Page:Text, type and style; a compendium of Atlantic usage.djvu/18

6 to each, all blunders that observation shows to be common.

"Further, since the positive literary virtues are not to be taught by brief quotations, nor otherwise attained than by improving the gifts of nature with wide or careful reading, whereas something may really be done for the negative virtues by mere exhibition of what should be avoided, the examples collected have had to be examples of the bad and not of the good."

The entertaining quality of the book is due largely to these "examples of the bad,"—especially in view of the eminent names often attached to the worst of them,—and to the authors' comments on them. An instance will be found on page 108 below, in connection with Emerson's foible of putting a comma between a noun and its verb. One can but wonder and take courage when one learns of the sins against good English committed by some of the greatest writers, and how curiously addicted some of them seem to be to special idiosyncrasies of syntax or punctuation.

The present writer has appropriated only one or two of the Messrs. Fowler's illustrative examples, but has taken his own as they have "happened" in the course of his reading—largely, of proofs, and, to some extent, of miscellaneous works. Only two books—"Sesame and Lilies" and "Diana of the Crossways"—did he reread