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

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 highersense 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,