All these unseemly things, however, take root in writing from a single cause: that craving for novelty in thought which is the special madness of our day. From the very sources of our excellences our faults are wont to arise. Since beauties of expression, sublimities, and pleasing graces lie open to the writer for the success of his composition, those same things, just as they are the principles of his triumph, become the principles and grounds of his opposite, his failure. Of such kind, in some measure, are reversals, hyperboles, and the use of the plural; we shall show in what follows what risk these involve. We must therefore now raise and examine the question by what means we can escape the faults bound up with sublimity. §1