Copperfield, as well as in not a few others scattered over his works. He seldom had occasion for a sustained effort of this kind, and the "tricks and manners" to which he was so unfortunately given lent themselves but too easily to imitation. Of the many writers of merit who stand beside and below these two space here forbids detailed mention. There are also many earlier authors who, either because they have been merely exceptional, or because they have been examples of tendencies which others have exhibited in a more characteristic manner, have not been noticed specially in the foregoing sketch. To take the last century only, Cobbett ranks with Bunyan and Defoe as the third of a trio of deliberately vernacular writers. The exquisite grace and charm of Lamb, springing in part no doubt from an imitation of the unreformed writers, especially Fuller, Browne, and Burton, had yet in it so much of idiosyncrasy that it has never been and is never likely to be successfully imitated. Peacock, an accomplished scholar and a master of irony, has a peculiarity which is rather one of thought than of style, of viewpoint towards the world at large than of expression of the views taken. The late Lord Beaconsfield, unrivalled at epigram and detached phrase, very frequently wrote and sometimes spoke below himself, and in particular committed the fault of substituting for a kind of English Voltairian style, which no one could have brought to greater perfection if he had given his mind to it, corrupt followings of the sensibility and philosophism of Diderot and the mere grandiloquence of Buffon.

In the same way, in the earlier and longer period, there are many names which, though claiming a place of right in the history of English prose, cannot claim a place in an essay on that history, while in some cases they have had to be excluded even from the list of selections. Many excellent theologians and sermon-writers have been shut out because the admission of one

would require the admission of all. Philosophers of the second class are in the same case. The older novelists who are dead and the modern novelists who are dying cannot here be mummified, nor can anything but the faintest taste be given of the vast mass of periodical literature which has been produced in these latter days. Except in regard to peculiarities which are exclusively the peculiarities of recent writers, and which therefore fall out of the scheme, the main characteristics of English prose are, it is believed, here given in the work of their most distinguished representatives. Vixere fortes, many of them, outside the lists of this or any similar undertaking. But they must, in the words of Wharton's sarcasm to Harley's twelve peers, here applied with no sarcastic intent, "speak through their foreman," or the foremen of their several classes.

Thus then the course of English prose style presents, in little, the following picture. Beginning for the most part with translations from Latin or French, with prose versions of verse writings, and with theological treatises aiming more at edification, and at the edification of the vulgar, than at style, it was not till after the invention of printing that it attempted perfection of form. But in its early strivings it was much hindered, first by the persistent attempt to make an uninflected do the duty of an inflected language, and secondly, by the curious flood of conceits which accompanied, or helped, or were caused by the Spanish and Italian influences of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the latter period we find men of the greatest genius producing singularly uneven and blemished work, owing to the want of an accepted theory and practice of style; each man writing as seemed good in his own eyes, and selecting not merely his vocabulary (as to that a great freedom, and rightly, has always prevailed in England), but his arrangement of clauses and sentences, and even to some extent his

syntax. To this period of individualism an end was put by Dryden, whose example in codifying and reforming was followed for nearly a century. During this period the syntactical part of English grammar was settled very nearly as it has hitherto remained; the limitation of the sentence to a single moderately simple proposition, or at most to two or three propositions closely connected in thought, was effected; the arrangement of the single clause was prescribed as nearly as possible in the natural order of vocal speech, inversions being reserved as an exception and a license for the production of some special effect; the use of the parenthesis was (perhaps unduly) discouraged; and a general principle was established that the cadence as well as the sense of a sentence should rise gradually toward the middle, should if necessary continue there on a level for a brief period, and should then descend in a gradation corresponding to its ascent. These principles were observed during the whole of the eighteenth century, and with little variation during the first quarter of the nineteenth, a certain range of liberty being given by the increasing subdivision of the subjects of literature, and especially by the growth of fiction and periodical writing on more or less ephemeral matters. The continuance of this latter process, the increased study of foreign (especially German) literature, the disuse of Greek and Latin as the main instruments of education, and the example of eminent or popular writers, first in small and then in great numbers, have during the last fifty years induced a return of individualism. This has in most cases taken the form either of a neglect of regular and orderly style altogether, or of the preference of a highly ornamented diction and a poetical rather than prosaic rhythm. The great mass of writers belong to the first division, the smaller number who take some pains about the ordering of their sentences almost entirely to the second.

That this laboured and ornate manner will not last very long is highly probable, that it should last long would be out of keeping with experience. But it is not so certain that its disappearance will be followed by anything like a return to the simplicity of theory and practice in style which, while it left eighteenth-century and late seventeenth-century authors full room to display individual talents and peculiarities, still caused between them the same resemblance which exists in examples of an order of architecture or of a natural species.

So much has been said about the balancing of the sentence, and the rhythm appropriate to prose and distinct from metre, that the reader may fairly claim to be informed somewhat more minutely of the writer's views on the subject. They will have to be put to a certain extent scholastically, but the thing is really a scholastic question, and the impatience with "iambs and pentameters," which Mr. Lowell (a spokesman far too good for such a breed) condescended to express some forty years ago on behalf of the vulgar, is in reality the secret of much of the degradation of recent prose. In dealing with this subject I shall have to affront an old prejudice which has apparently become young again, the prejudice which deems terms of quantity inapplicable to the English and other modern languages. The truth is, that the metrical symbols and system of scansion which the genius of the Greeks invented, are applicable to all European languages, though (and this is where the thoroughgoing defenders of accent against quantity make their blunder) the quantity of particular syllables is much more variable. In other words, there are far more common syllables in English and other modern languages than in Latin, or even in the language of those

Quibus est nihil negatum

Et queis "arēs ārēs" licet sonare.

A Greek would have laughed heartily enough at the notion that the alternative quantity of Ares made it impossible to scan Homer regularly, and so may an Englishman, even though a very large number of syllables (not by any means all) in his language are capable of being made long or short according to the pleasure of the writer and the exigencies of the verse. All good English verse, from the rudest ballad of past centuries to the most elaborate harmonies of Mr. Swinburne and Lord Tennyson, is capable of being exhibited in metrical form as strict in its final, if not in its initial laws, as that which governs the prosody of Horace or of Euripides. Most bad English verse is capable of having its badness shown by the application of the same tests. In using therefore longs and shorts, and the divisions of classical metre from Pyrrhic to dochmiac, in order to exhibit the characteristics of English prose rhythm and the differences which it exhibits from the metre which is verse rhythm, I am using disputed means deliberately and with the fullest intention and readiness to defend them if required.'

I take it that the characteristic of metre-that is to say, poetic rhythm-is not only the recurrence of the same feet in the same line, but also the recurrence of corresponding and similar arrangements of feet in different lines. The Greek chorus, and in a less degree the English pindaric, exhibit the first characteristic scantly, but they make up, in the one case by a rigid, and in the other by what ought to be a rigid, adherence to the second. In all other known forms of literary European verse, Greek, Latin, English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, both requirements are complied with in different measure or degree,

1 It has been pointed out to me, since the following remarks were written, that I might have sheltered myself under a right reverend precedent in the shape of some criticism of Hurd's on the rhythmical peculiarities of Addison. I do so now all the more willingly, that no one who compares the two passages will suspect me of merely following the bishop.