He then passes to the proposition that the art of the craftsman of words must be essentially a scholarly art; that the best writer, “with all the jealousy of a lover of words, will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majority of those who use them to efface the distinctions of language”; but there must be no hint of pedantry; the tact of the great writer being employed in seeing what new words and usages really enrich language and make it elastic and spontaneous, as well as what additions merely debase it. And then, too, the word-artist must employ “a self-restraint, a skilful economy of means”; every sentence must have its precise relief, “the logically filled space connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome.” He must employ “honourable artifice” to produce a peculiar atmosphere; and thus the perfect artist will be recognised by what he omits even more than by what he retains. “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.” The one essential thing, then, is “that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first.” “All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view.” It must be composition, and not loose accretion. The literary artist must leave off “not in weariness and because he finds _himself_ at an end, but in all the freshness of volition.” He admits that there are instances of great writers who have been no artists, who have written with a kind of unconscious tact; but he maintains that one of the greatest pleasures of really good literature is “in the critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure.” He sums up this part of the subject by saying that all good literature must be directed both by _mind_ and _soul_, the mind giving the logical structure, the soul lending the personal appeal. He then diverges into an elaborate illustration drawn from the methods of Flaubert, whose theory it was that though there might be a number of ways of expressing a thought, yet that there was one perfect way, if the artist could only find it, one unique word, one appropriate epithet, phrase, sentence, paragraph, which alone could express the vision within; and again he enforces his belief in the “special charm in the signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards a due end.”