V

to his purpose the resources of his own tongue blended with the added stores of classicism. He could bring to his prose just the right tincture of classical dignity, without losing that pungency of savour which came from the tradition of direct and familiar speech which was of native growth. Never losing its characteristic individuality, he can yet vary his style with his theme ; and the expression fits his thought with such perfection that (as is remarked in the introduction to the extracts which follow) it seems as if his aphorisms, and the thoughts that flower about them, often grew out of the aptness of a phrase that has suggested itself to his fancy.

But the promise of Bacon did not endure. The conditions of the time were adverse, even had the genius of the Elizabethans not waned, after the efforts they had made and the achievements they had won. To an age of creation there succeeded one of analysis. One of the first to point out the decadence in prose which followed the age of Elizabeth was Dean Swift; and this decadence he finds to consist chiefly in the loss of simplicity— "the best and truest ornament of most things in human life." It is to that loss of simplicity that Swift traces back even the vices of English prose in his own day, which he would fain correct by the dictates of an Academy—a device least of all suited for a style so defiant of all rule and fashion as that of Swift. himself.

Swift's proposal was due to his conviction that the loss of simplicity was owing to the absence of any controlling force, and such a force, it is conceivable, might have come through the instinctive obedience which is paid to genius. The genius of the Elizabethans did not exact that obedience in prose as it did in poetry. And the altered conditions soon made it impossible. New inquiries aroused curiosity, new interests claimed attention, new controversies occupied the field; it soon became impossible that prose style should conform to one simple fashion, or mould itself after one type, however perfect. Before English prose came to acquire regularity, and established for itself some sort of standard, more than three generations—each of them eventful, stirring, and contentious—were to pass; the old simplicity and directness, the old echo of a homely colloquialism, were almost overwhelmed beneath an unavoidable artificiality; and the new style was evolved out of a century of struggle and disorder.

transmitted itself to the Jacobean age-that of Euphuism. We may easily exaggerate the evils of the fashion, and caricature its absurdities. But it was not the product solely of affectation. It was its misfortune rather than its fault that it never commanded the allegiance of any consummate artist, who might have used what was good in it, and discarded what was bad. In the instinct that prose style must, in order to attain literary perfection, set before itself a certain standard of grace, and not be too timid of formality, Euphuism was right; and we are the richer for the efforts of the Euphuists. The fashion lingered on to the next generation; but it lingered with more depth and earnestness of feeling. Take, for instance, the Euphuism, if we may so call it, of Donne. His quaintnesses and oddities are not due to extravagance, but rather to the very earnestness which seeks to enforce itself by strained expressions. It is to this quality that we owe what the seventeenth century called wit. Its object was not to excite laughter, but to compel attention, and stimulate curiosity, by a subtle intricacy which aroused and startled the reader, and which reveals the writer's inmost personality. To a later age it may seem quaint and curious, even affected; but to understand it so in a seventeenth-century writer is to misread the literature of the day.

But side by side with this many influences were at work. As the century advanced men took sides in the pitched battles of religion and politics; and the literary instinct was often overpowered by the controversial. The works of the time inevitably fell into groups according to their adherence to one side or the other, and each of these groups had its own fashions and modes. Men wrote too hotly and too eagerly to study style. We must add to this, that even on the literary side they were torn in different directions. There was an antagonism in their minds between the reverence for authority, the imitation of classical works, and the stubbornness of independence. The antagonism is often seen working in the same men -conspicuously in the case of such a man as Ben Jonson. The very multiplicity of their subjects bewilders them, and gives them something of fantastic variety by their discursiveness, as in the case of Burton. The force and directness of the drama had given place to minute analysis of character, as in Overbury, Earle, and Samuel Butler. Sometimes the classicism overpowers originality, as in the slavish copying of classical models by Hayward and

May. Sometimes style seems to be everything, and a writer never loses sight of the formal dignity of address befitting his calling, as in Sir Thomas Browne or Sir Kenelm Digby, or Drummond. Sometimes, again, style seems to be altogether neglected, and the writer is absorbed only in his subject, as with Selden, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Ussher. Sometimes the most fantastic, either in style or subject, seems to be the only object of pursuit as with the extravagances of Urquhart, the odd eccentricities of Fuller, or the whimsical theories of Harrington. No literature ever passed through the throes of a severer struggle; none was ever more near to losing all balance in the wilderness of variety, the only saving quality of which was its thorough

earnestness.

But with all this, there was a steady development. English prose had perhaps lost its best chance of rising to the highest level when the Elizabethan age passed without leaving a standard warranted by its authority. The floods of controversy, of misdirected effort, of exaggerated individualism, passed over it. But in time it attained to a more serene atmosphere. In Jeremy Taylor, and we might add, in a lesser degree, in Leighton, we see the evolution of order from disorder. Taylor inherited something from the Euphuists: he caught his note of earnestness from such a man as Donne; but in his prose we have a sense of greater security and restfulness than in any that had gone before. The fretfulness of controversy, the restlessness of individualism, the perpetual pursuit of intricacy, and the ceaseless desire to startle the reader, all the seare calming down. The note of his books is earnestness; but it is earnestness which flows calmly. Contrast his prose with that of Milton, powerful as that is with the very heat of the fight, and sounding as it were with the echo of the war-trumpet. We cannot deny its power, we cannot resist its excitement. But yet we are compelled to hear in it rather the echoes of what had gone before than to recognise it as the harbinger of a new and more self-contained prose. To Milton prose

was an unnatural medium, which he never subdued to his purposes. As a prose writer he commands admiration only where he enlists sympathy. He used the weapon provided for him by his age with consummate power: but it was a weapon which he seized as he found it, which owed its force to the arm that wielded it, and which he left with no sharpness added to its temper, no new polish to its surface, no new facility in its contrivance.

On the whole the elements of greatest hopefulness for English prose-its earnestness, its dignity, its conscious grace-were perhaps best summed up, in that age, in Jeremy Taylor: and to him more than to any other may be ascribed the handing on of the torch from the preceding to the next generation, and the preserving of its flame clear and undimmed amidst the heated struggles and cloudy controversies of the time. But others played no small part in the development of English prose. The glory

of Taylor is shared by Clarendon, whose work, with all the occasional involution and irregularity of his style, stands unrivalled for its vivid picture of the Epic struggle in which he had played so conspicuous a part: for its careful adjustment of the parts, and above all for the surpassing skill of its character drawing. The chief impression of his prose is its studied restraint, and the instinct which makes him feel the exact point at which description should cease, and which compels his readers to accept each sentence, not as a mere literary ornament, but as contributing something essential to the description in hand. A history written under such conditions as that of Clarendon can never, in the nature of things, become a type which any successors could follow; but none the less, in spite of all its irregularities, his prose has left as distinct an impression on our literature as his personal action has upon our constitution.

'Another strain of English prose has to be taken into account in estimating the inheritance which this age bequeathed. From Hales and Chillingworth to Cudworth and Henry More there is a distinct genealogical connexion. Prose style was in no wise the aim, nor did it engage much of the attention of the English Rationalists or Platonists. But undoubtedly their work, in its care, its balanced thought, its elaborate arrangement of argument, above all in its air of philosophic calmness, did impart something of its character to later English prose. Doubtless the range of such writings must be small, and their influence cannot tell powerfully on the form of a general literary movement. Fancy, imagination, humour-these stand outside their sphere, and yet by these literary form must be largely shaped. But the language of the schools must still play its part; and it was something that alongside of the strained but powerful phrases of a philosopher like Hobbes, and the amorphous diction of such a writer on religion as Lord Herbert of Cherbury, there should be carried on the sane, albeit somewhat tame, moderation of

the school of Hales and Chillingworth, of Henry More and Cudworth.

Before the period closes we have a foretaste in L'Estrange of the literary craftsman of another age and type. His task came perilously near to hackwork, but he discharged it with something of the rollicking boldness, if with all the slipshod carelessness, of a generation to which, although older in years, he essentially belongs.

H. CRAIK.