* சிந்தனைக் கட்டுரைகள்
7 their meanness, but strove hard to purigy their tastes and refine their manners close as he lived to reality, its vulgarity he shunned. He idalized everything on which he set his thought. If what he took to handle were by its nature pure, after coming into his hands, it glowed with a still purer lught casting around a serene, moral and spiritual radiance; but if it were of a low and vulgar kind, he purged it of the foul element which rendered it unclean, while its good quality he improved.
In this noble work of idealisation Addison's English style plays a prominent part. His choice of words is faultless and the harmony of sound and sense in which the words flow into sentences, ren- ders the mater attaractive and easy of comprehension. Besides the literary grace, his mild and delicate humour infuses an additional charm into his essays which produces a pleasurable effect on the mind of the reader, when impressing on it the great moral and spiri- tual ideas imbedded in them. His English style, even after the lapse of two centuries which brought in succession great masters of English prose, still remains an excellent pattern to be studied after by all who wish to acquire a good English style. Wll has it been observed by Shaw that "Addison was long held up as the finest model of elegant yet idiomatic English prose; and even now, when a more lively, vigorous and coloured style has supplanted the neat and somewhat prim correctness of the eighteenth century the stu- dent will find in Addison some qualities that never can become obsolete-a never failing clearness and limpidity of expression, and a singular appropriateness between the language and the thought."
Twenty one years ago when I was studying with deep inter- est the essays of this master of English prose, I was taken up so much with the beauty, excellence and instructive power of which, that during the course of my reading I felt a strong desire within me to translate some of them into Tamil in order to make my coun- trymen understand the kind of inimitable literary grace with which the best English prose is tinged and how it aids to impress on the mind of the reader the moral and spiritual ideas which it inculcates. At first I translated "The Vision of Mirza' and 'The Wonders of Creation,' as they are full of thoughts and sentiments that bear a
