The standard of style of the last century was more aristocratic than is
the standard of to-day. The important words with Hume, Blair, Johnson,
Bolingbroke, as applied to style, were elegance, harmony, ornament;
and the chief of these was elegance: the composition must make the
impression of elegance, as to-day we demand the impression of the vital
and the real. Even the homely is more suited to the genius of democracy
than is the elegant. Perhaps the word is distasteful to modern ears
from its conventional associations or its appropriation by milliners
and dressmakers. One would not care to write inelegantly, but would
rather his page did not suggest the word at all, as he would have
his home or his dress suggest the quieter, humbler, more serviceable
virtues. In the old story of Bruce’s saying, the style may be said
to be homely. “I doubt I have killed the comyn.” “Ye doubt?” replies
Kirkpatrick; “I mak siccar.” Hume puts this into elegant language in
this wise: “Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, one of Bruce’s friends, asking him
soon after if the traitor was slain, ‘I believe so,’ replied Bruce.
‘And is that a matter,’ cried Kirkpatrick, ‘to be left to conjecture?
I will secure him.’” This is polite prose, dressed-up prose, but its
charm for us is gone.