Mr. Spencer in discussing this matter remarks that, as “language is the vehicle of thought, we may say that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency, and that in composition the chief thing to be done is, to reduce the friction and inertia to the smallest amounts.” But it must be remembered that motion is not only against friction but by friction. The rail may be too smooth as well as too rough. Every locomotive, for a given piece of track with a given gradient, has a certain co-efficient of friction for its most effective working, above and below which there is alike decrease of efficiency; and in engineering it is equally a problem to keep friction up as to reduce it. So I say of style, that it may be too smooth and facile, and may reduce mental friction to so low a point that there is no grasp and no real progress. A sentence of Hooker or Milton, magnificent stylists though they are, can, as an affair of economy of attention, be greatly improved by breaking it up into a number of simple plain sentences after the primer fashion, The cat mews, The dog barks, etc.; but this process certainly is not an improvement of their style. But if economy of attention were the sole secret of style, certainly the more economy we introduce the greater and better should be the style. Professor Sherman, of the University of Nebraska, in a recent article shows that heaviness—that which requires “constant effort in reading”—is due to the number of words _per_ sentence, which has been reduced in the course of the history of English prose from an average of fifty words a sentence in Chaucer and Spenser to five in the columns of a modern, low-grade, popular story-paper; but it obviously cannot be maintained that the style of the story-paper is ten times better than that of Spenser’s _State of Ireland_.