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4
venerable institutions,
FOREWORD
taste for unwritten law ;
the Athen/zum had a
its policy was adum-
brated rather than defined, but few contri-
butors, I believe, were unconscious of its
existence. Not one of us, I am sure, would
have expressed anything but what he thought
and felt, but we all hoped that our thoughts
and feelings would not be too dissimilar from
those of our presiding genius, Athene the wise,
our eponymous goddess ; because, if they were,
her high-priest, albeit one of the most charming
and accomplished people in Fleet Street or
thereabouts, stood ready with the inexorable
blue pencil to smite once and smite no more.
In the matter of expression, too, Her Omniscience
was, to my mind, something over-
exacting. Concision is an excellent quality in
a writer. We all know what Ben Jonson said
about Shakespeare and we all agree with him.
Still, when, by the shape of one's paragraphs,
the balance of one's sentences, and the internal
rhythm of one's clauses, one fancies that an
article has been raised almost to the perfection
of a work of art, it is disappointing to find a
line cut out here, two more there, half a dozen
missing from the second galley, and from the
third a whole paragraph gone for no better
reason than that they are not essential to the
argument especially when one is persuaded
that they are.