Addison's humorous imitation of these
faults gives us twice as good a lesson as any possible example of real
faults made by some writer unconsciously.
In Stevenson's letters we see the value of what has been called
"the magic word." Nearly the whole of his humor consists in selecting
a word which suggests ten times as much as it expresses on its face.
There is a whole world of fun in this suggestion. Sometimes it is
merely commonplace punning, as when he speaks of the "menial" of
"high Dutch extraction" as yet "only partially extracted;" and again it
is the delicate insinuation contained in spelling "Parc" with a _c,_
for that one letter gives us an entire foreign atmosphere, and the
disproportion between the smallness of the letter and the extent of the
suggestiveness touches our sense of the ridiculous.
The form of study of these passages may be slightly altered.
Instead of making notes and rewriting exactly as the original authors
wrote, we should keep the original open before us and try
to produce something slightly different in the same vein.
We may suppose the letter on love written by a man instead of
by a woman.
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