second thought about vitality and putrefaction, or from Armstrong's singular fancy (it is true this was in verse) for calling a cold bath a gelid cistern. The fashion rose, lived, died, as fashions do. But beauty looks only a little less beautiful in the ugliest fashion, and so the genius and talent of the eighteenth century showed themselves only to a little less advantage because of their predilection for an exotic vocabulary. No harm was done, but much good, to the theory and practice of verbal architecture, and if inferior material was sometimes used, Time has long since dealt with each builder's work in his usual just and equal fashion.

With the eighteenth century speaking generally—with Burke and Gibbon speaking particularly--what may be called the consciously or unconsciously formative period of English prose came to an end. In the hundred years that have since passed we have had not a few prose writers of great genius, many of extreme talent. But they have all either deliberately innovated upon or obediently followed, or carefully neglected, the two great principles which were established between 1660 and 1760, the principle, that is to say, which limited the meaning of a sentence to a moderately complex thought in point of matter, and that which admitted the necessity of balance and coherent structure in point of form. One attempt at the addition of a special kind of prose, an attempt frequently made but foredoomed to failure, I shall have to notice, but only one.

The great period of poetical production which began with the French Revolution and lasted till about 1830, saw also much prose of merit. Coleridge, Southey, Shelley, are eminent examples in both prose and verse, while Wordsworth, Byron, Moore, and others, come but little behind. Scott, the most voluminous of all except perhaps Southey in prose composition, occupies a rather peculiar position. The astonishing rapidity of his pro

duction, and his defective education (good prose-writing is far more a matter of scholarship than good verse-writing), may have had a somewhat injurious influence on his style; but this style has on the whole been rated much too low, and at its best is admirable English. The splendour, however, of the poetical production of the later Georgian period in poetry no doubt eclipsed its production in prose, and as a general rule that prose was rather even and excellent in general characteristics than eminent or peculiar in special quality. The same good sense which banished an artificial vocabulary from poetry achieved the banishing of it from prose. But except that it is always a little less stiff, and sometimes a little more negligent, the best prose written by men of middle or advanced age when George the Third was dying does not differ very greatly from the best prose written by men of middle or advanced age when he came to the throne. The range of subjects, the tone of thought, might be altered, the style was very much the same; in fact, there can be very little doubt that while the poets deliberately rebelled against their predecessors, the prose writers, who were often the same persons in another function, deliberately followed, if they did not exactly imitate them.

It was not until the end of this period of brilliant poetry that certain persons more or less deliberately set themselves to revolutionize English prose, as the poets for a full generation had been revolutionizing English verse. I say more or less deliberately, for the revived fashion of "numerous " prose which one man of genius and one man of the greatest talent, Thomas de Quincey and John Wilson, proclaimed, which others seem to have adopted without much of set purpose, and which, owing especially to the great example of Mr. Ruskin, has enlisted so large a following, was in its origin partial and casual. The inducers of this style have hardly had due honour or due dis

honour, for what they have done is not small, whatever may be thought of its character. Indeed, at the present day, among a very large proportion of general readers, and among a certain number of critics, "style" appears to be understood in the sense of ornate and semi-metrical style. A work which is "not remarkable for style" is a work which does not pile up the adjectives, which abstains from rhythm so pronounced and regular that it ceases to be rhythm merely and becomes metre, which avoids rather than seeks the drawing of attention to originality of thought by singularity of expression, and which worships no gods but proportion, clearness, closeness of expression to idea, and (within the limits incident to prose) rhythmical arrangement. To confess the truth, the public has so little prose of this latter quality put before it, and is so much accustomed to find that every writer whose style is a little above the school exercise, and his thought a little above platitude, aims at the distinction of prose-poet, that it has some excuse for its blunder. That it is a blunder I shall endeavour to show a little later. For the present, it is sufficient to indicate the period of George the Fourth's reign as the beginning of the flamboyant style in modern English prose. Besides the two persons just mentioned, whose writings were widely distributed in periodicals, three other great masters of prose, though not inclined to the same form of prose-poetry, did not a little to break down the tradition of English prose in which sobriety was the chief thing aimed at. These were Carlyle, with his Germanisms of phrase and his sacrifice (not at all German) of order to emphasis in arrangement; Macaulay with his spasmodic clause and his endless fire of snapping antitheses; and lastly, with not much influence on the general reader, but with much on the special writer, Landor, who together with much prose that is nearly perfect, gave the innovators the countenance

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of an occasional leaning to the florid and of a neo-classicism which was sometimes un-English. It is the nature of man to select the worst parts of his models for imitation.

Side by side with these great innovators there were no doubt many and very excellent practitioners of the older and simpler style. Southey survived and Lockhart flourished as accomplished examples of it in one great literary organ; the influence of Jeffrey was exerted rather vigorously than wisely to maintain it in another. Generally speaking, it was not admitted before 1850 that the best models for a young man in prose could be any other than the chief ornaments of English literature from Swift and Addison to Gibbon and Burke. The examples of the great writers above mentioned, however, could not fail to have a gradual effect; and, as time passed, more and more books came to be written in which one of two things was evident. The one was that the author had tried to write a prose-poem as far as style was concerned, the other that he was absolutely without principles of style. I can still find no better instance of this literary antinomianism than I found ten years ago in Grote's history, where there is simply no style at all. The chief political speeches and the most popular philosophical works of the day supply examples of this antinomian eminence in other departments, although, as their authors are living, it may be impertinent to name them. Take Grote and compare him with Hume, Gibbon, or even Thirlwall; take almost any chief speaker of either House and compare him with Burke or Canning or Lord Lyndhurst; take almost any living philosopher and compare him with Berkeley, with Hume, or even with Mill, and the difference is obvious at once. As history, as politics, as philosophy, the later examples may be excellent-no opinion on that point will be given here. But as examples of style they are not comparable with the earlier.

In the department of luxuriant ornament, the example of Mr. Ruskin may be said to have rendered all other examples comparatively superfluous. From the date of the first appearance of Modern Painters, the prose-poetry style has more and more engrossed attention and imitation. It has invaded history, permeated novel writing, affected criticism so largely that those who resist it in that department are but a scattered remnant. It is unnecessary to quote instances, for the fact is very little likely to be gainsaid, and if it is gainsaid at all, will certainly not be gainsaid by any person who has frequent and copious examples of English style coming before him for criticism.

At the same time the period of individualism has given rise, as a former period of something like individualism did in the seventeenth century, to some great and to many remarkable writers. Of these, so far as they have not been distinguished by an adherence to the ornate style, and so far as they have not, with the disciples of literary incuria, let style go to the winds altogether, Mr. Carlyle was during all his later days the chief, and in not a few cases the model. But he had seconds in the work, in many of whom literary genius to a great extent supplied the want of academic correctness. Thackeray, with some remarkable slovenlinesses (he is probably the last writer of the first eminence of whom the enemy "and which" has made a conquest), elaborated, rather it would seem by practice and natural genius, than in the carrying out of any theory, a style which for the lighter purposes of literature has no rival in urbanity, flexibility, and width of range since Addison, and which has found the widest acceptance among men of letters. Dickens again, despite very great faults of bad taste and mannerism, did not lack the qualities of a great writer. This is sufficiently shown in the excellent storm passage in David