay, which seems, from a passage in Edward Clarke’s _Travels_, to have been long expected by his friends. “I am sorry,” writes Clarke to him from Constantinople on 16th March, 1802, “to find you confess your breach of duty in not having written a book. But you have been engaged in the press, because I heard at the Palace that you had published a new edition of your _Population_, and, moreover, I was there assured so long ago as last year that you had written a work on the Scarcity of Corn. How does this accord with your declaration? Perhaps it is a pamphlet, and therefore strictly not ‘a book.’”[987]