John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

176 RHETORICAL ARTS. 1849-1872.
"
"
which and
" who ". He never entered into the distinction
"
"
of meaning between those two, and that as a relative. Like
many other writers, he used "that" only as a relief after too
"
whiches ". Here is an : example
"
Inasmuch as any,
many
even unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much
towards weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion,
which is not only the principal support of all present social
well-being, but the insufficiency of which does more than any
thing that can be named to keep back civilisation, virtue,
everything on which human happiness on the largest scale de
familiarity with French is apt to produce an
". pends Early
insensibility to the clogging effect of a great number of
"
whiches," and a consequent inattention to the many easy de
vices for keeping clear of the excess.
In the use of the pronoun
"
usually taken by good writers of the present day, to avoid un
certainty and ambiguity of reference.
His father s weakness for
"
the
it," he did not display the care
"
I know not form is occa
sionally seen in him also.
Instances of looseness not falling under any special type are
frequent enough. The following might possibly have been cor
rected, if he had lived to superintend the printing of the work
where it occurs :
" The patience of all the founders of the
Society was at last exhausted, except me and Roebuck ".
Of arts of the rhetorical kind in the structure of his sentences,
he was by no means wanting. He could be short and pithy,
which goes a great way. He had likewise caught up, probably
in a good measure from the French writers, his peculiar epi
grammatic smartness, which he practised also in conversation.
He would often express himself thus :
"
It is one thing to tell
the rich that they ought to take care of the poor, and another
thing to tell the poor that the rich ought to take care of them ".
" A historian, he says, must possess gifts of imagination and
;
what is rarer still, he must forbear to abuse them ".
" With
the genius for producing a great historical romance, he must