Hamerton are not to be looked upon as models after which to construct school compositions and college essays. These latter are necessarily very short and simple in structure. The writer does not attempt to treat the subject fully, but merely to present a few points coherently. Hence the utility of the rule for school and college, that paragraphs of introduction and conclusion-if employed at all-should be short. See § 125.

The introduction should state the general subject as concisely as may be without sacrificing clearness. Probably 50 words would be an ample limit. Webster's argument in the Dartmouth College case is a model:

The general question is, whether the acts of the legislature of New Hampshire of the 27th of June and of the 18th and 26th of December, 1816, are valid and binding on the plaintiffs without their acceptance or

assent.

The following, somewhat longer, but equally good, is from Ruskin's lecture on Turner and his Works:

My object this evening is [not so much to give you any account of the works or the genius of the great painter whom we have so lately lost (which it would require rather a year than an hour to do), as] to give you some idea of the position which his works hold with respect to the landscape of other periods, and of the general condition and prospects of the landscape art of the present day. [I will not lose time in prefatory remarks, as I have little enough at any rate, but will enter abruptly on my subject.]

By suppressing the portions in square brackets, Ruskin might have stated his subject in 40 words; but the extra words have their value, as every reader will see.

If the composition is in simple Narration, the introductory paragraph may consist of a brief statement of the time, place, and occasion from which the action starts; e. g.:

On the summit of one of the heights of the Odenwald, a wild and romantic tract of Upper Germany, that lies not far from the confluence of the Main and the Rhine, there stood, many, many years since, the

castle of the Baron von Landshort, etc.-IRVING: The Spectre Bridegroom.

But there is less need of an introduction in Narration than in any other form of writing.

In Description (i. e. a long, circumstantial description) it is advisable to begin by locating the object described. Thus:

Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely-peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon street; the house is the old Pyncheon house; and an elm tree of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon elm, etc.-HAWTHORNE: Seven Gables, ch. i.

In Exposition and Argument it is highly advisable, if not indispensable, to introduce clearly and succinctly the thing to be expounded or the proposition to be established. Thus :

The subject to which I have to beg your attention during the ensuing hour is "The Relation of Physiological Science to Other Branches of Knowledge."

[Here follows a paragraph of personal explanation.]

Regarding Physiological Science, then, in its widest sense, as the equivalent of Biology, the Science of Individual Life, we have to consider in succession:

1. Its position and scope as a branch of knowledge.

2. Its value as a means of discipline.

3. Its worth as practical information.

4. At what period it may best be made a branch of education.

HUXLEY (v.), p. 72.

The concluding paragraph of a composition should, if possible, leave upon the reader's mind an impression of power. It should not merely sum up the writer's views and statements, but it should drive them home by a succession of quick hard blows. There should also be, if the subject admits of it, an expression of feeling. The conclusion of Macaulay's second essay on The Earl of Chatham is at once forcible, dignified, and profoundly emotional:

Chatham sleeps near the northern door of [Westminster Abbey], in a spot which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and from above, his own effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer and to hurl defiance at her foes. The generation which raised that memorial of him has disappeared. The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, and none a more splendid, name.-MACAULAY: Chatham (Second Essay).

The above is oratorical in tone. This is simpler:

But there is another memorial of Edgar Tryan, which bears a fuller record: it is Janet Dempster, rescued from self-despair, strengthened with divine hopes, and now looking back on years of purity and helpful labor. The man who has left such a memorial behind him must have been one whose heart beat with true compassion and whose lips were moved by fervent faith.—George Eliot: Janet's Repentance, ch. xxviii., end.

The conclusion of Darwin's Origin of Species is remarkable for the ability with which the author sums up (see § 59) and makes concrete the results of his reasoning:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability, from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of

nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.— DARWIN: Origin of Species, ch. xv., end.

D*

CHAPTER V.

NARRATION.

22. A NARRATIVE is, in general, the statement of the details of something accomplished. This may be an act of nature, e. g., a storm, an earthquake, an eclipse of the sun. Or it may be the act of man, or of some other animal endowed with intelligence and will. Again, it may be real or it may be imagined. Thus, the storm in which the poet Shelley was drowned, and which is narrated in the biographies of him, was real; the snow-storm in which Eppie's mother perished (Silas Marner, ch. xii.) existed only in George Eliot's imagination. The story of Philip of Pokanoket in Irving's Sketch-Book is real; that of Rip Van Winkle is wholly imaginary. The tales of animals and birds in Esop's Fables are fictitious; the following is fact:

I have seen a mother-monkey, disturbed in her gambols on the ground by the whining of a tiny baby left half-way up an adjacent tree, suddenly break off, and, hastily shinning up the tree, snatch up the baby, hurry to the very topmost branch, where she plumped it down, as who should say, "Tiresome little wretch!" and then come down to resume her play. Thus is a mischievous midshipman mast-headed, and thus is the British baby sent up to the nursery while mamma amuses herself.-KIPLING, ch. iii. p. 72.

Whatever be the basis of a narrative, whether it be fact or fiction, an act of nature or the deed of man, it must be something more than a passing movement. It must be something that has a clearly-marked beginning and a clearly-marked end. We may narrate the coming on of a storm, its progress, its cessation; but a single flash of light