Anything not so related forms a digression, and, accord-
ing to its length and its subject-matter, more or less
diverts the reader's attention. Such a digression should
be put into an independent paragraph. Thus ; —

(i) ** On returning to our own frontiers, I had an opix)rtunity
of displaying my exemplary greenness. [Topic-sentence.]
That message to my brother with all its virus of insolence I
repeated as faithfully for the spirit, and as literally for the
expressions, as my memory allowed me to do ; and in that
troublesome effort, simpleton that I was, fancied myself exhib-
iting a soldier's loyalty to his commanding officer. [Specifica-
tion.] My brother thought otherwise : he was more angry with
me than with the enemy. — I ought, he said, to have refused
all participation in such sans cullotes^ insolence ; to carry it
was to acknowledge it as fit to be carried. [Contrasting Sen-
tence.] One grows wiser every day; and on this particular

» Macaulay, History of England^ ch. iii. ,

*The spelling in the Author's Library Edition (Boston, 1873.)



THE PARAGRAPH — UNITY. 21 7

day I made a resolution that, if again made prisoner, I would
bring no more * jaw * (so my brother called it) from the Philis-
tines. If these people would send *jaw,* I settled that, hence-
forwards, it must go through the post-office.*' [Reflection.] *
. (2) " My father was a merchant ; not in the sense of Scotland,
where it means a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells
groceries in a cellar, but in the English sense, a sense rigorously
exclusive ; that is, he was a man engaged m foreign commerce,
and no other ; therefore, in wholesale commerce, and no other
— which last limitation of the idea is important, because it
brings him within the benefit of Cicero*s condescending dis-
tinction as one who ought to be despised certainly, but not too
intensely to be despised even by a Roman senator. [Though
punctuated as a sentence, this medley contains three independ-
ent statements, each of which should be in a sentence by itself.
