by appeals to their state pride, while the real facts as to the power and spirit of the North were concealed from them. That they maintained a brave and stubborn contest so long was due... [cause and effect]. ; their uniform success at the beginning of the war was mainly owing [cause and effect] . . . Once the North was fully aroused [result]. They were clearly over-matched.

...

EXERCISE 40.

井

Develop the following topic-sentences, using at least two of the methods of development described in the foregoing lessons:

1. The dangers of athletic contests are over-estimated. 2. Longfellow and Whittier were different types of men. 3. Rivers seem to have lost much of their importance with the geographers.

4. There is much to be learned from a visit to a machine shop.

5. Burr's whole career was marked by insincerity.

6. At the dead of night, every sound seems to be full of a fearful significance.

7. The winter at Valley Forge was full of suffering for Washington's army.

8. Fishing excursions, I have noticed, are seldom repeated by the same people during the same season.

9. American states have not yet learned how to deal effectively with the tramp.

10. Rapid street-railway transit is making healthier. homes possible for laboring men.

11. There are very few of the old proverbs that prove true in all cases.

12. There is a vital distinction between "liberty" and "doing what you please."

13. Loss of hearing deprives one of more pleasures than loss of sight.

CHAPTER IV.

HOW TO SAY IT.

LESSON 21.

Short Sentences and Their Uses.

IN the preceding chapter we have seen that a writer may build up a paragraph from a topic-sentence by adding other sentences containing one or more of the following: repetitions of some of the ideas of the topic-sentence, particulars and details, specific instances or examples, comparisons and analogies, statements telling what a thing is not or is not like, contrasts, causes or effects, and proofs. Having built up the paragraph from the topic-sentence by one or more of these methods, the question still remains for the writer whether he has properly divided his thought into sentences.

One important part of this question is concerned with the length of the different sentences. Shall the sentences be all of about the same length, or of different lengths? and why? Are there special uses for long sentences in a paragraph and special uses for short sentences? We will answer the last question first.

Observe in the following paragraphs how sharply the attention is arrested by the short sentences (here printed in italics). It is because short sentences attract attention that the topic-sentence of a paragraph is often found expressed in a short sentence. (See Lesson 11.)

134

Age brings other obvious changes besides the loss of active power. The sensibilities are less keen, the intelligence is less lively, as we might expect under the influence of that narcotic which Nature administers. But there is another effect of her "black drop" which is not so commonly recognized. Old age is like an opium-dream. Nothing seems real except what is unreal. I am sure that the pictures painted by the imagination, the faded frescoes on the walls of memory, come out in clearer and brighter colors than belonged to them many years earlier. Nature has her special favors for her children of every age, and this is one which she reserves for our second childhood. — O. W. HOLMES: Over the Teacups, 39.

The distinguishing part of our constitution is its liberty. To preserve that liberty inviolate, seems the particular duty and proper trust of a member of the house of commons. But the liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.—BURKE: Speech on American Taxation.

Observe in the following paragraphs that the short sentences (here in italics) mark a transition from one part of the subject to another:

To write history respectably - that is, to abbreviate despatches, and make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united, and abounding in withs and withouts — all this is very easy. But to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely perfect. There are poems which we should be inclined to designate as faultless, or as disfigured only by blemishes which pass unnoticed in the general blaze of excellence. There are speeches, some speeches of Demosthenes particularly, in which it would be impossible to alter a word without altering it for the worse. But we are acquainted with no history

which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to bewith no history which does not widely depart, either on the right hand or on the left, from the exact line.

The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories. It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and like other districts similarly situated, it is ill-defined, ill-cultivated, and ill-regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory.

History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples. Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis. Those who can justly estimate these almost insuperable difficulties will not think it strange that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative or in the speculative department of history.-MACAULAY: Essay on History.

I am not going to write the history of La Pucelle: to do this, or even circumstantially to report the history of her persecution and bitter death, of her struggle with false witnesses and with ensnaring judges, it would be necessary to have before us all the documents, and therefore the collection only now forthcoming in Paris. But my purpose is narrower. There have been great thinkers, disdaining the careless judgments of contemporaries, who have thrown themselves boldly on the judgment of a far posterity, that should have had time to review, to ponder, to compare. There have been great actors on the stage of tragic humanity that might, with the same depth of confidence, have appealed from the levity of compatriot friends-too heartless for the sublime interest of their story, and too impatient for the labor of sifting its perplexities to the magnanimity and justice of enemies. To this class

belongs the Maid of Arc. The ancient Romans were too faithful to the ideal of grandeur in themselves not to relent, after a generation or two, before the grandeur of Hannibal. Mithridates, a more doubtful person, yet merely for the magic perseverance of his indomitable malice, won from the same Romans the only real honor that ever he received on earth. And we English have ever shown the same homage to stubborn enmity. To work unflinchingly for the ruin of England; to say through life, by word and by deed, Delenda est Anglia Victrix ! — that one purpose of malice, faithfully pursued, has quartered some people upon our national funds of homage as by a perpetual annuity . . . On the same principle, La Pucelle d'Orleans, the victorious enemy of England, has been destined to receive her deepest commemoration from the magnanimous justice of Englishmen. - DE QUINCEY: Joan of Arc.

In the following paragraph note that the short sentences (here in italics) announce ideas that are developed or explained in the longer sentences which follow:

We will leave to a separate chapter our sketch of the literary society of Edinburgh as then flourishing. The attitude of Burns in respect to it is very curious and interesting. Here was a young peasant, without education, without knowledge of the world, full of Scotch reserve and that farouche pride of the rustic which reaches the height of a passion. The pride which is supposed to accompany blue blood and great descent has justifications outside of the individual possessed by it; and in most cases it imposes a certain restraint upon that individual, and demands of him some qualities, or at least some graces, in accordance with it. But the pride of a peasant is wildly personal, and independent of every consideration. The more he is conscious of his deficiencies even, the more wildly bent he will be upon attentions and observances due in society only to high social qualifications. From the moment when Burns steps into the light in Edinburgh, this mixture of shyness, inordinate selfopinion, and an almost polemical determination to prove himself the equal, if not the superior of everybody round him, appears both in his behavior and in the private records of his opinions. It was no doubt a very difficult position. Uncultured, unaccustomed to the ways of society, knowing nobody, feeling himself a kind of vague