He might with advantage have taken more pains, and then he would have done better; but take pains he did.

In all his books he aims at producing a certain impression on the minds of his readers, and in order to produce that impression he was content to make sacrifices; hence his whimsicality, his out-of-the-wayness, at once his charm and his snare, never grows into wantonness and seldom into gross improbability.

He studied effects, as his frequent and impressive liturgical repetitions pleasingly demonstrate.

He had theories about most things, and may, for all I know, have had a theory of cadences.

For words he had no great feeling except as a philologist, and is capable of strange abominations.