STYLE

(Lat. stylus, or stilus.) A kind of pencil made use of by the Romans for writing on waxed tablets. It was made of bra or iron, with one end sharp for writing, and the other blunt and smooth to make erasures with; hence to turn the style is a phrase used by ancient writers, signify ing to make corrections. In Literature, the word style may be defined to mean the distinctive manner of writing which belongs to each author, and also to each body of writers, allied as belonging to the same school, country, or age. It is that winch, to use the expre ion of Dryden, individuates each writer from all others. The style of an author is made up of various minute particulars, which it is extremely difficult to describe, but each of which adds something to the aggregate of qualities which belong to him. Collocation of words, turn of sentences, syntax, rhythm; the relation, abundance, and the character of his usual figures and metaphors; the usual order in which thoughts succeed each other; the logical form in which conclusions are generally deduced from their premises; the particular qualities most insisted on in description amplification; and concisene , clearne and obscurity, directne and indirectne , exhaustion, suggestion, suppre ion — all these are features of style, in the largest sense of the expre ion, in which it seems to comprehend all peculiarities belonging to the manner in which thought is communicated from the writer to the reader. Excellence of style, particularly of the rhetorical parts of style, was more cultivated by the ancients than the moderns; and le , perhaps, at the present day, than at any former period since; the English language began to be written in prose with correctne and elegance. Since the period when Bolingbroke Junius, Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke became established as models, a certain superficial samene of style, wanting in the roughne and vulgarity, but also in the force and individuality of old English composition, seems to prevail to such an extent as to render modern writing extremely monotonous and artificial. But it should never be forgotten that whatever quality may command a temporary popularity, no work, either in poetry or prose, has ever permanently maintained its hold on pubiic admiration without excellence of style. Style, in the Calendar, is a manner of reckoning tin* [s. 1204]