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legacy as a patriot, not the sentiment "My country, right or wrong," but "My country - it shall never be wrong if I can help it!" The true patriot is not the one who says it is my country, and its institutions, that are sacred; but who says, with Lowell, "It is Man who is sacred." The citizen who holds to this sacredness of humanity will be the most useful in securing institutions and a country whose services to humanity will make them also sacred in his own heart, and in the hearts of all good men.—Century, 43: 150.

(c) GENERAL LAWS OF THE PARAGRAPH.

As a unit of discourse, every paragraph, whether related or isolated, is subject to the general laws of unity, selection, proportion, sequence, and variety, which govern all good composition.

(1) Unity.

The most important of these is the law of unity, which requires that the sentences composing the paragraph be intimately connected with one another in thought and purpose. The fundamental idea of the paragraph is oneness of aim and end in all of its parts. Unity is violated, therefore, when any sentence is admitted as a part, which does not clearly contribute its share of meaning towards the object for which the paragraph is written. Unity forbids digressions and irrelevant matter. The most common violation of unity is including matter in one paragraph which should either be taken out and made a separate paragraph by itself or be dropped altogether.

The following paragraph from Dryden, on Translation, will serve to illustrate how unity is frequently violated: :

(1) Translation is a kind of drawing after the life; where every one will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. It is one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable; and

another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole. (2) I cannot, without some indignation, look on an ill copy of an excellent original; much less can I behold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my life to imitate, so abused, as I may say, to their faces by a botching interpreter. What English readers, unacquainted with Greek or Latin, will believe me or any other man, when we commend these authors, and confess, we derive all that is pardonable in us from their fountains, if they take those to be the same poets whom our Oglevies have translated? But I dare assure them that a good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation, than his carcase would be to his living body. (3) There are many who understand Greek and Latin and yet are ignorant of their mother tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few; it is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them without the help of a liberal education, long reading and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us; the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted while he was laying in a stock of learning. Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discern, not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author from that which is vicious and corrupt in him. And for want of all these requisites, or the greatest part of them, most of our ingenious young men take up some cried-up English poet for their model; adore him, and imitate him, as they think, without knowing wherein he is defective, where he is boyish and trifling, wherein either his thoughts are improper to his subject, or his expressions unworthy of his thoughts, or the turn of both is unharmonious.

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The section of this paragraph marked (2) is an expression of Dryden's personal feelings towards bad translations, and shows no connection with what precedes in the section marked (1), which states the nature and difficulties of translation. Section (2) should either be omitted entirely or be taken out and made into a separate paragraph, prefaced, as Bain suggests (Rhetoric, Part I. p. 113), by some such statement as this: A good original must not be judged by an ill copy.". Section (3) would, in the latter case, also become a separate paragraph, prefaced by some such statement as this: "That good translations are few is not to be wondered at. For a good translation two things are required: a knowledge of English, as well as a knowledge of the original." The order of the paragraphs would then be (1), (3), (2). If section (2) were omitted entirely, section (3) might be unified with section (1) by prefacing (8) with the single

sentence:

For a good translation two things are required: a knowledge of English, as well as a knowledge of the original." The changes suggested here in the order of sentences illustrate also the law of sequence (the fourth law of the paragraph).

Good examples of paragraphs possessing unity will be seen in the quotation from Hamerton, already given, and in the quotations from Emerson's Essay on Art (see Proportion), from Macaulay's Essay on the Earl of Chatham, in the quotation from Dr. Johnson (see Sequence), and in the descriptive paragraph quoted in illustration of the next law (see Selection).

In the following from Ruskin, unity is secured by the figure of speech which runs through the whole paragraph:

Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with fierce and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength; the plains and the lower hills are the repose and the effortless motion of the frame, when its muscles lie dormant and concealed beneath the lines of its beauty, yet ruling those lines in their every undulation. This, then, is the first grand principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit of the hills is action; that of the lowlands, repose; and between these there is to be found every variety of motion and of rest; from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks, which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with the clouds drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to Heaven, saying, "I live forever!"— Modern Painters, Vol. I. pt. ii. sec. iv. chap. i.

Paragraphs for criticism by the student will be found in Appendix A 1.

(2) Selection.

The law of selection requires that of all which might be said on the subject treated, only those points be chosen for mention in the sentences which will best subserve the purpose of the paragraph and will give force and distinction to its main idea. In narrative or descriptive paragraphs, a

few well-chosen points will usually serve better than the mention of many minute and unimportant particulars. What to omit is here the important question for the writer. The effort to make the narrative or description complete even to the smallest details frequently renders the account obscure. There is less danger of this in paragraphs of an expository or argumentative character. In these, violations of this law more often arise from selecting remote and inapplicable figures of speech and far-fetched and misleading contrasts.

The following quotation contains two such contrasts, so far-fetched and inapplicable to the subject that their force is lost, to most readers. They are here printed in italics :

Ordinary criminal justice knows nothing of set-off. The greatest desert cannot be pleaded in answer to a charge of the slightest transgression. If a man has sold beer on Sunday morning, it is no defence that he has saved the life of a fellow-creature at the risk of his own. If he has harnessed a Newfoundland dog to his little child's carriage, it is no defense that he was wounded at Waterloo. — Macaulay: Lord Clive.

Some more obvious 'transgression' than 'harnessing a Newfoundland dog to his little child's carriage,' (it will occur to most readers,) ought to have been cited, in order to justify the extraordinary method of defense suggested — that of exposing the wounds the prisoner received at Waterloo. The very wideness from each other of the things selected for contrast defeats the writer's purpose. This is a charge, however, that cannot often be brought against Macaulay. His paragraphs are, in general, models of structure, unity, and force.

De Quincey, especially when he tries to be humorous, often suffers from what may be called a temporary paralysis of the selective faculty. In the following example, if the subject of the paragraph is 'The Hebrew Source of Mendelssohn's Music,' the portions in italics are not happily chosen.

It strikes me that I see the source of this music. We that were learning German some thirty years ago must remember the noise made at that time about Mendelssohn, the Platonic philosopher. And why ?

Was there anything particular in "Der Phædon

on the immortality of the soul? Not at all; it left us quite as mortal as it found us; and it has long since been found mortal itself. Its venerable remains are still to be met with in many worm-eaten trunks, pasted on the lids of which I have myself perused a matter of thirty pages, except for a part that had been too closely perused by worms. But the key to all the popularity of the Platonic Mendelssohn is to be sought in the whimsical nature of German liberality, — which, in those days, forced Jews into paying toll at the gates of cities, under the title of "swine," but caressed their infidel philosophers. Now, in this category of Jew and infidel stood the author of "Phædon." He was certainly liable to toll as a hog; but, on the other hand, he was much admired as one who despised the Pentateuch. Now, that Mendelssohn, whose learned labours lined our trunks, was the father of this Mendelssohn, whose Greek music afflicts our ears. Naturally, then, it strikes me that, as 66 papa "Mendelssohn attended the synagogue to save appearances, the filial Mendelssohn would also attend it. I like wise attended the synagogue now and then at Liverpool and elsewhere.

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have been cruising in the same latitudes; and, trusting to my own remembrances, I should pronounce that Mendelssohn has stolen his Greek music from the synagogue. There was, in the first chorus of the "Antigone," one sublime ascent (and once repeated) that rang to heaven it might have entered into the music of Jubal's lyre, or have glorified the timbrel of Miriam. All the rest, tried by the deep standard of my own feeling, — that clamours for the impassioned in music, even as the daughter of the horse-leech says, "Give, give," is as much without meaning as most of the Hebrew chanting that I heard at the Liverpool synagogue. I advise Mr. Murray, in the event of his ever reviving the "Antigone," to make the chorus sing the Hundredth Psalm rather than Mendelssohn's music, or, which would be better still, to import from Lancashire the Handel chorus-singers. — De Quincey: The Antigone of Sophocles.

What connection is there, in the following, between the anecdote of Lord Nelson and the remainder of the paragraph?

During pedestrian tours in New England, in various parts of the West, and in every Southern State, I have frequently stayed for the night at the houses of poor farmers, laborers, fishermen, and trappers. In such journeys I have invariably listened to the tales of the neigh

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