or to receive any one who does not possess some special qualifications to be enrolled in its ranks. - London Saturday Review.

EXERCISE 138.

Read one of the selections from the list in Appendix C. As you read make careful note of the leading ideas; connect these in a single paragraph, omitting all illustrations and explanations.

CHAPTER VII.

WHAT NOT TO SAY.

LESSON 38.

Digressions.

THERE is always a tendency, as we write, to forget the exact topic on which we are writing, and to admit to a place in our composition sentences, and sometimes even whole paragraphs, which, while they may have something to do with the general subject on which we are writing, have little or nothing to do with the particular part or phase of the subject set before us for discussion. It is hard to stick to our text. We are apt to be turned aside from our direct purpose and to wander in a long digression far away from the topic. We stop to tell a story only remotely connected with our theme, or, having made an allusion perhaps fittingly enough, we explain it in unnecessary detail.

The following paragraph from De Quincey illustrates the most frequent violation of unity - including matter which should be dropped altogether, or taken out and organized by itself.

1. What reason is there for taking up this subject of Joanna precisely in the spring of 1847? 2. Might it not have been left till the spring of 1947; or, perhaps, left till called for? 3. Yes, but it is called for; and clamorously. 4. You are aware, reader, that among the many original thinkers whom modern France has

produced, one of the reputed leaders is M. Michelet. 5. All these writers are of a revolutionary cast; not in a political sense merely, but in all senses; mad, oftentimes, as March hares; crazy with the laughing-gas of recovered liberty; drunk with the wine-cup of their mighty revolution; snorting, whinnying, throwing up their heels like wild horses in the boundless pampas, and running races of defiance with snipes, or with the winds, or with their own shadows, if they can find nothing else to challenge. 6. Some time or other I, that have leisure to read, may introduce you, that have not, to two or three dozen of these writers; of whom I can assure you beforehand, that they are often profound, and at intervals are even as impassioned as if they were come of our best English blood. 7. But now, confining our attention to M. Michelet, we in England who know him best by his worst book, the book against priests, etc. — know him disadvantageously. 8. That book is a rhapsody of incoherence. 9. But his "History of France" is quite another thing. 10. A man, in whatsoever craft he sails, cannot stretch away out of sight when he is linked to the windings of the shore by towing-ropes of history. 11. Facts and the consequences of facts draw the writer back to the falconer's lure from the giddiest heights of speculation. 12. Here, therefore, in his “France,” — if not always free from flightiness, if now and then off like a rocket for an airy wheel in the clouds, M. Michelet, with natural politeness, never forgets that he has left a large audience waiting for him on earth, and gazing upward in anxiety for his return: return, therefore, he does. 13. But history, though clear of certain temptations in one direction, has separate dangers of its own. 14. It is impossible so to write a history of France, or of England-works becoming every hour more indispensable to the inevitably political man of this day-without perilous openings for error. 15. If I, for instance, on the part of England, should happen to turn my labors into that channel, and (on the model of Lord Percy going to Chevy Chase)

"A vow to God should make

My pleasure in the Michelet woods

Three summer days to take,"

probably, from simple delirium, I might hunt M. Michelet into delirium tremens. 16. Two strong angels stand by the side of his

tory, whether French history or English, as heraldic supporters: the angel of research on the left hand, that must read millions of dusty parchments, and of pages blotted with lies; the angel of meditation on the right hand, that must cleanse these lying records with fire, even as of old the draperies of asbestos were cleansed, and must quicken them into regenerated life. 17. Willingly I acknowledge that no man will ever avoid innumerable errors of detail; with so vast a compass of ground to traverse, this is impossible; but such errors (though I have a bushel on hand, at M. Michelet's service) are not the game I chase; it is the bitter and unfair spirit in which M. Michelet writes against England. 18. Even that, after all, is but my secondary object; the real one is Joanna the Pucelle d'Orléans for herself.

Condensed and stripped of digressions, what the paragraph stands for is this: "One reason for taking up this subject of Joanna now, is that M. Michelet, in his History of France, while treating of this same subject, writes against England in a bitter and unfair spirit. That, however, is only a secondary reason; the real one is Joanna the Pucelle d'Orléans for herself." Where and how De Quincey has digressed from this theme is shown in the following analysis.

The matter in the first column is clearly pertinent to the theme of the essay, as well as to the theme of the paragraph. That in the second column might be retained without serious offence against unity. But the matter in the third column is so remotely connected with the theme of the paragraph, and some of it so little pertinent even to the theme of the essay, that it must be regarded as seriously digressive. A considerable part of the matter in the third column might be used to form a separate paragraph on the general character of Michelet's History of France, were such a paragraph desirable.

The following paragraph, after the first sentence, is a