10 JANUARY 1829, Page 10

FINE WRITING MADE EASY.

THE man who desires to write fine nonsense with good accepta- tion, should turn the pages of certain articles in the Edinburgh Review with a daily and a nightly hand. There is in the last number one of these papers which contains passages that are only com- parable in substance and effect with Poi's "Verses by a *Person of Quality ;" we refer once more to the review " Atherstone's Fall of Nineveh." The razor-vender in the epigram, when re- proached by bleeding Hodge with the bluntness of his tools, answers that they were not made to shave but to sell. It may with equal force be pleaded for the beauties in the article named, that they are not made to be understood, but to sound ; they are written for the ear, not the sense ; it is never intended that the reader should stop and ask, " what would this mean to say ?" he is expected to go along with the writer intent in admiration on his power of language, and with an intellect, like a good subject, pas- sively obedient to phrases. From the single performance before us, admirable rules for " the Art of Fine Writing without any Ex- pense of Thinking" might be extracted. We have not leisure for such an undertaking ; but certain elements of success in the craft are so obvious, that without any trouble we can note and commu- nicate them. Reader, or writer, whichsoever you may be—when you sit down to compose a fine article, think of a fine word ; and when you have made your election, that fine word is theina et funda- mentwn. For example, gorgeous is the root, trunk, branch, leaf, and fruit of the article under analysis. What "God dam" is to Fi- garo's English, gorgeous is to the Reviewer's composition ; and whenever the language flags, or the bladder collapses, in comes " gorgeous" to inflate and plump it up again to seemliness. MATHEWS gives us a character whose slang of "and all that sort of thing you know, and all the rest of it," makes up the whole pith and point of an incessant tittle-tattle. The Re- viewer's gorgeous serves him in as good part. We do see indeed a whole paragraph at this moment without a single gorgeous; but it may with truth, be remarked, that it is the more conspicuous because it is unnamed—the gorgeous in effect occupies it entirely. We shall take a liberty with this very passage, which will show how important a matter is position. Reading it straight on as it is printed, it only seems stupendously fine, quite a Lord Mayor's show of a paragraph, all gilded and gorgeous ; but if we do but double it up, bringing the tail in juxtaposition with the head, it stands out stark nonsense and palpable contradiction. Treating of the poetry past and present, the writer says :— DESCRIPTION THE FORTE AND EXCELLENCE.

"We have abundance of admirable descriptions, ingenious similitudes, and elaborate imitations,—but little invention, little direct or over- whelming passion, and little natural simplicity. On the contrary, every- thing almost now resolves itself into description,—description not only of actions and external objects, but of characters, and emotions, and the signs and accompaniments of emotion—and all given at full length, ostentatious, elaborate, and highly finished, even in their coun- terfeit carelessness and disorder. But no sudden unconscious bursts, either of nature or of passion—no casual flashes of fancy, no slight passing intimations of deep but la- tent emotions, no rash darings of untutored genius, soaring proudly up into the infinite unknown !"

WANT OF VRAISEMBLANCE THE AC- COMPANYING FAULT.

" The chief fault; hoWever,-is the want of subject and matter—the absence of real persons, intelligible interests, and conceivable incidents, to which all this splendid apparatus of rhetoric and fancy (!) may attach itself, and thus get a purpose and a meaning, which it never can possess without them. To satisfy a rational being, even in his most sensitive mood, we require not only a just representation of passion in the ab- stract, but also that it shall be em- bodied in some individual person whom we can understand and sym- pathize with— and cannot long be persuaded to admire splendid images, and ingenious allusions which bear upon no comprehen- sible object, and seem to be intro- duced for no other purpose than to be admired."—No. XCV. p. 51.

Men, such as men commonly are, would, if undazzled by such fine pollysyllabic words, be apt to think that " admirable descriptions of actions, external objects, characters, and emotions," could not possibly consist with " want of subject and of matter ;" for such descriptions would comprehend every thing and quality in the scheme of nature. But the nonsense is too palpable to require critical exposure. It is only necessary for a reader of common sense to ask himself the meaning of one sentence before he passes to the examination of the following one ; by which process, he will find, that the positions stand together on the friendly terms of nine-pins—give any one its length, and down go all its neighbours.