It should scarcely be necessary to say that no attempt is made in this essay to compile a manual of English prose-writing, or to lay down didactically the principles of the art. The most that can be done or that is aimed at is the discovery by a running critical and historical commentary on the illustrations which follow, and on the course of English prose generally, what have been the successive characteristics of its style, what the aims of its writers, and what the amount of success that they have attained. There is nothing presumptuous in the attitude of the student, whatever there may be in the attitude of the teacher. Nearly ten years ago, at the suggestion of Mr. John Morley, I attempted in the Fortnightly Review a study of the chief characteristics of contemporary prose. Since then I have reviewed many hundreds of new books, and have read again, or for the first time, many hundreds of old ones. I do not know that the two processes have altered my views much they certainly have not lessened my estimate of the difficulty of writing good prose, or of the merit of good prose when written. During these ten years considerable attention has undoubtedly been given by English writers to style: I wish I could think that the result has been a distinct improvement in the quality of the product. If the present object were a study of contemporary prose, much would have to be said on the growth of what I may call the Aniline style and the style of Marivaudage, the first dealing in a gorgeous and glaring vocabulary, the second in unexpected turns and twists of thought or phrase, in long-winded description of incident, and in finical analysis of motive. Unexpectedness, indeed, seems to be the chief aim of the practitioners of both, and it lays them perhaps open to the damaging question of Mr. Milestone in Headlong Hall. When we hear that a bar of music has "veracity," that there is a finely-executed “passage" in a marble chimney-piece, that someone is "part of the con

science of a nation," that the "andante" of a sonnet is specially noteworthy, the quest after the unexpected has become sufficiently evident. But these things are not directly our subject, though we shall find other things remarkably like them in the history of the past. For there is nothing new in art except its beauties, and all the faults of French naturalism and English æstheticism were doubtless perfectly well known to critics and admired by the uncritical in the days of Hilpa and Shalum.

For reasons obvious enough, not the most or the least obvious being the necessity of beginning somewhere, we begin these specimens with the invention of printing; not of course denying the title of books written before Caxton set up his press to the title of English or of English prose, but simply fixing a term from which literary production has been voluminous and uninterrupted in its volume.

In the earlier

examples, however (up, it may be said, to Lyly), the character of the passages, though often interesting and noteworthy, is scarcely characteristic. All the writers of this period are, if not actually, yet in a manner, translators. The work of Malory, charming as it is, and worthy to occupy the place of honour here given to it, is notoriously an adaptation of French originals. Latimer and Ascham, especially the former, in parts highly vernacular, are conversational where they are not classical.

It was not till the reign of Elizabeth was some way advanced that a definite effort on the part of writers to make an English prose style can be perceived. It took for the most part one of two directions. The first was vernacular in the main, but very strongly tinged with a peculiar form of preciousness, the origin of which has been traced to various sources, but which appears clearly enough in the French rhétoriqueurs of the fifteenth century, from whom it spread to Italy, Spain, and England.

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 pamphleteers— Greene, 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. 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