This style, in part almost vulgar, in part an estilo culto of the most quintessenced kind, is represented here only by Lyly. But it is in fact common to all the Elizabethan pamphleteersGreene, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, Breton, and the rest. The vernacular in many of them descends even to vulgarity, and the cultivated in Lyly frequently ascends to the incomprehensible. Few things are more curious than this mixture of corduroy and clinquant, of slang and learning, of street repartees and elaborate coterie preciousnesses. On the other hand, the more sober writers were not less classical than their forerunners, though in the endeavour not merely to write Latin sentences rendered into English, or English sentences that would translate with little alteration into Latin, they fell into new difficulties. In all the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline writers, inelegancies and obscurities occur which may be traced directly to the attempt to imitate the forms of a language possessed of regular inflections and strict syntax in a language almost destitute of grammar. Especially fatal is the attempt to imitate the Latin relative and demonstrative pronouns, with their strict agreement of gender, number, and case, and to render them in usage and meaning by the English words of all work who, which, he, they, and to copy the oratio obliqua in a tongue where the verbs for the most are indistinguishable whether used in obliqua or in recta. These attempts lie at the root of the faults which are found even in the succinct style of Hooker and Jonson, which turn almost to attractions in the quaint paragraph-heaps of the Anatomy of Melancholy, which mar many of the finest passages of Milton and Taylor, and which in Clarendon perhaps reach their climax. The abuse of conjunctions-which is also noticeable in most of the writers of this period, and which leads them, apparently out of mere wantonness, to prefer a single sentence jointed and rejointed, paren

thesised and postscripted, till it does the duty of a paragraph, to a succession of orderly sentences each containing the expression of a simple or moderately complex thought-is not chargeable quite so fairly on imitation of the classics. But it has something to do with this, or rather it has much to do with the absence of any model except the classics. Most of these writers had a great deal to say, and they were as much in want of models as of deterrent examples in regard to the manner of saying it. The feeling seems still to have prevailed, that if a man aimed at literary elegance and precision he should write in Latin, that English might be a convenient vehicle of matter, but was scarcely susceptible of form, that the audience was ex hypothesi incult, uncritical, exoteric, and neither required nor could understand refinements of phrase.

I have more than once seen this view of the matter treated with scorn or horror, or both, as if those who take it thought little of the beauty of seventeenth century prose before the Restoration. This treatment does not appear very intelligent. The business of the critic is to deal with and to explain the facts, and all the facts. It is the fact, no doubt, that detached phrases, sentences, even long passages of Milton, of Taylor, of Browne, equal if they do not excel in beauty anything that English prose has since produced. It is the fact that Clarendon is unmatched for moral portrait painting to this day; that phrase after phrase of Hobbes has the ring and the weight and the sharp outline of a bronze coin; that Bacon is often as glorious without as within. But it is, at the same time, and not less often, the fact that Clarendon gets himself into involutions through which no breath will last, and which cannot be solved by any kind effort of repunctuation; that Milton's sentences, beginning magnificently, often end in mere tameness, sometimes in mere discord; that all the authors of the period abound in what look

like wilful and gratuitous obscurities, cacophonies, breaches of sense and grammar and rhythm. To anyone who considers the matter in any way critically, and not in the attitude of mind which shouts "Great is Diana of the Ephesians" by the space of as many hours as may be, it is perfectly evident that these great men, these great masters, were not thoroughly masters of their instrument; that their touch, for all its magic in its happier moments, was not certain; that they groped, and sometimes stumbled in their walk. When Browne begins the famous descant, "Now since these dead bones;" when Hobbes gathers up human vice and labels it unconcernedly as "either an effect of power or a cause of pleasure;" when Milton pours forth any one of the scores of masterpieces to be found here and there in his prose work, let us hold our tongues and simply admire. But it is a merely irrational admiration which refuses to recognize that Browne's antithesis is occasionally an anticlimax and his turn of words occasionally puerile; that Milton's sentences constantly descend from the mulier formosa to the piscis; and that Hobbes, after the very phrase above quoted, spoils its effect as style by a clumsy repetition of nearly but not quite the same form of words, after a fashion which few writers possessing a tithe of Hobbes's genius would have imitated in the eighteenth century. It is still more irrational to deny that most of this great group of writers occasionally make what are neither more nor less than "faults of English," grammatical blunders which actually vitiate their sense. se. Let us admire Alexander by all means, but let us not try to make out that Alexander's wry neck is worthy of an Apollo or an Antinous.

Among the chief reasons for this slowness on the part even of great writers in recognizing the more obvious requirements of English prose style, not the least perhaps may be found in the fact that English writers had no opportunity of comparison in

modern tongues. German literature was not, and Spanish and Italian, which had been cultivated in England with some zeal, were too alien from English in all linguistic points to be of much service. The Restoration introduced the study and comparison of a language which, though still alien from English, was far less removed from it than the other Romance tongues, and which had already gone through its own reforming process with signal success. On the other hand, the period of original and copious thought ceased in England for a time, and men, having less to say, became more careful in saying it. The age of English prose which opens with Dryden and Tillotson (the former being really entitled to almost the sole credit of opening it, while Tillotson has enjoyed his reputation as a stylist and still more as an originator of style at a very easy rate) produced, with the exception of Swift and Dryden himself, no writer equal in genius to those of the age before it, but the talent of the writers that it did produce was infinitely better furnished with command of its weapons, and before the period itself had ceased English prose as an instrument may be said to have been perfected. Even in Dryden, though not very often, and in his followers Temple and Halifax occasionally, there appear examples of the old slovenlinesses; but in the writers of the Queen Anne school these entirely disappear. To the present day, though their vocabulary may have in places become slightly antiquated, and their phrase, especially in conversational passages, may include forms which have gone out of fashion, there is hardly anything in the structure of their clauses, their sentences, or their paragraphs, which is in any way obsolete.

The blemishes, indeed, which had to some extent disfigured earlier English prose, were merely of the kind that exists because no one has taken the trouble to clear it away. Given on the one side a certain conversational way of talking English, inaccurate

or rather licentious as all conversational ways of speaking are, and on the other side a habit of writing exact and formal Latin, what had happened was what naturally would happen. Dryden himself, who during the whole of his life was a constant critical student of language and style, may be said, if not to have accomplished the change single-handed, at any rate to have given examples of it at all its stages. He in criticism chiefly, Temple in miscellaneous essay writing, and Halifax in the political pamphlet, left very little to be done, and the Queen Anne men found their tools ready for them when they began to write. It is moreover very observable that this literary change, unlike many if not most other literary changes, had hardly anything that was pedantic about it. So far was it from endeavouring to classicize English style, that most of its alterations were distinctly directed towards freeing English from the too great admixture of Latin grammar and style. The vernacular influence, of which almost in its purity the early part of the period affords such an admirable example in Bunyan, while the later part offers one not much less admirable in Defoe, is scarcely less perceptible in all the three writers just mentioned, Dryden, Temple, and Halifax, and in their three great successors, Swift, Addison, and Steele. Addison classicizes the most of the six, but Addison's style cannot be called exotic. The ordinary English of the streets and the houses helped these men to reform the long sentence, with its relatives and its conjunctions, clumsily borrowed from Latin, to reject inversions and involutions of phrase that had become bewildering in the absence of the clue of inflexional sounds, to avoid attempts at oratio obliqua for which the syntax of the language is ill fitted, to be plain, straightforward, unadorned. It is true that in rejecting what they thought, in many instances rightly, to be barbarisms, they to a great extent lost the secret of a splendour which had