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Please leave the little chapel for the moment, and walk down the nave, till you come to two sepulchral slabs near the west end, and then look about you, etc.-RUSKIN.

He had been apprehensive that the enemy would avoid a decisive action and would protract the war till the autumnal rains should return with pestilence in their train.-MACAULAY.

The following is an excellent specimen of a long and complicated sentence of conditioned statement. Though long and complicated, it is perfectly clear throughout; each word, phrase, and clause is in the proper place, and the relation of each part to the whole is unmistakable :

Without wasting time over the exaggeration which Wordsworth's judgment on criticism clearly contains, or over an attempt to trace the causes —not difficult, I think, to be traced-which may have led Wordsworth to this exaggeration, a critic may with advantage seize an occasion for trying his own conscience, and for asking himself of what real service at any given moment the practice of criticism either is or may be made to his own mind and spirit, and to the minds and spirits of others.-MATTHEW ARNOLD.

BALANCED STATEMENT.

7. A balanced sentence is one in which the several members run parallel, resembling one another in grammatical structure and in word-order; the effect of the whole is to give peculiar point to a comparison or a contrast. For example:

Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers.— MACAULAY.

But, my lord, you may quit the field of business, though not the field of danger; and, though you cannot be safe, you may cease to be ridiculous.-JUNIUS.

They are still base enough to encourage the follies of your age, as they once did the vices of your youth.-JUNIUS.

Worth makes the man, the want of it the fellow.-POPE.

In peace, children bury their parents; in war, parents bury their children.-Z.

Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid, Pope is always smooth, uniform, and level. Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities,

and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe and levelled by the roller.-JOHNSON.

We were ten or twelve millions of people, spread over almost half a world. We were more than twenty States, some stretching along the same seaboard, some along the same line of inland frontier, and others on opposite banks of the same vast rivers.-WEBSTER.

There was no blush, no tremulousness, which said, "I know you think me a pretty woman, too young to preach"; no casting up or down of the eyelids, no compression of the lips, no attitude of the arms, that said, "But you must think of me as a saint."-GEORGE ELIOT.

More than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts in his mind.-HAWTHORNE.

Miss Baillie's play went off capitally here. We wept till our hearts were sore, and applauded till our hands were blistered. -SCOTT.

The passages quoted from Macaulay, Junius, George Eliot, and Hawthorne are the only ones which present a balanced sentence in the strict sense; that is, a sentence in which one member is balanced against another, the balance constituting the syntactic union of the parts. In the passages from Pope, Z., Johnson, and Scott, we have independent sentences placed side by side, the contrast binding them together loosely, not syntactically. In the passage from Webster the balance exists only in the several clauses describing the predicate "States." This may be called clause-balance.

Examples of a conditioned sentence in which one member is in balanced structure are the following:

The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectator.-MACAULAY.

If you wish to enrich a person, study not to increase his stores but to diminish his desires.-Z.

The following are more nearly balanced sentences in the strict sense:

As persons have a difficulty in knowing their own characters, so has a writer in judging of his own compositions.-JOWETT.

It is in these matters as in the commonest affairs of practical life: the guess of the fool will be folly, while the guess of the wise man will be wisdom.-HUXLEY.

Law cannot prevent the envenomed arrow from being pointed at the

intended victim; but it has given him a shield in the integrity of a jury. -CURRAN.

Compare the two. This I offer to give you is plain and simple; the other, full of perplexed and intricate mazes. This is mild, that harsh. This is found by experience effectual for its purposes; the other is a new project. This is universal; the other calculated for certain Colonies only. This is immediate in its conciliatory operation; the other remote, contingent, full of hazard.-BURKE,

Balanced sentences of a peculiar kind are frequent in the poetry and the proverbial writings of the Hebrews. For example:

A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.--Prov. x., I.

Blessings are upon the head of the just but violence covereth the mouth of the wicked.-Prov. x., 6.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.-Ps. xxiii., 2.

This peculiar Hebrew construction is called parallelism.

GENERAL REMARKS.

8. In the present chapter an attempt has been made to classify the several forms of the sentence; also to illustrate the more usual varieties of each form. Many specimens have been taken from writers of acknowledged merit. The student is earnestly advised to cultivate the habit of examining for himself in like manner the sentence-structure of the English classics; only by virtue of this habit can he hope to acquire familiarity with the essentials of expression. The sentence is, after all, the unit of written discourse. True, the unity and sequence of the paragraph are not to be neglected. And, indeed, certain features of sentence-structure can be taught only in connection with the paragraph. See $$ 45-52. Nevertheless, after making all due concessions to paragraph-writing, we must admit the fundamental truth that each individual sentence is the expression of an individual thought, and that this A thought should be expressed in the most perfect form. sense of perfect sentence-structure we can acquire only through

the most painstaking study of sentences as we find them in the best writers. Only after such study can we truthfully assert that we know what a sentence is.

In pursuing this study we need not expect to be always able to classify the exact variety of condition in a sentence of conditioned statement. Some sentences, like some figures of speech, will admit of classification under more than one head. The main point is to recognize the principle that one action turns upon another action, with a movement resembling that of a hinge. Bearing this broad principle in mind, the student should note the peculiar manner in which the individual writer makes his sentences turn. The close study of one hundred well-selected pages of the best prose will yield surprising results in training the student's mind insensibly in the habit of arranging his thoughts in conditioned form, instead of stringing them loosely together. See §§ 15-17, 36.

For the unconditioned sentence, the chief gain will consist in a clearer insight into the method of arranging phrases and clauses. The longer and more involved the sentence, the greater the art of disposing every word in the proper place. This art of arrangement is exceedingly slow of acquisition. Nothing but the example of the best writers can carry us very far on the road.

The balanced sentence is used sparingly by the best writers. Certain writers of the eighteenth century, notably Pope, Johnson, and Junius, used it to excess; in the nineteenth century Macaulay is somewhat free in the use of it. The balanced sentence is dangerous in two ways. First, it soon becomes monotonous; the eye and the mind of the reader weary of the pendulum-like swing. Secondly, and chiefly, it is dangerous to our habits of thought. Very few things resemble each other so nearly that we can safely balance one with the other in this formal manner. The variations are also to be taken into account. Yet the habitual writer of balanced sentences, in his eagerness to find things alike, overlooks the differences, and thus violates the truth. This will be evident

to any one who will study critically Johnson's long-drawn-out parallel between Dryden and Pope, from which an extract has been given in § 7. Johnson was so desirous of weighing his clauses and phrases that he forgot to weigh his facts.

Occasionally, perhaps, the student may be tempted to confound a balanced sentence with a conditioned sentence embodying a comparison. Yet the difference is obvious. In a conditioned sentence one member is subordinate to the other, hence dependent. In the balanced sentence the members are co-ordinate. No one is dependent on another. The thoughts and facts are all independent; the writer merely puts them side by side by way of forcible illustration.

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