impart. Is the author too presumptuous in hoping that these school-boy pieces of his may contribute in some small degree to this happy result? To amend incorrect sentences, while of course necessary, is after all a negative thing, and the mental attitude it requires is the critical. Composition is positive, requiring the constructive attitude on the part of the writer. It seems a pity to keep the student working exclusively at crooked English, without doing something even from the outset to foster that desire to contrive, to build, to bring to pass, which is so necessary to any fruitful literary work. For this reason, there are introduced from the beginning of the book certain problems to solve, the object being to give the student all along something creative to do. As the book progresses, the relative proportion of this constructive work is increased, while the merely critical, which was so predominating at first, becomes more and more subordinate. It is not in theology alone that the law of "Thou shalt not" should be swallowed up in the gospel of "Thou shalt"; in composition, too, as in many other things, the ideal must be borne constantly in mind, to be effected as rapidly as the man can be trusted in obeying the gospel not to discard the law. 3. Attention is finally called to the Appendix part of the book, which contains, besides the Digest of Rules already mentioned and one or two other things, a Glossary of Words and Forms needing study or caution. In this Glossary will be found, arranged under one alphabet, not only whatever the student needs in order to work out the exercises, but a large number of words and phrases in excess of this requirement; the design being to make it complete enough to be a vade mecum for any writer in the locutions concerning which there is most liability of doubt or mistake. It is hoped that this feature will give the book a value beyond the schools for whose use it is primarily intended, and make it a practical aid in private study or private practice of composition. INTRODUCTION. T write an essay or any formal kind of composition seems to most people, and doubtless is, a much more difficult thing than to converse. But why should it be so? At bottom it is virtually the same thing, except that it is done with a pen instead of with the voice. The purpose too is the same, namely, to make others see a subject as the author sees it; and it ought to be just as natural, just as spontaneous, just as characteristic of the man, to write his thoughts as to speak them. If we could always bear this obvious truth in mind, and feel perfectly at ease with a pen in our hand, composition would cease to be the bugbear that it now too often is. What Composition requires. There is a good reason, however, which we ought not to ignore, why composition must in the nature of the case be more difficult than conversation. It is because in composing we have to be more careful and painstaking. We cannot, for one thing, be so off-hand about the words we use and the manner in which we put them together; we must take thought for choice and arrangement, because what we write is intended for a permanent expression of our thought, and we have no opportunity afterward to explain or correct our blunders. Nor again will it answer to throw out our ideas at random just as they chance to occur to us; we need to devise some order for them which will help the reader to follow them readily from point to point and to recall them afterward. Further, as our subject may be hard, or our reader slow to grasp it, we must often study how to express ourselves with such emphasis or animation, such copiousness or pointedness, as most surely to engage his attention and give our thought a lodgment in his mind. Many such necessary things belong to the art of putting our ideas on paper, and of course make composition a more studied and calculated work, and in this sense more difficult, though in its real nature it remains the same as speaking. Rhetoric: its Definition and Aim. Now when the words, the sentences, the plan, the various details of composition, are skilfully adapted to produce their proper and intended effect, we say the work has rhetorical qualities. Rhetoric, therefore, is the art of expressing our thoughts with skill, of giving to our composition the qualities that it ought to have in order to accomplish its author's design. For every author, if he works wisely, works with a specific design in view; a determinate object which he is aiming by his writing to effect. That object may be merely to give his readers plain information, as in a letter or a report or a history; it may be to amuse and entertain, as in a sketch or a story; it may be to arouse, animate, convince, as in an oration or an argument. variety of such objects, general and particular, might be mentioned, which however need not detain us now. For the present it is sufficient to say, as was said at the beginning, that the writer's paramount purpose, in whatever he writes, is to make others see a subject as he sees A |