Unkindly were it to lay down the Journal without a grateful reference to d'Argenson's style. It is a vexed question, though all that is necessary has long been said with the noble generosity of Ste. Beuve. Those of d'Argenson's friends who were gifted with a pretty wit used to tell him that he wanted style. What they meant was that he wanted stylishness. In those days, before Buffon had let in light upon the darkness, the meaning of style was very undefined. People used the word to denote delicacy and refinement. To those qualities d'Argenson could never pretend. His diction was of a heterogeneous character, the language of polite society mingling with expressions from the gutter or the farmyard, or places more unsavoury still. The structure of his sentences is often erratic, and he is never embarrassed by the importunities of grammar. Such necessary niceties he regarded with unconcern, or as a mark of coxcombry or pedantry; in learning and literature he hated both. What he valued was mother wit; and he was content to express it in his mother tongue. He was not inclined to cavil at a word which had been good enough for Rabelais, nor was French the less French for being Tourangeau, as that great master proved. Such licence however as he took, he could well afford to take. D'Argenson's style resembles his statesmanship. Delicacy, finesse, those smaller aptitudes that come by practice, he had never been able to acquire; yet he displays no slight command of the larger qualities of style. His writing wins us, not by the charm of symmetry and grace, but by the kind of rude dignity which comes of will and energy and power. He cleaves his way to his own meaning with a certain two-handed effectiveness by no means unimposing; and we have never to fear having lost one jot or tittle of the idea he is trying to convey. Often ungrammatical, he is never obscure. The reader has scarcely a knot to unravel in the whole nine volumes of his Journal. Though unformed and unrefined by art, his literary instinct is of the surest. He never misses the point of a story, or fails to convey it to his readers. His handling of episodes, grave, sure and convincing, compels the regret that he was not born poor, in order that he might have achieved distinction as a master of style. But the binding charm of d'Argenson is his perennial flow and freshness. Brisk, alert, ever unwearied, his reader cannot weary of him. His vitality scatters the dust from his pages, leaving them bright as the day they were written. He is a foe, as ever, to pomp and ceremony; his narrative opens readily, it closes with a clasp. He has none of St. Simon's breadth of elaboration; yet he has something which makes us feel, as we lay down the ninth volume, that we owe the writer no grudge, and that if life were long enough, we would open a tenth with unblunted curiosity and pleasure.