Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/225

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Here is a writer who, at any rate, has not the vice of 'elegant variation'. Most of the possibilities of repetition, for good and for evil, are here represented. As Bagehot himself might have said, 'we have instances of repetition that are good in themselves; we have instances of repetition that are bad in themselves; and we have instances of repetition that are neither particularly good nor particularly bad in themselves, but that offend simply by recurrence'. The ludicrous appearance presented by our collection as a whole necessarily obscures the merit of individual cases; but if the reader will consider each sentence by itself, he will see that repetition is often a distinct improvement. The point best illustrated here, no doubt, is that it is possible to have too much of