action. The most obvious peculiarity is the tendency
which he noticed himself, to "use too big words and too
many of them." He had to explain to Miss Reynolds
that the Shakesperian line, --

You must borrow me Garagantua's mouth,

had been applied to him because he used "big words,
which require the mouth of a giant to pronounce them."
It was not, however, the mere bigness of the words
that distinguished his style, but a peculiar love of
putting the abstract for the concrete, of using awkward
inversions, and of balancing his sentences in a monotonous
rhythm, which gives the appearance, as it sometimes
corresponds to the reality, of elaborate logical discrimina-
tion. With all its faults the style has the merits of
masculine directness. The inversions are not such as to
complicate the construction. As Boswell remarks, he
never uses a parenthesis; and his style, though ponder-
ous and wearisome, is is transparent as the smarter snip-
snap of Macaulay.

This singular mannerism appears in his earliest
writings; it is most marked at the time of the Rambler;
whilst in the Lives of the Poets, although I think that
the trick of inversion has become commoner, the other
peculiarities have been so far softened as (in my judgment,
at least), to be inoffensive. It is perhaps needless to
give examples of a tendency which marks almost every
page of his writing. A passage or two from the Rambler
may illustrate the quality of the style, and the oddity of
the effect produced, when it is applied to topics of a
trivial kind. The author of the Rambler is supposed to
receive a remonstrance upon his excessive gravity from
the lively Flirtilla, who wishes him to write in defence of

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