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

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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