been by no means exclusively or often barbaric. They were unrivalled in vigour, not easily to be beaten in sober grace, abundantly capable of wit, but as a rule they lacked magnificence, and prose was with them emphatically a sermo pedestris. Except in survivors of the older school, it is difficult to find in post-Restoration prose an impassioned passage. When the men of the time wished to be impassioned they thought it proper to drop into poetry. South's satire on the "fringes of the North-star" and other Taylorisms expresses their attitude very happily. It is hardly an accident that Dryden's subjects, capable though the writer was of giving literary expression to every form of thought and feeling, never in prose lead him to the inditing of anything exalted; that Temple gives a half sarcastic turn to the brief but exquisite passage on life which closes his essay on poetry; that Addison's renowned homilies on death and tombs and a future life have rather an unrivalled decency, a propriety that is quintessential, than solemnity in the higher sense of the term. The lack of ornament in the prose of this period is never perhaps more clearly shown than in the style of Locke, which, though not often absolutely incorrect, is to me, I frankly own, a disgusting style, bald, dull, plebeian, giving indeed the author's meaning, but giving it ungraced with any due apparatus or ministry. The defects, however, were for the most part negative. The writers of this time, at least the greater of them, spoilt nothing that they touched, and for the most part omitted to touch subjects for which their style was not suited. The order, lucidity, and proportion of Dryden's criticism, the ease and well-bred loquacity of Temple and the essayists, the mild or rough polemic of Halifax and Bentley, the incomparable ironic handling of Swift, the narrative and pictorial faculty, so sober and yet so vivid, of Bunyan and Defoe, are never likely to be surpassed in English literature. The genera

tion which equals the least of them may be proud of its feat. This period, moreover, it must never be forgotten, was not merely a great period in itself as regarded production, but the schoolmaster of all periods to follow. It settled what the form, the technical form, of English prose was to be, and settled it once for all.

It is not usual to think or speak of the eighteenth century as reactionary, and yet, in regard to its prose style, it to some extent deserves this title. The peculiarities of this prose, the most famous names among whose practitioners are Johnson and Gibbon, exhibit a decided reaction against the plainness and vernacular energy which, as has been said, characterized writers from Dryden to Swift. Lord Chesterfield's well-known denunciation of proverbial phrases in speaking and writing, and the Latinisms of the extreme Johnsonian style, may seem to have but little to do with each other, but they express in different ways the revolt of the fine gentleman and the revolt of the scholar against the simplicity and homeliness of the style which had gone before. The men of 1660-1720 had not been afraid of Latinisms, but they had not sought them: the ampullæ et sesquipedalia verba of Johnson at his worst were by no means peculiar to himself, but may be found alike in the prose and the verse of writers over whom he exercised little or no influence. The altered style, however, in the hands of capable men became somewhat more suitable for the dignified branches of sustained prose-writing. We shall never have a greater historian in style as well as in matter than Gibbon; in style at least we have not beaten Hume, though there has been more than a century to do it in. Berkeley belongs mainly to the latest school of seventeenth century writers, to the Queen Anne men, but partly also to the eighteenth century proper; and he, again with Hume as a second, is as unlikely to be surpassed in mastery of philoso

phical style as Gibbon and Hume are unlikely to be surpassed in the style of history. Nor were there wanting tendencies and influences which counteracted to a great extent the striving at elaboration and dignity. The chief of these was the growth of the novel. This not only is in itself a kind unfriendly to the pompous style, but happened to attract to its practice the great genius of Fielding, which was from nothing so averse as from everything that had the semblance or the reality of pretension, pedantry, or conceit. Among the noteworthy writers of the time, not a few stand apart from its general tendencies, and others exhibit only part of those tendencies. The homely and yet graceful narrative of the author of Peter Wilkins derives evidently from Defoe; the commérage of the letters of Walpole, Gray, and others, is an attempt partly to imitate French models, partly to reproduce the actual talk of society; Sterne's deliberate eccentricity is an adaptation, as genius of course adapts, of Rabelais and Burton, while the curious and inimitable badness of the great Bishop Butler's form is evidently due, not like Locke's, to carelessness and contempt of good literary manners, but to some strange idiosyncrasy of defect. On the whole, however, the century not merely added immortal examples to English prose, but contributed not a little to the further perfecting of the general instrument. A novelist like Fielding, a historian like Gibbon, a philosopher like Hume, an orator and publicist like Burke, could not write without adding to the capacities of prose in the hands of others as well as to its performances in their own. They gave a further extension to the system of modulating sentences and clauses with a definite regard to harmony. Although there may be too much monotony in his method, it seems unlikely that Gibbon will soon be surpassed in the art of arranging the rhythm of a sentence of not inconsiderable length without ever neglecting co-ordination,

and, at the same time, without ever committing the mistake of exchanging the rhythm proper to prose for the metre which is proper to poetry. Much the same may be said of Burke when he is at his best, while two earlier ornaments of the period, Bolingbroke and Conyers Middleton, though their prose is less rhythmical, are scarcely less remarkable for a deliberate and systematic arrangement of the sentence within itself and of the sentences in the paragraph. To enumerate separate particulars in which the eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries subjected English prose to laws would be rather appropriate to a manual of composition than to an essay like the present. For instance, such details as the reform of punctuation, and especially the more frequent use of the full stop, as the avoidance of the homoeoteleuton, and if possible of the same word, unless used emphatically, in the same sentence, can be only very summarily referred to. But undoubtedly the matter of principal importance was the practice, which as a regular practice began with Dryden and was perfected in Gibbon, of balancing and proportioning the sentence. Of course there are numerous or innumerable examples of exquisitely proportioned sentences in Milton and his contemporaries, but that is not to the point. What is to the point is such a sentence as the following from the Areopagitica: “But if his rear and flanks be not impaled, if his back-door be not secured by the rigid licenser but that a bold book may now and then issue forth and give the assault to some of his old collections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keep waking, to stand in watch, to set good guards and sentinels about his received opinions, to walk the round and counter-round with his fellow-inspectors, fearing lest any of his flock be seduced, who then also would be better instructed, better exercised and disciplined." Here the sentence begins excellently, winds up the height to "trenches," and descends again

in an orderly and regular fashion to "seduced." There in sense, in sound, by all the laws of verbal architecture it should stop, but the author has an afterthought, and he tacks on the words italicised, thereby ruining the balance of his phrase, and adding an unnecessary and disturbing epexegesis to his thought. Had Milton lived a hundred years later he would no more have committed this merely careless and inerudite fault than Gibbon would.

Like all rules of general character, the balancing of the sentence has of course its difficulties and its dangers. Carried out on principles too uniform, or by means too obvious, it becomes monotonous and disgusting. It is a considerable encouragement to sonorous platitude, and (as satirists have sometimes amused themselves by showing) it can easily be used to disguise and carry off the simply unmeaning. When Mrs. St. Clair in The Inheritance uttered that famous sentence, "Happy the country whose nobles are thus gifted with the power of reflecting kindred excellence, and of perpetuating national virtue on the broad basis of private friendship," she owed everything to the fact that she was born after Dr. Johnson. Very large numbers of public speakers in and out of pulpits were, during the time that prose rhythm by means of balance was enforced or expected, in a similar case of indebtedness. But the amount of foolish speech and writing in the world has not appreciably lessened since every man became a law unto himself in the matter of composition, and for my part I own, though it may be immoral, that I prefer a platitude which seems as if it might have some meaning, and at any rate sounds well as sound, to a platitude which is nakedly and cacophonously platitudinous or senseless. The Latinizing of the language was a greater evil by far, but one of no lasting continuance. No permanent harm came to English literature from Johnson's noted