degree of restraint or of enthusiasm with which we are accustomed to express our emotions; when the general effect is to throw us into a condition of boredom or of distaste, we make a corresponding choice of appropriate adjectives.  When we wish to be specially critical we pass a little way beyond an empirical judgment by pleasure or annoyance and take into account the degree of harmony between matter and manner.  In such a frame of mind we discount the pleasure obtained from verbal quips, if these occur in a grave exposition, or that received from solemn and stately harmonies of language if these be employed on insignificant trifles.  In a condition of unusual critical exaltation we may even admit an excellence of language and phrasing though these have as their contents ideas which we dislike, or press towards conclusions from which we dissent.  But if we desire to make an exact appreciation of literary style, it is requisite to examine separately the three elements which contribute to the effect produced on us by any written work.  These three elements are the words or raw materials employed, the building of words into sentences and of sentences into paragraphs, which may be designated as the architectural work, and, finally, the ideas conveyed, that is to say, the actual object of the writing.

Huxley was a wide and omnivorous reader, and so had an unusually large fund of words at his disposal.  His writings abound with quotations and allusions taken from the best English authors, and he had a profound and practical belief in the advantage to be gained from the reading of English.  “If a man,” he wrote, “cannot get literary culture out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers—­I say, if he cannot get it out of these writers, he cannot get it out of anything.”  He had at least a fair knowledge of Greek in the original, and a very wide acquaintance with Greek phrasing and Greek ideas derived from a study of Greek authors in English versions.  He had an unusual knowledge of Latin, both of the classical writers and of the early Church fathers and mediaeval writers on science and metaphysics.  French and German, the two foreign languages which are a necessary part of the mental equipment of an English-speaking man of science, were familiar to him.  Finally, he had of necessity the wide and varied vocabulary of the natural and technical sciences at his disposal.  From these varied sources, Huxley had a fund of words, a store of the raw material for expressing ideas, very much greater and more varied than that in the possession of most writers.  You will find in his writings abundant and omnipresent evidence of the enormous wealth of verbal material ready for the ideas he wished to set forth:  a Greek phrase, a German phrase, a Latin or French phrase, or a group of words borrowed from one of our own great writers always seemed to await his wish.  General