He struggles and stumbles and alters and adds, but finds at last that he has gone either too far or not quite far enough.

Then there comes upon him the necessity of choosing between two evils.

He must either give up the fulness of his thought, and content himself with presenting some fragment of it in that lucid arrangement of words which he affects; or he must bring out his thought with ambages; he must mass his sentences inconsequentially; he must struggle up hill almost hopelessly with his phrases,--so that at the end the reader will have to labour as he himself has laboured, or else to leave behind much of the fruit which it has been intended that he should garner.

It is the ill-fortune of some to be neither easy or lucid; and there is nothing more wonderful in the history of letters than the patience of readers when called upon to suffer under the double calamity.

It is as though a man were reading a dialogue of Plato, understanding neither the subject nor the language.