For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and
astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great
qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and enforced and
seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing—he is, in my belief, without
his peer in the English-writing world. _Sustained._ I intrench myself
behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great
qualities as greatly as he does, but only by intervaled distributions of
rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between;
whereas Howell’s moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the
nights.