the narrative, which rounds out and completes the account, and the ordering of the details so as to produce this cumulative effect belongs to coherence rather than to emphasis. But often, especially when narration combines with exposition, there is opportunity of observing the principle of effective massing. The narrative form, in such cases, is chosen for the elucidation of some truth, and the effectiveness of the composition depends upon >>the emphatic presentation of this cardinal idea. For example, in the following paragraph from Green's Short History of the English People-which, for the purposes of the immediate discussion, we may view as a complete unit - the thought of especial value is the resolute character of Henry II. as underlying a policy that prepared England for future unity and freedom. It will be noted that this central theme is brought to the reader's attention at the very outset and is left with him at the close.

Young as he was, Henry mounted the throne with a resolute purpose of government which his reign carried steadily out. His practical, serviceable frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was something in his build and look, in the square, stout frame, the fiery face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the bull neck, the coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen, stirring, coarse-fibred man of business. "He never sits down," said one who observed him closely; "he is always on his legs from morning to night." Orderly in business, careless in appearance, sparing in diet, never resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a singular charm of address and strength of memory, obstinate in love or hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his general air that of a rough, passionate, busy man, Henry's personal character told directly on the character of his reign. His accession marks the period of amalgamation, when neighborhood and traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and Normans rapidly into a single people. A national feeling

was thus springing up before which the barriers of the older feudalism were to be swept away. Henry had even less reverence for the feudal past than the men of his day; he was indeed utterly without the imagination and reverence which enable men to sympathize with any past at all. He had a practical man's impatience of the obstacles thrown in the way of his reforms by the older constitution of the realm, nor could he understand other men's reluctance to purchase undoubted improvements by the sacrifice of customs and traditions of bygone days. Without any theoretical hostility to the co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a perfectly reasonable and natural course to trample either baronage or Church under foot to gain his end of good government. He saw clearly that the remedy for such anarchy as England had endured under Stephen lay in the establishment of a kingly government unembarrassed by any privileges of order or class, administered by royal servants, and in whose public administration the nobles acted simply as delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie in the organization of judicial and administrative reforms which realized this idea. But of the great currents of thought and feeling which were tending in the same direction he knew nothing. What he did for the moral and social impulses which were telling on men about him was simply to let them alone. Religion grew more and more identified with patriotism under the eyes of a King who whispered, and scribbled, and looked at picture-books during mass, who never confessed, and cursed God in wild frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples formed themselves on both sides of the sea round a sovereign who bent the whole force of his mind to hold together an Empire which the growth of nationality must inevitably destroy. There is throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of Henry's position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the midst of the twelfth, building up by patience and policy and craft a dominion alien to the deepest sympathies of his age, and fated to be swept away in the end by popular forces to whose existence his very cleverness and activity blinded him. But indirectly and unconsciously, his policy did more

than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.1

The passage does not indeed carry out the rather theoretical principle laid down by Professor Barrett Wendell in his English Composition that the effective massing of a paragraph may be tested by our ability to summarize its substance in a simple sentence of which the subject is the opening sentence of the paragraph and the predicate the last; but it approximates even this extreme test. We might perhaps say that the substantial thought of the passage from Green runs somewhat after this order: The resolute purpose displayed by the young king at his accession, and steadily carried out through his reign, was largely instrumental in preparing England for her future unity and freedom. The brief narrative résumé contained in the body of the paragraph is entirely subordinate to this main consideration, which is driven home by its emphatic position at the beginning and at the end of the passage.

Macaulay's famous account of the Black Hole horror, as contained in the Essay on Lord Clive, is an example of the more typical brief narrative. It may be considered as an enlarged narrative item of three paragraphs in length.

Then was committed that great crime, memorable for its singular atrocity, memorable for the tremendous retribution by which it was followed. The English captives were left at the mercy of the guards, and the guards determined to secure them for the night in the prison of the garrison, a chamber known by the fearful name of the Black Hole. Even for a single European malefactor that dungeon would, in such a climate,

1 From Green's Short History of the English People. Published by Harper & Brothers.

have been too close and narrow. The space was only twenty feet square. The air-holes were small and obstructed. It was the summer solstice, the season when the fierce heat of Bengal can scarcely be rendered tolerable to natives of England by lofty halls and by the constant waving of fans. The number of the prisoners was one hundred and forty-six. When they were ordered to enter the cell, they imagined that the soldiers were joking; and, being in high spirits on account of the promise of the Nabob to spare their lives, they laughed and jested at the absurdity of the notion. They soon discovered their mistake. They expostulated; they entreated; but in vain. The guards threatened to cut down all who hesitated. The captives were driven into the cell at the point of the sword, and the door was instantly shut and locked upon them.

Nothing in history or fiction, not even the story which Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, after he had wiped his bloody lips on the scalp of his murderer, approaches the horrors which were recounted by the few survivors of that night. They cried for mercy. They strove to burst the door. Holwell, who, even in that extremity, retained some presence of mind, offered large bribes to the jailers. But the answer was that nothing could be done without the Nabob's orders, that the Nabob was asleep, and that he would be angry if anybody woke him. Then the prisoners went mad with despair. They trampled each other down, fought for the places at the windows, fought for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire among them. The jailers in the meantime held lights to the bars, and shouted with laughter at the frantic struggles of their victims. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. But it was some time before the soldiers could make a lane for the survivors, by piling up on each side the heaps of corpses on which the burning climate had already begun to do its loathsome work. When at length a passage was made, twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own mothers

would not have known, staggered one by one out of the charnelhouse. A pit was instantly dug. The dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promiscuously, and covered up.

But these things, which, after the lapse of more than eighty years, cannot be told or read without horror, awakened neither remorse nor pity in the bosom of the savage Nabob. He inflicted no punishment on the murderers. He showed no tenderness to the survivors. Some of them, indeed, from whom nothing was to be got were suffered to depart; but those from whom it was thought that anything could be extorted were treated with execrable cruelty. Holwell, unable to walk, was carried before the tyrant, who reproached him, threatened him, and sent him up to the country in irons, together with some other gentlemen who were suspected of knowing more than they chose to tell about the treasures of the Company. These persons, still bowed down by the sufferings of that great agony, were lodged in miserable sheds and fed only with grain and water, till at length the intercessions of the female relations of the Nabob procured their release. One Englishwoman had survived that night. She was placed in the harem of the Prince at Moorshedabad.

The student will notice the dramatic effect of the sentences that close these respective paragraphs: "The captives were driven into the cell at the point of the sword, and the door was instantly shut and locked upon them," "The dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promiscuously, and covered up," and "She was placed in the harem of the Prince at Moorshedabad." Each division of the narrative concludes forcefully, leaving a distinct impression of horror. The paragraphs are well massed.

Another consideration that belongs to this same rhetorical element of emphasis is the proportionate amount of space that each detail should receive. In the item there