not ashamed of it, and I will not deny it; and before he has read through this book, I hope that I shall have convinced him that I am a man of sense, which is rather better than being a learned man; or at any rate if it is not better, I will say this, that learning without sense, if the thing is possible, is not worth half as much as learning and sense together; and lastly I earnestly wish the reader to believe, and I shall try to convince him of that too, that I am an honest man, and I think this is worth more than learning and sense together, though I think that an honest man should have some sense, and for my part I would not trust his honesty if I could not trust his sense.

LESSON 39.

Incoherence.

Closely connected with the question of unity, how to stick to the text, is the question of coherence, how to make the parts of a composition hang together. Incoherence in a composition results most often from a lack of careful planning at the outset. Successive paragraphs in an incoherent composition do not show logical relationship to one another, and the same may be true of successive sentences within a paragraph. When a sentence is unduly prolonged, it is quite likely to lack coherence; the parts do not hang together well.

Upon the return from Cales without success, though all the ships, and, upon the matter, all the men were seen, (for though some had so surfeited in the vineyards, and with the wines, that they had been left behind, the generosity of the Spaniards had sent them all home again;) and though by that fleet's putting in at Plymouth, near two hundred miles from London, there could be but very imperfect relations, and the news of yesterday was contradicted by the morrow; besides that the expedition had been undertaken by the advice of the parliament, and with an universal approbation of the people, so that nobody could reasonably speak loudly against it; yet, notwithstanding all this, the ill success was

heavily borne, and imputed to ill conduct; the principal officers of the fleet and army divided amongst themselves, and all united in their murmurs against the general, the Lord Viscount Wimbledon; who, though an old officer in Holland, was never thought equal to the enterprise. - CLARENDON: History of the Rebellion, I, 70.

The same danger which besets the paragraph, of forgetting the exact topic and putting in something irrelevant, besets the sentence also.

In the United States every male child that is born has a chance, though not an equal chance, for some are naturally more gifted than their fellows with a genius for success, though our Constitution says they are not, of becoming the foremost person in his city, in his state, or in the community at large.

There is also the danger of over-crowding a sentence with details which, though perhaps relevant, are so numerous as to make the thought hard to follow. The third sentence below is over-crowded with details about Dryden, which would better have been omitted or taken out and organized into a sentence by themselves.

1. Davies is remembered for his philosophical poem, the earliest of the kind in the language. 2. It is written in rhyme, in the common heroic ten-syllable verse, but disposed in quatrains. 3. No other writer has managed this difficult stanza so successfully as Davies: it has the disadvantage of requiring the sense to be in general closed at certain regularly and quickly recurring turns, which yet are very ill adapted for an effective pause; and even all the skill of Dryden has been unable to force it from a certain air of monotony and languor, a circumstance of which that poet may be supposed to have been himself sensible, since he wholly abandoned it after one or two early attempts. 4. Davies, however, has conquered its difficulties; and, as has been observed, "perhaps no language can produce a poem, extending to so great a length, of more condensation of thought, or in which fewer languid verses will be found."

The attempt to have a sentence say too much frequently leads to confusion, making the main idea hard to find.

Of the French town, properly so-called, in which the product of successive ages, not without lively touches of the present, are blended together harmoniously with a beauty specific - a beauty cisalpine and northern, yet at the same time quite distinct from the massive German picturesque of Ulm, or Freiburg, or Augsburg, and of which Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of the rivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being of the essence of its physiognomy. the town of Auxerre is perhaps the most complete realization to be found by the actual wanderer.

This confusion not infrequently shows itself in involved clauses, wheels within wheels, which are to be avoided.

In the crowd near the door there was found upon the ground a hat, in the inside whereof there was sewed upon the crown a paper, in which was writ four or five lines of that declaration made by the house of commons in which they had styled the duke an enemy to the kingdom, and under it a short ejaculation or two towards a prayer. - CLARENDON: History of the Rebellion, I, 51.

The involution of clauses in the foregoing sentence may be indicated thus:

(a) There was found a hat

(b) in the inside whereof there was a paper

(c) in which was writ four or five lines of that declaration made by the house of commons

(d) in which they had styled the duke an enemy to the kingdom.

There may be so many things mentioned in a sentence that the reader cannot tell just what the sentence-topic is. Such a sentence is said to be heterogeneous.

His [King Charles's] inclination to his new cup-bearer [Villiers] disposed him to administer frequent occasion of discoursing of the

court of France, and the transactions there, with which he had been so lately acquainted, that he could pertinently enlarge upon that subject, to the king's great delight, and to the gaining the esteem and value of all the standers-by to himself: which was a thing the king was well pleased with. He acted very few weeks upon this stage, when he mounted higher; and being knighted, without any other qualification, he was at the same time made gentleman of the bedchamber and knight of the order of the garter; and in a short time (very short for such a prodigious ascent) he was made a baron, a viscount, an earl, a marquis, and became lord high admiral of England, lord warden of the cinque ports, master of the horse, and entirely disposed of all the graces of the king, in conferring all the honors and all the offices of three kingdoms, without a rival; in dispensing whereof, he was guided more by the rules of appetite than of judgment; and so cxalted almost all of his own numerous family and dependants, whose greatest merit was their alliance to him, which equally offended the ancient nobility, and the people of all conditions, who saw the flowers of the crown every day fading and withered; whilst the demesnes and revenue thereof were sacrificed to the enriching a private family (how well soever originally extracted) scarce ever heard of before to the nation; and the expenses of the court so vast and unlimited, that they had a sad prospect of that poverty and necessity, which afterwards befell the crown almost to the ruin of it. CLARENDON: History of the Rebellion, I, 18.

A sudden and unexpected change of subject in a sentence is a hindrance to cohesion.

As he paused on the crest of the hill, looking foolishly about him and wondering where his tormentor could have hidden herself, a low faint tittering was heard, which seemed to come from the interior of the earth.

Coherence will be promoted by making the principal clause read as follows: "He heard a low, faint tittering, which seemed to come from the interior of the earth."

One needs to be cautious about appending a phrase or clause to a sentence as if by an afterthought.

Though he stood on the very spot where Leonidas and his handful of Greeks had repulsed the Persian hosts and stayed the tide of Oriental barbarism, he could think of nothing but his lost umbrella and he could call up no sentiment more noble than a desire to be seated, clothed and in his right mind, in a first-class hotel before a good hot dinner, which is not an uncommon experience for tourists.

Th words of reference, especially the pronouns, need careful attention. The writer should see that every one of his words of reference points with unerring accuracy to the word or expression to which he wishes to refer. Common errors are the use of their for its1 (a word in the singular preceding) and there is for there are (a word in the plural following).

A fortune of $118,000 is hanging on the grammatical construction of a single word, in the superior court of San Francisco. A jury, among whom there is not a school-teacher or any one claiming to be an authority on grammar, had, up to a week ago [Jan. 12, 1896], devoted 12 days to the consideration of the point, and at last account the case was still unsettled. The learned judgɔ and some half dozen high-priced lawyers had been helping to disentangle the intricacies of the problem.

The prize depends on the exact meaning of the word "their" as it appears in a clause in a contract. It is plain that the word is a pronoun, standing for an antecedent noun in the sentence, but there are two such nouns, and the point is as to which it refers. This is the $118,000

And at their option the Adams company is to have the use of all the machinery and coal hoisting appliances now in use by the Southern companies.

The Southern companies referred to have the money which is at stake, and if the jury decide that the "their" refers to them they will keep it. If they hold that "their" refers to the Adams company, then the Adams company will get it. The sentence occurs in a contract by which the Adams company was to unload all the coal ships of the Southern Pacific Railroad company for five years. The Adams company owned machinery for unloading the coal, but it broke down, and then the Southern Pacific company's machinery was used, the Adams company claiming the right to use it by virtue of the clause quoted. After the contract had run six months the Southern Pacific's machinery also broke down, and the Adams company alleged that the Southern people ought to repair it. The South