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 A HISTORY OF 
 ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
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 TORONTO
 
 A HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY 
 
 M.A. OXON. 5 HON. LL.D. ABERD. ', HON. D.LITT. DURH. 
 
 FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY ; HONORARY FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORI> 
 
 PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 
 
 Nihil, quod prosa scriptum, non redigi [potest] in quaedam 
 versiculorum genera vel in membra. . . . Neque enim loqui 
 possumus nisi e syllabis brevibus ac longis, ex quibus pedes 
 fiunt. QUINTILIAN, Inst. Orator, ix. iv. 52, 61. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1912
 
 COPYRIGHT
 
 Cofiage 
 Ubrary 
 
 TK. 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE work which I am now attempting, and which was, 
 in an indirect fashion, promised or aspired to in the 
 History of English Prosody (iii. 20 and elsewhere), may 
 be said to be a carrying out of lines laid down a good 
 deal earlier than those of the History of Prosody itself. 
 It is now some six and thirty years since Lord Morley of 
 Blackburn, then editor of the Fortnightly Review, after 
 most kindly honouring a draft at sight which I had drawn 
 upon him, uninvited and unintroduced, in the shape of a 
 paper on Charles Baudelaire, asked me to write something 
 else on " English Prose Style," * a matter on which, though 
 always interested in it from the time when, as a mere 
 boy, I read De Quincey, I had never yet formulated any 
 very precise ideas. About this time, or shortly after, I 
 came into abundant practice as a reviewer, and had to 
 keep the subject before me ; while, some years later still, 
 the late Mr. Kegan Paul asked me to deal still more 
 elaborately with it in the Preface to a collection of 
 Extracts. 2 By this time I had systematised my ideas on 
 the subject to some not inconsiderable extent, and the 
 idea of formal scansion of English prose (if I had known 
 of Bishop Hurd's attempts I certainly had forgotten all 
 about them) first regularly suggested itself. 3 Of this I 
 
 1 "Modern English Prose/' F.R., February 1876. 
 
 2 Specimens of English Prose Style (London, 1885). Both this paper and 
 the preceding are reprinted in Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1892). 
 
 3 I did not know Mason's book, v. inf., till much later.
 
 vi A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 have never left hold since, being much stimulated by the 
 regular and professional study of the remarks of Aristotle, 1 
 Quintilian, and others on prose rhythm in their respective 
 languages. A further stimulus was also administered, 
 perhaps a decade later, by that remark of Dr. Lawrence's 
 to which I draw fuller attention elsewhere. 2 But the causes 
 which prevented me from undertaking other things see 
 Prefaces to the Histories of Criticism and of English Prosody 
 and then these things themselves, kept it back, not to 
 mention that, for some time, there was a chance of the 
 subject being taken up by a friend of excellent competence. 
 He, however, dropped it, 3 not, I believe, being able to 
 arrive at conclusions sufficiently definite to satisfy him ; 
 and on finding that he had finally given up the notion, I 
 
 threw out the hint above referred to. It now remains to 
 
 * 
 
 be seen whether I shall be able to make something of the 
 matter. The attempt, if made, may not be quite useless, 
 and in making it I shall certainly be able also to administer 
 divers delectable draughts of example. The expense of 
 my own time and trouble at least has not been grudged ; 
 though the amount of both demanded by the task cannot 
 easily be overrated. 
 
 There is hardly more than one point of fact on which 
 I may say a further prefatory word. Although I have no 
 fault to find with the reception accorded to the Histories 
 above mentioned though I have rather to acknowledge a 
 most generous welcome it appeared to me, in both cases, 
 that a somewhat extravagant, not to say erroneous, mean- 
 ing was attachedjby some readers, to the word " History." 
 They appeared to demand, not only a complete account 
 of the ort, but an exhaustive examination of the Start. 
 
 1 I had not " taken up " the Rhetoric or the Poetics at Oxford, because there 
 was in my time an idea, encouraged by some tutors, that neither was, as a 
 book, bien vu in certain high quarters. 2 V. inf. p. 10. 
 
 3 Not wholly (v. inf. p. 464 note), but as the subject of a complete history 
 or treatise.
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 Now, on the possibility, and still more on the use, of this 
 latter, in regard to the majority of subjects, I am something 
 of a sceptic ; and even when I acknowledge the felicity 
 of knowing the causes of things, I think it well to know 
 the things themselves first. I do not, however, intend 
 to neglect theory altogether, and some generalising 
 suggestions will be found in the Interchapters which 
 summarise the successive Periods, as well as in the 
 Conclusion, and especially in Appendix III. But I wish 
 chiefly to bring out the facts of this interesting and much 
 neglected matter ; and to indicate the additional delecta- 
 tion which attends the study of them. To sport with 
 Amaryllis (if Amaryllis be poetry) may be best ; but there 
 remains a Neaera in prose, and the tangles of her hair 
 are not to be despised by the sportsman-lover. 
 
 As I approach, contemplating it still from whatever 
 distance, the end of these studies of metre and rhythm 
 which I may never reach, that sense of the " unending 
 endless quest," 1 which I suppose all but very self-satisfied 
 and self-sufficient persons feel, impresses itself more and 
 more upon me. An, I suppose, youthful reviewer of some 
 different but kindred work of mine not very long ago, 
 reproached me with ignorance or neglect of the fact that 
 he and his generation had quite given up positive deliver- 
 ances in criticism. They regarded it (I think he said) as 
 hopeless and wrong to " pin " something or other " to the 
 rainbow beauty of what was really a miracle of incrusta- 
 tion." The proceeding appeared to me to be difficult, if 
 not impossible, and the phrase to be really a miracle of 
 galimatias. But, as a fact, I hope that almost all who 
 have read me will acquit me of the impudence or the 
 folly of thinking that I could say even an interim last 
 word on the secrets of rhythmical charm, whether in the 
 
 1 The last words of Longfellow's proem to Ultima Thule, his last' pub- 
 lished work.
 
 viii A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 slightly more tangible form of verse, or the far more 
 intangible one of prose. Here, as everywhere, and almost 
 more than anywhere, beauty incipit in mysterio as well as 
 exit in mysterium. Here, and almost more also, it is as 
 when you see a face and say to it with Browning 
 
 Lie back ; could thought of mine improve you ? 
 
 and decide that, if improvement is impossible, the inter- 
 pretation of the actual charm is equally so. You can 
 get some way towards the secret. The spring of the 
 wing of the nostril ; the plunge into the clear pool of the 
 eyes, with its impenetrable background of agate or lapis 
 lazuli, of chrysoprase or avanturine ; the sweep of the cheek- 
 edge from ear to chin ; the straight descent, or curved and 
 recurved wave, of the profile ; the azure net-work of the 
 closed eyelids ; " the fringed curtains " at their juncture ; ' 
 the infinite intricacies of the mouth and hair, ask yourself 
 about any one of these, and you cannot tell why it is beau- 
 tiful, why the combination of the whole makes a beautiful 
 face. But you can, to some extent, fix for yourself the 
 character of those parts and the composition of that whole, 
 and, so far at least, you are ahead of the mere gaper who 
 stares and " likes grossly." 
 
 So it is with literature. You can never get at the 
 final entelechy which differentiates Shelley and Shake- 
 speare from the average versifier, Cluvienus and myself 
 from Pater or from Browne. But you can attend to 
 the feature -composition of the beautiful face, to the 
 quality of the beautiful features, in each of these masters, 
 and so you can dignify and intensify your appreciation of 
 them. That this is best to be done in prose, as in verse, 
 by the application of the foot-system that is to say, by 
 studying the combinations of the two great sound-qualities 
 which, for my part, I call, as my fathers called them from 
 the beginning, " long " and u short," but which you may call
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 anything you like, so long as you observe the difference 
 and respect the grouping I may almost say I know ; 
 having observed the utter practical failure of all other 
 systems in verse, and the absence even of any attempt to 
 apply any other to prose. 
 
 With this I may leave the present essay to its 
 chances ; only repeating my acquaintance with two quota- 
 tions which I made thirty-six years ago when touching, 
 for the first time, the subject of Prose Style generally. 
 One was Nicholas Breton's warning to somebody " not to 
 talk too much of it, having so little of it," and the other, 
 Diderot's epigram on Beccaria's ouvrage sur le style oit il 
 riy a point de style. These are, of course, " palpable hits " 
 enough. But you may criticise without being able to 
 create, and you may love beauty, and to the possible 
 extent understand it, without being beautiful. 1 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 
 
 THE ATHEN^UM, June 15, 1912. 
 
 1 It ought not to be necessary, but perhaps is desirable, to emphasise the 
 fact that this attempts only to be a History of English Prose Rhythm, illus- 
 trated by examples from writers greater and lesser not a History of English 
 Prose Style generally. And of these examples I have (with the kind permission 
 of the publishers and the editor) chosen as many as I could from Sir Henry 
 Craik's English Prose Selections (5 vols., London, 1890-96), where the reader 
 will often find useful contexts, many other illustrations, and, as it were, a 
 Chrestomathy to this History. But I have, of course, not confined myself to 
 this even in the later part ; while I have constantly re-read books, and some 
 whole authors, to " freshen the atmosphere," and make sure that my examples 
 were exemplary. The passages chosen from Old and Middle English owe 
 nothing to any previous collection, though some of them may necessarily have 
 appeared in one or another. I must apologise for any errors left in foot- 
 division and quantification things extremely difficult to get right, especially 
 with eyes as weak as mine. In this, and in matters generally ranked as more 
 important, I owe, yet once more, infinite thanks to my old helpers, Professors 
 Ker, Elton, and Gregory Smith.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY OF PROSE RHYTHM GENERALLY, AND OF THE 
 HISTORY OF ITS STUDY 
 
 FACE 
 
 The beginnings in Greek and Latin Aristotle Demetrius (?) 
 
 Dionysius Quintilian Others, Cicero Longinus . . I 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 General characteristics of Old English prose Its drawbacks and advan- 
 tages in vocabulary and compounds Its "synthetic" character 
 Intermixture of prosaic and poetic style Latin influence Passages 
 for examination Ethelbald's grant to the Bishop of Worcester 
 The "Slaying of Cynewulf " Remarks Rhythmical effect of 
 inflections Of compounds, etc. Um endings, consonant groups, 
 etc. General word-rhythm Remarks on the rhythm of the com- 
 position And its relations to verse Absence of alliteration 
 Alfred's translations The tenth century The Blickling Homilies 
 Interim summary of prose before ^Elfric ^Elfric, the Colloquy 
 The Homilies Specimen passages Remarks on them Later 
 examples, Wulfstan Apollonius of Tyre General survey and 
 summary . . . . . . .10 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FORMATION OF PROSE RHYTHM IN MIDDLE ENGLISH 
 BEFORE C. 1350 
 
 Importance and difficulty of Early and Middle English in our subject 
 The Ancren Riwle Analysis of passages "The Wooing of Our 
 Lord" Other twelfth and thirteenth century pieces General 
 remarks on early Middle English prose Influence of the Vulgate, 
 and of French prose . . . . . .43
 
 xii A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 English made a school language The four prosemen of the late four- 
 teenth century Wyclif The Tracts and Sermons The translation 
 of the Bible Trevisa Sir John Mandeville Chaucer His 
 various prose pieces Their somewhat neglected importance The 
 Parson's Tale The Tale of Melibee Its blank verse The 
 Astrolabe The Boethius The fifteenth century Its real im- 
 portance Pecock and the Represser His syntax His compound 
 equivalents The Fasten Letters Malory His prose and the 
 earlier verse Morte Guinevere's last meeting with Lancelot The 
 Lancelot dirge The Throwing of Excalibur His devices His 
 excellence a rather lonely one Berners Style of his romance 
 translations And contrast of their Prefaces Fisher . . 56 
 
 INTERCHAPTER I . . . . .102 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 4 
 
 THE FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 
 
 Shorter retrospect Continuance of rhetorical influence : the Cambridge 
 School Cheke : his "bankruptcy" theory Its fallacy Wilson 
 and " ink-horn terms " The excuses Ascham Tyndale The 
 Prayer- Book (Cranmer ?) Latimer Profane translations Lyly 
 and Euphuism : its failure in rhythm Hooker : his achievement 
 Rhythm-sweep And fingering of particular words Sidney . 1 14 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE AUTHORISED VERSION AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE 
 ORNATE STYLE 
 
 The coming of harvest The Authorised Version of the Bible The 
 sixtieth chapter of the book of Isaiah A.V., Septuagint, and 
 Vulgate scanned Discussion of each Earlier English versions 
 for comparison : Coverdale The " Bishops' " Remarks on them 
 Geneva and Douay A New Testament example, the Charity 
 passage of / Cor. : atrocities of the Revisers The older versions 
 here Results of scrutiny Observation on use of synonyms In- 
 dividual writers Raleigh Greville Donne The palmiest days 
 Bacon (?) Burton Beauties and faults Milton Disputes 
 about his prose, and their causes Close connection of Milton's 
 style with oratory Some of its faults Partial foot-analysis 
 Taylor : the general high estimate of him Examples Rhythmical 
 characteristics Browne : Coleridge's charge against him Special 
 character of his charm, and special treatment of it required The
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 finale of Urn Burial Interim observation on overture The close 
 of the Garden of Cyrus Short passages from Religio Medici 
 From the Hydriotaphia From the Garden of Cyrus The Letter 
 to a Friend And Christian Morals. Others perforce omitted . 141 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 
 
 The charm of seventeenth - century ornateness Glanvill But such 
 omateness not for all work The forging of the plant for this Ben 
 Jonson High value of the Discoveries Hobbes His eminence 
 and its contrasted character The "Race" and "Love" passages 
 of Human Nature Clarendon ..... 201 
 
 INTERCHAPTER II . . . - . 217 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 AUGUSTAN PROSE 
 
 The prevailing of the plain style The group of 1630 Distribution of 
 the chapter Cowley Dryden South Halifax Temple and his 
 masterpiece The plainest styles, vulgar and not vulgar The non- 
 vulgarians : L'Estrange and Tom Brown Bunyan The vulgarians 
 The effect of abbreviations Instances from Rymer, etc. Defoe 
 Swift The rhythmical character of irony Addison Kurd's 
 dealings with his rhythm His supposed " Addisonian termina- 
 tion" His general view of Addison's "harmony" Specimens 
 of Addison himself Rhythmical analysis of them Selections of 
 other Queen Anne men necessary Berkeley Shaftesbury 
 Bolingbroke Letter-writers and novelists to be shortly dealt with 
 Conyers Middleton Efforts at variety Adam Smith Interim 
 observations on this prose Attempts to raise it Johnson : differ- 
 ent views respecting him His relation to Browne Characteristics 
 of the Johnsonian style Burke : his oratorical ethos His declared 
 method Early examples Middle Later Examples and com- 
 ments Gibbon : his peculiarity Its general effect, and that of 
 the other reformers The standard Georgian style Southey . 227 
 
 INTERCHAPTER III 288 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 
 
 The necessity of reaction Its causes and bents Preoccupation of the 
 ground by poetry ; the Lake group and Scott Byron, Shelley, 
 and Keats The minors : Moore The Epicurean Return to
 
 xiv A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 Coleridge in Anima Poetae General descriptive character of these 
 early passages The three chief pioneers De Quincey Specimen 
 phrases and passages, with analysis and comment The Dream- 
 Fugue and the Suspiria the chief quarries Elaborate rhythm by 
 no means often aimed at elsewhere Its connection with dream 
 The Suspiria again The Autobiography De Quincey's relation 
 to poetry Wilson Landor : his characteristics The relations of 
 his poetry and his prose His critical utterances on the subject 
 Results in a " prose grand style " Specimens Some general ob- 
 servations The four kinds of rhythm in relation to prose I. Non- 
 prosaic rhythm or poetry II. Hybrid verse-prose III. Pure 
 prose highly rhythmed IV. Prose in general . . . 293 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 
 
 The coexistence of different styles in 1820 Momentary return to Landor 
 Comparative merits The "standard" still prevalent, but with a 
 tendency to degradation Definition of "slovenliness" Return to 
 examples Coleridge again Jeffrey Note on italics Chalmers 
 Note on Irving Hazlitt Lamb Leigh Hunt Carlyle 
 Macaulay The novelists: Miss Austen and Peacock Lord 
 Beaconsfield Dickens Thackeray Newman . . . 347 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY PROSE 
 
 1843 Modern Painters Influences on Ruskin's style His subjects 
 His practice in verse, and its marks on his prose Kingsley : his 
 pure Ruskinian prose His "song-shape" style Charlotte Bronte 
 "George Eliot" Mr. Froude Matthew Arnold His peculiar 
 system of repetition Examples, and discussion of it Mansel A 
 false censure corrected Pater His quietism His apes: Mr. 
 Frederick Myers Mr. Swinburne The mixed influences in him 
 Examples in great and little William Morris " Wardour 
 Street " or not ? George Meredith : his Meredithesity 
 Stevenson . . . . . . -39' 
 
 CONCLUSION 443 
 
 APPENDICES (I. Stave-Prose Poetry Ossian, Blake, Whitman, 
 etc. II. Mason on Prosaic Numbers. III. Table of Axioms, 
 Inferences, and Suggestions) ..... 467 
 
 INDEX .483
 
 I 
 
 H 
 W 
 W 
 
 
 < 
 H 
 
 I I 
 
 b -4-T u I I fi _C 
 
 -J^ tn rt o ^ 3 o 
 
 Is^Tifsl
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY - OF PROSE RHYTHM GENERALLY, 
 AND OF THE HISTORY OF ITS STUDY 
 
 The beginnings in Greek and Latin Aristotle Demetrius (?) 
 Dionysius Quintilian Others, Cicero Longinus. 
 
 THAT it is possible to use prose without knowing or The begin 
 thinking anything about it, is established by one of the 
 great and greatly quoted things which it is now considered 
 unlawful to mention, because everybody is supposed to 
 know them ; and which, in the near future of what is 
 now called education, nobody at all will know. That it 
 is possible, and not undesirable, to consider prose almost as 
 curiously as verse itself, is a more contentious proposition. 
 It is, however, certain, on the one hand, that, in the very 
 dawn of criticism, Aristotle, who threw light on so many 
 things, practically started the whole enquiry in which 
 this book is an essay, by his description of prose as 
 " neither possessing metre nor destitute of rhythm " ; l and 
 that, in this context of the Rhetoric, he discussed Greek 
 prose scansion with some fulness. It is equally certain 
 that this distinction one of those which commend them- 
 selves, as soon as proposed, to almost every intelligence 
 was followed, though not probably to any very great 
 extent, 2 by critics both Greek and Latin. And we possess, 
 
 JS X^ews Set /j.rfre <-fj./j.eTpov elvai fji-qre S,ppvd^ov (Rhet. III. 
 viii. I ). Isocrates, in a treatise of which we have only fragments, seems to 
 have preceded Aristotle, with whom he but in part agrees. See Benseler's 
 edition (Leipzig, 1877), ii. 276 ; or Cope and Sandys on the Rhetoric, vol. iii. 
 p. 83 (Cambridge, 1877), and note I next page. 
 
 2 The ordinary run of Greek writers in their " Arts" of rhetoric seem to 
 
 m B
 
 2 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 in particular, a consideration of Latin prose rhythm by 
 Quintilian, which forms a not unworthy pendant to 
 Aristotle's in regard to Greek. It is unfortunate, no 
 doubt, that, from the nature of the case, these passages 
 are among the obscurest of their respective authors'. 
 Whether we have much certain knowledge as to even the 
 vowel sounds of Greek and Latin, is a matter of grave 
 doubt to some of us ; that we have practically no know- 
 ledge at all on the almost more important points of 
 their intonation, accentuation, and general pronunciation, 
 is, to some of those some, a certainty. 
 
 Aristotle. Partly owing to this, and partly to other causes, 
 
 Aristotle's brief remarks as to the details of the subject 
 are somewhat obscure ; and they display a musical- 
 mathematical preoccupation which hardly applies to 
 modern languages, and which has certainly misled some 
 modern enquirers. Others, more wary, must admit that 
 they here see, if not always darkly, yet never more than 
 partly in the antique glass. When Aristotle says that 
 spondaic-dactylic (i.e. heroic) rhythm is too stately, too 
 little varied, and not well enough adapted to ordinary 
 conversation for prose ; that iambic, though thoroughly 
 conversational, is too conversational, and not stately 
 enough ; and that trochaic is too tripping, 1 we know 
 what he means, though there may be a faint puzzle even 
 here as to how the metre of the Prometheus and the 
 Agamemnon can be wanting in stateliness. When he 
 says that " the paeon remains," he is providing for us a 
 great door and effectual ; but his reasons, if we attend 
 
 have eschewed it ; but the three greatest the uncertain Demetrius in the De 
 Interpretations, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Longinus do not. 
 
 1 Isocrates, on the other hand, seems to have preferred " a mixture of 
 iambic and trochaic." The whole passage, to be also found in Walz among 
 the scholia on Hermogenes, runs thus : " But let not prose be altogether 
 prose, for it would be dry ; nor metred, for that would attract too much 
 attention (Kara<f>a.i>ts ydp) ; but let it be mingled with all kinds of metres, 
 especially iambic and trochaic." There are complete trimeters in "the 
 old man eloquent." But we ought to remember that he was groping his way, 
 and that these familiar and simple rhythms are apt to suggest themselves 
 before the ear detects the superiority, for prose, of the combination of them 
 into paeons and other four- or even five-syllabled feet In two of the four 
 possible forms the paeon is "a mixture of iambic and trochaic."
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 too much to them, seem likely to shut that door again ; 
 for he says that " heroic " rhythm (spondaic or dactylic) 
 is as one to one (i.e. two longs, or one long and two shorts 
 = half-longs), iambic or trochaic as two to one (long, two 
 halves, and short, one), but the paeon (one long and three 
 shorts) as whole and half (to one). Even after we have 
 arrived at the meaning of this, which is itself not quite 
 sun-clear, a puzzle remains, not indeed insoluble, but a 
 puzzle. 1 For one may ask in vain, in the first place, for 
 an explanation of the precise virtue in the " one and a 
 half to one " relation ; and, in the second, what he means 
 by saying that you cannot construct metre out of paeons, 
 whereas you certainly can. 
 
 There are therefore, and could not but be, difficulties 
 in the way of taking Aristotle as a guide in detail, besides 
 the great one greater in prose than in verse that he is 
 speaking of Greek and we of English. But we have at 
 any rate got two great possible lights and leading-strings 
 from him. One is the saying that prose must be neither 
 " emmetric " nor " arrhythmic " ; the other is the indication 
 of the paeon, or four-syllabled foot, as the base-rhythm. 
 
 The mysterious Demetrius, in sections 38 to 43 of his Demetrius (?). 
 treatise, deals with prose rhythm, basing himself expressly 
 on Aristotle, repeating much from him, and disagreeing 
 with his limitation of the possible paeonic forms. He 
 has, however, an interesting remark on the dignity of 
 Thucydides as attained by the long syllables he uses, 
 which would look as if Demetrius considered not merely 
 the paeon, but its opposite the epitrite, 2 as admissible. 
 
 1 The paeon being composed of three short syllables and one long one, 
 " two and a half" might seem to be its equivalent : but Aristotle, as before, 
 is splitting the foot up. Every paeon consists of two halves, in one of which 
 there is a long syllable, while in the other there is not, so that they stand to 
 each other in the relation of three to two, or one and a half to one. Aristotle 
 seems to have recognised only two paeons that with the long syllable at the 
 beginning, and that with it at the end. In English all forms of the foot 
 occur, but the commonest and most valuable has the long in the third place. 
 
 2 One short and three long as opposed to one long and three short. The 
 table of feet prefixed to this chapter should be constantly consulted by those 
 to whom the names are not familiar. In the opening sentence of the great 
 History which Demetrius quotes, 'Aflijccuos (with wtypa\f/e following) is an 
 epitrite by position, and 'AQrivaluv one of itself.
 
 4 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 But he thinks that recurrent spondees exceed the bounds 
 of prose. And he does not say much more. 
 
 Dionysius. Dionysius also refers to Aristotle as indeed does 
 
 Cicero, who naturally attacks the subject, more than others, 
 from the specially elocutionary point of view, and from 
 whose references to it most moderns, in the comparatively 
 few cases in which it was touched, probably in turn 
 derived their suggestions. But the Halicarnassian here, 
 as in not a few other cases, makes the subject his own by 
 a bold advance on the Stagirite. " No rhythm whatever," 
 he says, 1 and says truly, " is banished from unmetred 
 composition, any more than from that in metre." So 
 that he maintains Aristotle's distinction of the emmetric 
 and arrhythmic, while removing (as is in some lan- 
 guages undoubtedly right) the restriction to particular 
 rhythms. 
 
 Quintiiian. The Quintilian passage 2 is very much longer than 
 Aristotle's, and it has been contaminated by the infusion 
 of a much later rhetorical abuse of terms. Because certain 
 rhythms, considered merely in themselves, and for their 
 mathematical -musical value, represent the same values, 
 men had got into a fatal habit (which is doing harm to 
 this day) of calling all three-time double in this sense 
 " dactylic." Quintilian, indeed, warns his readers most 
 carefully that, in verse, an anapaest is a totally different 
 thing from a dactyl. But this supposed abstract equi- 
 valence (not the inherited and consecrated licence as in 
 verse) injures his words, for our use, to some extent. His 
 drift, however, is all right, and that unfailing common - 
 sense in which he is the equal of any writer, makes the 
 following remarks of the highest value : that, though 
 the appearance of an entire verse in prose is " the ugliest 
 fault of all," and even part of one risks inelegance, still 
 " actual verses often escape us without our perceiving 
 them " ; that " though the whole body and course of 
 prose is pervaded by number, and we cannot even speak 
 except in longs and shorts, the materials of feet," yet 
 prose must, above all, be " varied in composition " ; and 
 
 1 In the De Composilione, xviii. 2 Inst. Orat. IX. iv. 45-121.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 that " no system will be good if ... it go always on 
 the same feet." 1 
 
 Differing from Aristotle and Cicero, but it would seem 
 resting on Isocrates, he would in one place exclude four- 
 and five-syllabled feet from prose scansion, and confine 
 his list to ordinary double and triple measures of verse, 
 
 though he excludes the molossus ( ). Yet he 
 
 lets the longer in again later, and in fact seems to have 
 been in two minds on the subject, as well as on some 
 others. The point of importance is that he, like Aristotle 
 and Cicero, has no doubt of the possibility and propriety 
 of applying longs and shorts, in their necessary varieties 
 of combination, to the interpretation of prose rhythm. 
 His insistence on Variety as the be-all and end-all of 
 this rhythm rests on what we shall perhaps find to be 
 the one " rock that abides " in our treacherous and quick- 
 sand-like matter. And we shall probably find also only 
 too much reason to agree with him that " the manage- 
 ment [either in creation or in criticism] of feet in prose is 
 more difficult than in verse," though there may be better 
 chance, for obvious reasons, of " windfalls of the Muses " 
 and haphazard success. 
 
 These are, of course, not the only authorities that Others 
 might be cited. As far as Latin is concerned some might 
 consider Cicero more important even than Quintilian. 
 A practising orator, who was also an untiring theoretical 
 student of oratory, could not fail to devote special 
 attention to a matter so intimately affecting his pro- 
 fessional efforts, though it is no doubt well to remember 
 that oratorical rhythm is by no means the only rhythm of 
 prose, and that it may injuriously affect the reading aloud 
 (and still more the reading to oneself) of non-oratorical 
 matter. He is full of curious touches ; though the 
 curiosity often enforces the lesson hinted at above and to 
 be repeated below. 
 
 In fact, I confess to having been gratified when a 
 person of undoubted competence, to whom I had used 
 
 1 A larger cento will be found in the present writer's Loci Critici (London 
 and New York, 1903) pp. 65, 66.
 
 6 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 the word <f>\vapia in reference to some of the Tullian 
 remarks on this subject, laughed and did not disagree. 
 Cicero had got hold of Aristotle (whom he partly mis- 
 quotes) and knew Isocrates ; but his own remarks on the 
 subject are, however well expressed, not much more 
 "ingoing" than Mr. Pope's on moral philosophy. There 
 is something in the Orator, more in the De Oratore, and 
 perhaps a few remarks elsewhere ; but it all comes to very 
 little. As good a thing as any, though not commonly 
 quoted, is the observation, 1 of the general type which the 
 author can conceive fairly well and express excellently, 
 est autem etiam in dicendo quidam cantus obscurior 
 (" there is in speaking a kind of underhum of song "). 
 His best strictly technical criticism 2 seems to me to be 
 that the dochmiac, which he confines to one only of its 
 numerous forms (short, two longs, short, and long), quovis 
 loco aptus est, though he will not have it repeated. And 
 there is another good one, that by pause you can destroy 
 the bad effect of a continuous iambic run. But what has 
 been said above remains true, and the oratorical nisus 
 shows itself in his excessive attention to the ends of 
 sentences ; which are, of course, important, but hardly 
 more so than other parts. His occasional obscurities and 
 inconsistencies troubled the good Mason (see App. II.) 
 not a little. 
 
 Longinus. We must not, however, pass over in silence, 3 or with a 
 
 mere mention, the treatment of the subject by the greatest 
 of ancient, perhaps of all critics the writer whom all the 
 restless meddling and peddling of so-called scholarship 
 still need not prevent any one who appreciates the laws 
 of literary evidence from identifying (at least under 
 caution) with Longinus of Athens and Palmyra. He 
 had, though with a certain vacillation of language, 
 mentioned rhythm, or at least " harmony " of construction, 
 as one of his five " sources " of Sublimity ; and at his 
 thirty - ninth chapter he comes to it more specially. 
 
 1 Orator, xvii. 57 (ed. Wilkins, Oxford, n.d.). 
 
 2 Ibid. Ixiv. 218. 
 
 3 That stupor mundi rhetorici, Hermogenes, dealt with the subject, but 
 not elaborately : we will not dwell on him.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Unfortunately for us, however, he had, he tells us, published 
 two books on the subject already ; and therefore cuts it 
 short here. Whether these dealt with rhythm and metre 
 generally, or with prose rhythm specially, we cannot, of 
 course, be sure or even guess. But it is clear that though 
 in other parts of the treatise he includes and discusses 
 poetry, he is here thinking of oratory in the first place, if 
 not wholly. He opens with one of his most eloquent 
 eulogies of "heavenly harmony" itself its power of 
 mastering the soul and compelling the very body to 
 imitative movement how it creates and reinforces all the 
 changing forms of beauty in words and thoughts, and so 
 forth. And then he illustrates with a sentence of 
 Demosthenes, couched, as he says (it is, according to a 
 warning just given, not perfectly easy to follow him), 
 "wholly in the dactylic measure," but ending in a first 
 paeon (he does not call it so), which gives a grandeur 
 vanishing alike at the subtraction of a syllable and the 
 addition of one. 
 
 But after a digression of more general character he 
 turns from advocacy to warning. As nothing raises style 
 more than grandeur and harmony of rhythm, so nothing 
 degrades it so much as mincing or tripping effeminacy 
 of movement pyrrhics and trochees and double trochees 
 suggesting regular dance-tune. 1 And he shows us how 
 acute and well-trained the ears of a Greek must have been 
 by saying that the audience of such a style sometimes 
 actually beat time like dancers with the speaker not 
 apparently from any wish to ridicule him, but unable to 
 resist the temptation and infection. There is, as has been 
 admitted, not a little in this that is difficult ; but the 
 general drift of it is clear enough and thoroughly germane 
 to our general subject. It was not impossibly the curious 
 popularity of Longinus in the eighteenth century which 
 put Mason and Hurd on the track of their rhythmical 
 
 1 Aristotle had already stigmatised the poor trochee as " rather cancan-ish " 
 KopdaxiKilrrfpos. This certainly does not apply in English, where the trochee 
 is the acorn-drop (in fall and rebound) from our ancestral oaks, and the trickle 
 of the water-spring from the rock whence we were hewn.
 
 8 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 analysis of prose, though Cicero is their more probable 
 and oftener cited guide. 
 
 It may be said, therefore, that these ancients set us in 
 the right method ; and if it is objected that our results 
 will be totally different from theirs, it must be repeated 
 that this objection, akin to one often made as to prosodic 
 scansion, is the fruit of a disastrous misunderstanding. 
 
 D 
 
 English feet will not produce the same effects, and permit 
 of the same combinations, as Greek feet, because Greek is 
 Greek and English is English. But they bear the same 
 relation to English that Greek feet do to Greek, and they 
 are equally useful and indispensable instruments in the 
 analysis of rhythmical composition. The passage which 
 I have taken as motto is golden : " We cannot even 
 speak except in longs and shorts ; and longs and shorts 
 are the material of feet." 
 
 The history which is to follow should show amply the 
 impossibility of early conscious application of any simifer 
 analysis to English ; though it is hoped that it will also 
 show something more. If even our prosodic writing is 
 late, scanty, and for the most part frankly unsatisfactory 
 at first, it could not be expected that this much more 
 difficult and disputable enquiry should be entered upon 
 early. Ben Jonson is almost the first person I can 
 think of who is likely to have thought much about the 
 matter ; and it is noteworthy that his part disciple 
 Hobbes, when he wrote his own remarkable "brief" of 
 Aristotle's Rhetoric, simply omitted the portion concern- 
 ing rhythm. Mason and Kurd, in the middle of the 
 eighteenth century, are the first critics who, to my 
 knowledge, treated prose rhythm seriously ; and of the 
 work of both account will be found in the proper place. 
 Samuel Woodford 1 indeed, a man noticeable in many 
 ways, had glanced at the connection between blank verse 
 and prose ; and Johnson, in some of his denunciations of 
 " blanks," looks as if he ought to have had glimpses 
 about the matter. But in fact, with occasional " sports " 
 and exceptions, which should be duly chronicled later, 
 
 1 See History of Prosody, Hi. 552, note 7.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 the subject has remained unhandled stuff and untrodden 
 ground, or very nearly so, to the present day. 1 
 
 1 It is, perhaps, barely desirable to observe that these few pages have not 
 the least pretension to be an adequate account of the criticism of prose rhythm 
 in antiquity. I should very much like to write in extenso on the subject, but 
 such writing would be out of place here. The fullest, and in a way the 
 standard book on the subject is, I believe, E. Norden's Die antike Kunst- 
 prosa (Leipzig, 1898), which I have known since its appearance. But it 
 was not until after this chapter was in print that I came across Mr. 
 A. C. Clark's invaluable collection of, I think, all the passages cited above, 
 and certainly many others Fontes Prosae Numerosae (Oxford, 1909). The 
 English Preface is short and curiously unpretentious, but full of matter ; and 
 the collection itself is, as has been said, priceless. Much has recently been 
 written on Cicero's rhythms but for him v. sup. The present sketch is 
 merely intended to indicate the origins of the procedure adopted in what 
 follows, not the niceties of actual Greek and Latin arrangement. (After the 
 greater part of this book was in type, and when the present chapter was 
 already in revise for press, there appeared in the Church Quarterly Review 
 for April 1912 an interesting article, by Mr. John Shelly, based on Mr. Clark's 
 and some other books, and dealing with rhythm Latin and English - 
 ecclesiastical. As I had already stated infra (p. 133 note), I doubt whether 
 Latin cadences are patient of exact adjustment to English. I also doubt the 
 possibility of effectually introducing, with us, the so-called cursits. But our 
 literature on the subject is so scanty that I am glad to salute any new 
 companion -explorer, though I may add, as the book goes on, occasional 
 indications in note of what I think insufficient in a Latin explanation. )
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 General characteristics of Old English prose Its drawbacks and 
 advantages in vocabulary and compounds Its "synthetic" 
 character Intermixture of prosaic and poetic style Latin 
 influence Passages for examination Ethelbald's grant to the 
 Bishop of Worcester The " Slaying of Cynewulf " Remarks 
 Rhythmical effect of inflections Of compounds, etc. Um 
 endings, consonant groups, etc. General word -rhythm 
 Remarks on the rhythm of the composition And its relations 
 to verse Absence of alliteration Alfred's translations Th*e 
 tenth century The Blickling Homilies Interim summary of 
 prose before yElfric yElfric, the Colloquy The Homilies 
 Specimen passages Remarks on them Later examples, 
 Wulfstan Apollonius of Tyre General survey and summary. 
 
 General char- 
 acteristics of 
 Old English 
 prose. 
 
 IT is well known that Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, 
 prose stands in a rather peculiar relation to the corre- 
 sponding verse. 1 It is a sort of commonplace of literary 
 history that verse is always older than prose, and in the 
 case of most literatures especially modern ones it is 
 
 1 Dr. Lawrence's remark (see Preface), which so impressed me, is 
 as follows : " The true rhythm of the old English verse is not a matter 
 of mere antiquarian interest. Until it is understood the development of 
 English prose rhythm cannot be properly explained " ( Chapters on Alliterative 
 Verse, by John Lawrence, D.Litt., London, 1893). It was this, as I have 
 said, which set me on a new line of exploration, and I can never give it too 
 much credit or thanks for the "send-off." But my memory had, as I find 
 on reading Dr. Lawrence's tractate again after a good many years (during 
 which it had, after the wicked wont of pamphlets, "dived under"), deceived 
 me as to there being, in the body of the work, any working-out of this 
 suggestion. Such a working-out was not, in fact, in the least necessitated by 
 the title. On the contrary, Dr. Lawrence was not merely allowed but bound 
 to confine his attention, under that title, to what, no doubt, was the most 
 important feature of Anglo-Saxon verse-alliteration ; and was allowed, if not 
 bound, to devote his chief attention to two varieties of that feature "cross" 
 and "vowel" alliteration. Now these, though they certainly still furnish a 
 
 10
 
 CHAP, ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 11 
 
 almost demonstrably so. Nor, perhaps, is there reason 
 to doubt that the law did extend to Anglo-Saxon itself, 
 and that the oldest forms of Beowulf and its companion 
 pieces, not to speak of lost matter, might be older than 
 any prose that existed, as they certainly were than any 
 prose that we have. At the same time it would as 
 certainly seem that prose of a fairly elaborate and 
 accomplished character began with us at a period 
 relatively much earlier than with other and especially 
 with Romance nations. We get no Old French prose 
 worth speaking of 1 till (and that rather doubtfully) the 
 latter part of the twelfth century. We have Old English 
 pretty certainly from the seventh, and quite certainly 
 from the eighth. 
 
 The quality of this prose may no doubt have been 
 exaggerated by the late Professor Earle in his interesting 
 and enthusiastic book 2 on the subject ; nor will the 
 present writer undertake to rank the tenth century with 
 the seventeenth and the nineteenth as the three great 
 ages of the vehicle in English. But undoubtedly the 
 goodness of Old English prose is remarkable, and could 
 hardly have escaped general observation had it not been 
 that most people who have dealt with it have been 
 either, as foreigners, 3 partially incapable of knowing good 
 English prose from bad, or else natives intent upon 
 points which have nothing to do with its goodness. 
 
 "riband in the cap" of English prose, can scarcely be said to dominate or 
 prescribe its rhythm in any way. Alliteration is often almost entirely absent 
 in some of the most exquisite of modern examples for instance, in Mr. 
 Pater's passage on Lionardo's landscape ; though it may be eminently 
 present in others, as in De Quincey's description of Our Lady of Sighs. 
 Moreover, some of Dr. Lawrence's dicta are certainly not applicable to 
 modern work, whatever they may be to ancient. But nothing can be further 
 from my intention than to enter into any polemic with him. " I owe him 
 a thousand pounds " for that sentence, and the rest hardly concerns me. 
 
 1 Of course there must have been we know, at least from assertion, that 
 there was in the case of St. Mummolenus and others spoken prose much 
 earlier ; but it has not come down, and prose does not seem to have been ever 
 used for literary purposes before noo, or for some time after that date. 
 
 2 English Prose (London, 1890). 
 
 3 A writer whom I greatly respect, but with whom I often disagree, once 
 objected that " we are all foreigners as to Old English and Middle English." 
 I should retort " Anglus sum, nihil Anglicanum," etc.
 
 12 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 But the distinguo is all the more necessary here 
 because it has been so seldom applied. I hardly know 
 a single writer, except Mr. W. P. Ker, who has dealt with 
 Anglo-Saxon prose adequately, 1 and the space which he 
 had for so dealing with it was itself inadequate for taking 
 such aspects as the present. In order to judge it 
 properly we must, in the first place, remember its 
 limitations ; which were so many and so great that, while 
 they may justly reduce the positive critical estimate of 
 its achievements, they ought to exalt that estimate 
 relatively in almost a greater proportion. 
 
 its drawbacks The greatest of these drawbacks was not, perhaps, 
 and ad- fa Q limitation of the vocabulary, though undoubtedly 
 
 vantages in 
 
 vocabulary and this was a drawback. But it may be doubted whether 
 compounds, ^e ac j- ua i WO rd-Hst, which is very far from inconsiderable, 
 was insufficient for the tasks that it had to perform ; 
 and it possessed a power of compounding which, though 
 English has not really lost it, modern precision has sadly 
 hampered and hobbled. You may (Pecock, long after 
 Anglo-Saxon days, showed it) go too far in the direction 
 of substituting " star-witty man " for astrologer, and there 
 really is no necessity to ostracise " penetration " in 
 favour of " gothroughsomeness." But it is a great thing 
 to be able to do these things when you like ; and the 
 languages which, like French, have surrendered, or mostly 
 so, their franchise in this respect have paid no small penalty. 
 The real drawbacks of Anglo-Saxon lay elsewhere. 
 In the first place, there was the large prevalence of the 
 termination m, the ugliness of which Quintilian had 
 admitted 2 and bewailed in Latin, centuries earlier. It 
 has for some of us too much of the language of Mr. 
 Cophagus, " um and so on." To some of us also, its 
 vowels are apt to be drowned and muffled into a chorus 
 of grunts by the consonants. But clear pronunciation 
 can conquer this, as it (too rarely) does with well-bred, 
 well-educated, and not phonetically given speakers of 
 English to-day. 
 
 1 In The Dark Ages' (Periods of European Literature) (Edinburgh and 
 London, 1904). 2 Inst. Orat. xn. x. 33.
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 13 
 
 The most important characteristic of Old English, its " syn- 
 however, from our present point of view or the most character, 
 important next to its power of composition was one, 
 the exact operation of which, from that point of view, 
 might seem rather doubtful. This was the fact that the 
 language was what is (not too " inevitably ") called a 
 " synthetic " one that is to say, one furnished with 
 pretty full declensions and conjugations of the principal 
 parts of speech. The direct effect of this might at first 
 sight seem likely to be favourable to variety and con- 
 cinnity of rhythmical arrangement.; inasmuch as, in such 
 a language, the actual order of words in the clause is 
 almost unlimited by any consideration of putting together 
 in place those which are to go together in sense. It is 
 doubtful, however, whether this is not counter -worked 
 by some other and less obvious consequences of the 
 synthetic condition. In such languages there is a 
 tendency universally observable, if not quite so positively 
 " natural " as some have thought to shift the verb to 
 the end of the sentence ; and this in its turn begets a 
 monotony of sentence-rhythm. Moreover, the periodic 
 sentence is much encouraged by the conveniences of such 
 accidence, and the periodic sentence is much more un- 
 likely to attain the finest effect of symphonic arrangement 
 than the cumulative. 
 
 Lastly, there is what should be the well-known fact intermixture 
 that the connection between Anglo-Saxon prose and ^ e p ^ s s a t ic le and 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry is extraordinarily close. There was 
 a time when students of this poetry had hardly recognised 
 that it was verse at all. There was another, at the time 
 of the production of the literature itself, when writers of 
 prose made it, with alliteration and balanced accent, 
 look as much like their own verse as possible. In fact, 
 there is hardly a language in which prose-poetry claims 
 such a definite division or department as in Old English : 
 there is certainly none in which the instruments of the 
 two harmonies are so nearly identical, and in which, 
 consequently, the products slide and grade off into one 
 another so easily and undistinguishably. There is no
 
 14 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 metre in the poetry, 1 and there is a very fair amount of 
 rhythm in the prose. Mechanically, the more regular 
 recurrence of the centre break (which itself might be 
 little noticed in some cases without the centre dot) is 
 the only mark of division. In diction there is indeed 
 something more : the peculiar metaphors and other 
 unfamiliar turns of phrase appearing in the verse but 
 not in the purer prose. Yet these very things do, as 
 has been said, appear in the ornater specimens of that 
 division. 
 
 It will be observed by all, and I have no doubt 
 objected by many, that in these remarks I have taken no 
 account of modern theories as to the pronunciation of Old 
 English and its supposed differences from Middle and 
 Modern. I do not know that such notice could in strict- 
 ness be required of me, whatever my own ideas on the 
 subject were. 2 For relativity of rhythm, generally if not t 
 universally, remains the same whatever the individual 
 values may be ; or is affected only by intonation, on 
 which hardly even the maddest phonologist will dogmatise 
 too confidently in the case of ancient languages. It may 
 be that, as I believe they say, an oak was an " ark " 
 (without the r roll) in Alfred's time, and an " awk " (with 
 acorns for eggs) in Chaucer's. It may also have been an 
 " aik," as it was till lately in Scotland, or an " ike," as it 
 is in Germany, or an " ock," as some of the place-names 
 
 1 This statement has been called "startling"; but it will certainly not 
 startle those who are acquainted in any way with the History of English 
 Prosody to which this is a sequel ; and I should not have thought that many 
 others, even if they hold prosodic views different from mine, would object 
 to it. "Metre" is used, of course, in the full classical sense in which 
 Aristotle made his antithesis. 
 
 2 I had at first put them somewhat more fully ; but there is no room here 
 for partially irrelevant polemics. I shall only say that not, I think, from 
 that "ignorance" which it is the rather facile wont of phoneticians and 
 spelling-reformers to impute to their adversaries, but after much study of the 
 subject I hold (a) that we have very slight and scrappy knowledge of our 
 ancestors' pronunciation at any time ; (l>) that even if an absolute standard of 
 contemporary pronunciation could be reached, it is quite intolerable that any 
 particular generation should deform or destroy the historical continuity of the 
 written language, in order to inflict that pronunciation on its successors ; 
 (c) that dead languages can be best enjoyed as literature when they are 
 pronounced by each nation as it pronounces its own living language.
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 15 
 
 they quote show, or an " ack," as perhaps some others do. 1 
 But no one of these different values will really affect 
 much, if at all, the rhythm of a sentence in which this 
 polyonymous tree occurs. 
 
 Of phonetics, then, no more now, or for ever, as far as 
 this book is concerned. 
 
 One other consideration of a general kind, and we Latin 
 may pass to the actual survey of the facts, and to such m 
 consideration of former views of them as may seem absol- 
 utely necessary. It is quite certain that, however early we 
 may place such specimens of Anglo-Saxon prose as we 
 possess, these represent a period when Latin 2 culture of 
 some kind was already open to, and in some degree had 
 been enjoyed by, the writers. Now it so happens that 
 Lower Latin (the authors in which naturally exerted 
 greater influence than the " Classics " proper) had de- 
 veloped a strongly rhetorical tinge which is noticeable 
 even in writers like Symmachus, much more in Martianus 
 Capella, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Venantius Fortunatus. 
 This tendency to " fireworks " seems to have been caught 
 and exaggerated by the barbarian nations who came under 
 Latin influence ; and in some Anglo-Saxon writings, such 
 as the Blickling Homilies, it is sometimes very distinctly 
 perceptible, while rhetorical teaching in the technical 
 sense was largely used and always included attention to 
 rhythm. In fact, bombastic diction and artificial arrange- 
 ment crept into the very charters themselves, where 
 nothing could be less appropriate. But enough of these 
 generalities. 
 
 It is proverbially difficult to begin ; but the difficulty Passages for 
 is multiplied, in a case like the present, by a consideration examinatlon - 
 which has not always presented itself to writers on such 
 
 1 The " ock " and " ack " may have, on the principle that Orm has made 
 famous, short vowel-va.\nes as against the long ones of the others. But this 
 will not much alter their rhythmical effect, which is the same in " Ockh&m. " 
 as in " Oakh&m." 
 
 2 There appears to be also some reason for thinking that Greek was on 
 the whole more known in the "Dark" Ages than in the "Middle"; but 
 this, though it should be kept in mind, is not sufficiently defined as a fact to 
 enable us to take very positive estimates of the extent and nature of Greek 
 influence.
 
 16 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Ethelbald's 
 grant to the 
 Bishop of 
 Worcester. 
 
 subjects as clearly as it should have. A document such 
 as the famous account of the murder of King Cynewulf, 
 which will be commented on presently, may refer to an 
 event certainly of the eighth century no matter for the 
 exact year. But if we only have it in a MS. at 
 oldest of the very end of the ninth, what confidence can 
 we place in it as a monument of pure eighth-century 
 prose ? Still more, if this MS. is the earliest trustworthy 
 one of the Chronicle, can the brief but fairly composed 
 entries of the fifth, sixth, seventh, claim such confidence ? 
 We might as well say that the short account of the birth 
 of Christ and the visit of the Magi was written, in Anglo- 
 Saxon as we have it, a few months later than the event when 
 the news came to Britain. However, it may be admitted 
 that this doubt applies less, or not at all, to documents 
 of a definitely " diplomatic " kind such as the again 
 famous grant of remission of London port-dues on two 
 ships to the Bishop and Chapter of Worcester. The 
 text and translation, as close as possible to words and 
 order, may be given, following, in selection, Prof. Earle x 
 and others for text, but modern-Englishing, with the words 
 picked and the order kept as near as possible to the 
 original, for ourselves. 
 
 In usses dryhtnes noman 
 haelendes Cristes ic AeSelbald 
 Myrcna cincg waes beden from 
 baem arfullan bisceope Milrede 
 paett ic him alefde and his baem 
 halegan hirede alle nedbade 
 tuegra sceopa be baerto lim- 
 pende beoS bett ic him forgefe 
 ba baem eadigan Petre apostola 
 aldormen in baem mynstre beo- 
 wiaS baet is geseted in Huicca 
 maegSe in baere stowe be mon 
 hateS Weogernacester. paere 
 
 In our Lord's name, the 
 Saviour Christ, I Ethelbald of 
 Mercians king, was bidden 
 \j>rayed~\ by the pious bishop Mil- 
 rede that I to him leave [remz't] 
 and to his holy herd [society} 
 all need-bids [forced charges^ on 
 two ships thereto belonging that 
 are that I forgive it to those 
 that the blessed Peter, alderman 
 of the apostles, in the minster 
 serve, that is seated in Hwicca 
 country, in the stow that men 
 
 1 Who prints both. The charter may also be found in Thorpe's 
 Diplomatarium Anglo - Saxonicum (London, 1865), pp. 28, 29, usefully 
 preceded by other Latin documents of the same kind and tenor, which no 
 doubt were patterns in form, but in no wise prescribe order or rhythm. 
 The " Slaying of Cynewulf" occurs, of course, in any edition of the Chronicle, 
 anno 755.
 
 OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 bene swySe arfulle geSafunge ic 
 waes syllende for minre sawle 
 laecedome to Son ]?aett for minum 
 synnum hi heo geeaSmedden 
 Jjaette heo waeren gelomlice bin- 
 geras wi<5 drihten. SwySe lust- 
 fullice ba forgeofende ic him 
 alyfde alle nedbade tuegra sceopa 
 ba be baer abaedde beoS from 
 baem nedbaderum in Lunden- 
 tunes hy<5e ond naefre ic ne 
 mine lastweardas ne Sa nedbad- 
 eras geSristlaecen bat heo hit 
 onwenden o59e bon wiSgaen. 
 Gif heo bat nyllen syn heo bonne 
 amansumade from daelneo- 
 mencge liceman and blodes usses 
 drihtnes haelendes Cristes and 
 from alre neweste geleafulra syn 
 heo asceadene and asyndrade 
 nymSe heo hit her mid bingonge 
 bote gebete. A Handbook to the 
 Land Charters, etc., by J. Earle 
 (Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 42. 
 
 And ba ongeat se cyning baet, 
 and he on ba duru code, and ba 
 unheanlice hine werede, ob he 
 on bone aebeling locude, and ba 
 utraesde on hine, and hine mic- 
 lum gewundode. And hie alle 
 on bone cyning wserun feohtende 
 ob baet hie hine ofslasgenne haef- 
 don. And ba on baes wifes gebse- 
 rum onfundon baes cyninges beg- 
 nas ba unstilnesse, and ba J>ider 
 urnon swa hwelc swa J>onne gearo 
 wear]? and radost ; and hiera se 
 as]?eling gehwelcum feoh and 
 feorh gebead, and hiera naenig 
 hit ge]?icgean nolde : ac hie 
 simle feohtende waeran o}> hie 
 alle lasgon butan anum Bryttis- 
 
 hight Worcester. To this bene 
 [" prayer " as in Wordsworth] a 
 very gracious consent I was sell- 
 ing [/ gave\ for my soul's leech- 
 dom, to the end that for my 
 sins they might condescend that 
 they should be frequent thingers 
 [" persons who address a thing 
 or judicial assembly " " advo- 
 cates "] with the Lord. Very lust- 
 fully \_gladly\ then forgiving I 
 have left \remitted\ them all 
 need - bids \imposts\ on two 
 ships, which there bidden be by 
 need - bidders [" collectors "] in 
 London town-hithe. And never 
 I nor my last-comers [successors] 
 nor the need-bidders [shall] pre- 
 sume that they it undo or go 
 against it. If they nill this, be 
 they therefore excommunicated 
 from deal-nimming [partaking] 
 of the body and blood of our 
 Lord Saviour Christ, and from all 
 society of believers be they shed 
 [severed] and sundered, unless 
 they it here with thinging boot 
 [penance made after application 
 for forgiveness to a lawful 
 authority] make atonement. 
 
 And then perceived the king The ' ' Slaying 
 that ; and he to the door yode, of Cynewulf. ' 
 and there in no paltry fashion 
 warded himself, till he on the 
 atheling looked, and then out- 
 rushed him and him mickle 
 wounded. And they all on 
 the king were righting till that 
 they him offslain had. And 
 then on the woman's outcries, 
 on-found this king's thanes the 
 unstillness ; and then thither ran, 
 just as yare was and readiest. 
 And the atheling each of them 
 fee and life bid ; and none of 
 them take it would ; but they 
 always fighting were till they all 
 lay [dead], but one British 
 C
 
 1 8 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 cum gisle, and se swi]?e gewun- 
 dadwaes. Da on morgenne gehier- 
 dun J>aet J>ass cyninges J?egnas J>e 
 him be aeftan wasrun J>ast se 
 cyning ofslaegen waes, ]?a ridon 
 hie ]?ider, and his aldormon 
 Osric, and WiferJ) his J>egn, and 
 J>a men J>e he be aeftan him 
 laefde aer, and J>one sej>eling on 
 J>aare byrig metton }?aer se cyning 
 ofslaegen laeg, and J?a gatu him 
 to belocen haefdon and J>a ]?aer to 
 eodon ; and J>a gebead he him 
 hiera agenne dom feos and londes 
 gif hie him J>aes rices u]?on, and 
 him cyj>don J>aet hiera maegas 
 him mid waeron ]?a Je him from 
 noldon ; 
 
 and ]>a cuasdon hie ]?aet him 
 naenig maeg leofra naere }>onne 
 hiera hlaford, and hie naefre 
 his banan folgian noldon ; and 
 Ja budon hie hiera maegum 
 J>ast hie gesunde from eodon ; 
 and hie cuasdon ]?ast taet ilce 
 hiera geferum geboden waere, J>e 
 aer mid ]?am cyninge wasrun ; J>a 
 cuaedon hie Ipset hie hie )?aes ne 
 onmunden }>on ma J?e eowre 
 geferan ]?e mid J>am cyninge 
 ofslaagene wasrun. And hie }>a 
 ymb ]?a gatu feohtende wasron 
 o]?}?3et hie }>aer inne fulgon, and 
 }>one aejieling ofslogon, and J>a 
 men J>e him mid wasrun alle 
 butan anum, se waes J>aes aldor 
 monnes god sunu. 
 
 I have adopted this style of translation, though con- 
 scious that it will irritate some people sorely, because it 
 would be impossible otherwise to indicate to that probably 
 not inconsiderable proportion of readers who cannot or 
 will not read Anglo-Saxon, something, and indeed a good 
 deal, of the tactical l and rhythmical character of the 
 
 1 I.e. not " jj/wtactical " in the limited grammatical sense, but in matter of 
 arrangement of words. 
 
 hostage, and he much wounded 
 was. 
 
 When on the morning heard 
 that the king's thanes who after 
 \left behind] him were that the 
 king offslain was, then rode they 
 thither, and his alderman Osric, 
 and Wiferth his thane, and the 
 men whom he after him left ere 
 while. And the atheling in the 
 burg they met [found] where the 
 king offslain lay ; and the gates to 
 them they locked had ; and then 
 they yode to them. And then bid 
 he them their own doom [terms] 
 fees and lands if they him the 
 kingdom would grant : and he 
 let them couth that their kinsmen 
 him with were, and that they him 
 from nold \would not] go. 
 
 Then said they [the thanes] 
 that to them no kinsman w^s 
 nearer than their lord, and they 
 never his bane follow would. 
 And then they bid their kinsmen 
 that they sound from [away] 
 yede should, and they said that 
 that same to theirferes had bidden 
 been when they with the king 
 were ; they said that they this 
 not admitted more than your 
 feres that with the king offslain 
 were. And they then about the 
 gates fighting were until they 
 therein made [their way]; and the 
 atheling offslew and the men that 
 him with were, all but one who 
 was the alderman's god-son.
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 19 
 
 language, and so to keep the balance true in respect of the 
 illustrative extracts throughout the book. 1 
 
 Now, any one who studies these passages with a Remarks- 
 moderate degree of attention will not, I think, have much effe ^ l t Cc 
 difficulty in agreeing, more or less, with the following inflections. 
 remarks on the phenomena. The first and most obvious 
 characteristic, as well as the most obvious point of difference 
 from modern and even from Middle English, is that the 
 presence of inflection determines the ordonnance of the 
 clause. The verb gravitates to the end ; the case has a 
 tendency to come before the preposition ; genitives and 
 other dependents are often split by the word on which 
 they depend. 
 
 One point of great and special as well as general Of com- 
 importance is the predilection of the language for com- ^ lds> etc- 
 pounds, even to express a single or at least a simple idea, 
 and the allied effect which particles and suffixes produce. 
 Thus we no longer say to " 0^slay," and though we still 
 say to " kill off" with a somewhat special meaning, we do 
 not say to " off kill." 2 We should still, if we used the same 
 verb, say that the thanes " found out " that the king was 
 dead, but we should not say that they " outfound " it, 
 and we should say the king " rushed out," but not " out- 
 rushed." Every one of these changes alters the rhythm. 
 Such a word, again, as unheanlic, though almost alone 
 in these particular extracts with " unstillness," represents 
 
 1 Incidentally, I hope it may also indicate to some how little difference or 
 difficulty there really is in Anglo-Saxon for a tolerably well-educated and 
 tolerably intelligent person a description the like of which seems strangely 
 to annoy some who perhaps do not recognise themselves in it. In the above 
 long extracts I do not think there are a score of words which are absolutely 
 obsolete, though there may be a few more of which the use has changed 
 or which are archaic. The mere disguise of spelling should be impenetrable 
 to no pretty fair wits. As to the language adopted it is necessarily somewhat 
 of the " Wardour Street " order. " Yede " as an infinitive, has been specially 
 objected to ; but I am content to have my lot in Spenser's bosom hereafter 
 (which indeed almost implies "Arthur's"). See Shep. Kal. July, 109, and 
 F. Q. I. xi. v. I. "Bid" and "bidden," as in bidding at a sale, "make 
 an offer." 
 
 2 "Offset" has survived, though only in competition with "set-off." 
 " Offsaddle " has come back to us through kindred Dutch ; and there are 
 other compounds (chiefly dialectic) of the kind. But in most if not all of 
 them it will be noted that the "off" has a more separate and additional sense 
 than in "offslay."
 
 20 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 an immense body of Anglo-Saxon words which are, by 
 the prefix " un," altered in form and differently balanced 
 in shape ; and the omnipresent " ge " has the same effect. 
 The result of all this is that we find Old English provided, 
 in proportion, with fewer of the short monosyllables with 
 which the more modern tongue has been reproached, when 
 it does not avail itself of Romance synonyms. " Unstill- 
 ness " for " noise " alters the rhythm remarkably. 
 
 Of actual syntax, except as far as the analytic-synthetic 
 question comes in, it is not necessary to take much notice. 
 I think it was odd of Professor Earle to say that " this 
 syntax is not more rugged than that of Thucydides." 
 The " ruggedness " of Thucydidean syntax surely consists 
 in its constant subordination to the sense, which has 
 accordingly to be found out by a not always easy process 
 of interpretation before you can see what the syntax is. 
 But the sense in these passages is as clear as anything can 
 possibly be a slight confusion of demonstrative pronouns 
 (especially in the latter part of the " Slaying ") being 
 almost the only fault. 
 
 Um endings In one respect, which has been glanced at previously, 
 consonant both passages illustrate, though not very specially, the 
 
 groups, etc. , , 
 
 ugly -urn endings, which, let it be remembered, are not in 
 any material degree beautified by pronouncing them -oom, 
 for the grunt remains. The language may also to some 
 ears not, I confess, to mine underlie the charge which 
 has persisted against its descendants, that it is " overladen 
 General w ^h consonants." l Its rhythmical capacities are not 
 
 word-rhythm. srn all ; it has already fallen into moulds which are still 
 recognisable, and in some respects it already possesses 
 instruments of harmony which, when language has ceased 
 to be inflected and has shed most of its prefixes, will have 
 to be supplied from alien sources. In particular, it is, by 
 the operation of the causes above discussed, well furnished 
 with those words of an amphibrachic character which Dante, 
 though he did not call them amphibrachs, recognised as 
 
 1 The charge, I think, rests altogether on a fallacy. If the predominance 
 of consonants "clogs," the predominance of vowels gives, as sometimes in 
 Italian, a monotonous flux which can be quite as teasing.
 
 OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 so important in the rhythm of his own language. 1 And, 
 again as in Italian, these and other words tend to convey 
 a general trochaic rhythm, which, of course, is equally and 
 more noticeable in the poetry of the time, but which has 
 beyond all doubt persisted in English prose more fully 
 than it has in English poetry. 
 
 In : usses | dryhtnes | noman | healendes | Cristes. 2 j 
 
 the very first note strikes it with a monosyllabic " catch " 
 (or an amphibrach) at the beginning and one dactylic 
 extension, as always with trochees, while if you start 
 iambically the rhythm breaks down in ugly fashion. So 
 
 J>a cuaedon | hie thast him | naenig | maeg | leofra | naere | thonne [ hiera | 
 hlaford, | and hie | naefre | his banan | folgian | noldon | 
 follows the key, with amphibrachic and dactylic substitution, 
 in the noblest and most exalted passage of all. 
 
 We must, however, be careful, in considering, to dis- Remarks on 
 tinguish the characteristics of individual word-rhythm from of 6 t h e y 
 those of the completed clause or sentence. It is true that, composition, 
 as we shall find by experience, foot-division otherwise than 
 at the end of a word is much less frequent than it is in 
 verse ; so much so, that my friend the late Mr. R. L. 
 Stevenson had a notion 3 that you should not divide the 
 word at all in spacing prose rhythm. But this,flace tanti, 
 is certainly wrong. Foot-division at the end of a word is 
 or should be as much the rule in prose as it is or should 
 be the exception in verse. But, on the other hand, the 
 much greater compass and content of the prose foot 
 which may extend to five syllables at least groups words 
 in a fashion which to some extent merges, and to a very 
 
 1 Amore, difesa, etc. 
 
 2 This is perhaps the best place to explain the system of " quantification " 
 adopted in reference to A.S. It does not, of course, in the least pretend to 
 follow vowel quantity nor (v. sup. ) any presumed system of pronunciation ; 
 but is constructed on the principle which I believe to be essentially English 
 at'all periods, and to provide the very rhythmical differentia of the language 
 
 that of granting the power of length sometimes to stress (as in "noman"), 
 sometimes to position, and sometimes to other causes still. 
 
 3 Developed in a letter to me on my arrangement of a text from the 
 Canticles in the essay mentioned above (v. Preface).
 
 22 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 great extent affects, their individual value. A strong 
 monosyllable following a trochee will make the end of the 
 foot iambic ; and so in more complicated cases, as will or 
 should be endlessly illustrated below. 
 
 Now, when we look at the rhythm of the passages 
 quoted, from the point of view of the larger integers, we 
 shall find traces of the infancy of prose style in that the 
 dominant word-rhythm echoes, with rare but not insufficient 
 exceptions, the dominant clause-rhythm. Thus in the 
 beginning of the grant it runs : 
 
 In usses | dryhtnes | noman 
 haelendes | Cristes 
 ic AeSelbald | Myrcna | cincg 
 waes beden | from baem | arfullan 
 bisceope | Milrede, 
 
 and so on ; where it will be observed that if cyning had 
 been put for cincg every line would have been trochaic or 
 dactylic in ending. Trochaic or dactylic rhythm continues 
 down to " Weogernacester " in fact, through the whole 
 piece. Except that there is only accidental alliteration the 
 whole thing might be a block of Anglo - Saxon verse, 
 neither very good nor very bad. 1 
 And its rela- This cannot quite be said of the other piece, though 
 
 tions to verse. ^ j Qoks exactly the kind of thing which WQuld be . 
 
 rhymed " according to a process frequent in very early 
 French prose 2 and exemplified in some of Malory's finest 
 work. The strong prose genius of the language has got 
 hold of this forerunner of Malory himself, and of many 
 a prose tale-teller since. It is true that, by a curious 
 accident, the opening words, modernised almost imper- 
 ceptibly, and keeping a dissyllabic form for " duru," give 
 a verse-rhythm familiar enough to us now in the history 
 of the more fortunate fortunes of another King, Cole : 
 
 And then | ongat | the cyjning that 
 And he | to the door [way yode. 
 
 1 If the similar Latin charters, above referred to, be examined, the rhythm 
 will be found quite different, and necessitating quite different measurement. 
 
 2 It is actually known to have occurred in some cases : and is believed on 
 good grounds to have given us Henri de Valenciennes' continuation of 
 Villehardouin.
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 23 
 
 But this is not an Anglo-Saxon verse rhythm at all ; * 
 you do not get it till the Middle English blend has been 
 chemically and indissolubly compounded. The trochaic 
 under-hum is present ; but the heat of the narration to 
 some extent muffles it except at clause-ends ; and even 
 icre the result is often truncated or catalectic, as indeed 
 ancient critics had noticed in the case of their own 
 languages. How it comes out at the climax has been 
 noted already. 
 
 One other point, however, of remarkable interest and Absence of 
 importance, should be discussed before we pass from these a 
 two texts. Alliteration, which plays so important a part 
 in Anglo-Saxon verse, is here almost entirely absent. In 
 the charter you would not expect much, but there is 
 practically none such things as " halegan hirede " or 
 "syllende for minre sawle " being possibly accidental, and, 
 at any rate, of no rhythmical pertinence. In the story of 
 the king's death it would be much more in place, and 
 a later writer of the time and taste of ^Elfric would not 
 dream of omitting it. Here you may almost say that 
 the writer, consciously or unconsciously, has gone out of 
 his way to avoid it. Except " feoh " and " feorh," an 
 undoubtedly proverbial phrase or catch-word, which is 
 not repeated as it might be lower down, there is hardly 
 a single instance of even casual alliteration in the piece. 
 
 Very much the same characteristics, reinforced, Alfred's 
 perhaps, to some extent by the constant presence or translatlons - 
 nearness, in translation, of Latin, appear in the work by, 
 or attributed to, Alfred. But in the originally contributed 
 pieces there is something more like alliteration and 
 verse-rhythm generally, besides the trochaic dominant. 
 Yet even here there is not really much. In the well- 
 known narrative of Othere we come across things like 
 " NorSmanna norSmest," " stowum sticcemaelum," " fyrrest 
 faraS," " fisceran and fugeleran," but they are by no 
 means very numerous, and it is impossible to say that 
 
 1 Attempts have been made to trace " nursery rhymes " to Anglo-Saxon 
 rhythms of verse. But, if I know anything about any prosody, they are quite 
 mistaken.
 
 24 A HISTOR Y OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 they constitute a distinct feature of the style. The 
 companion report of Wulfstan has even fewer. In 
 passages of pure translation the run of the Latin sentence 
 is very commonly kept ; and any alliteration that appears 
 is more or less fortuitous. There may seem, for instance, 
 to be some in this from the account of the death of 
 Cyrus : " hi up-forlet on feower hund ea and on syxtig 
 ea ; and sySSan mid his fyrde Jjaer-ofer for," but on 
 reading it it will be seen that the repeated fs are little 
 noticed and affect the rhythm hardly at all. Still there 
 is more alliteration, as in the story of Orpheus from the 
 Boethius. It may be worth while here to give the Anglo- 
 Saxon with translation as before, the original Latin, and 
 Chaucer's version parallel, that they may be useful for 
 reference later. Not much comment is needed here, 
 except the (perhaps obvious) caution that Alfred's is not 
 a translation but a very free paraphrase. 
 
 ALFRED. {Literally translated.) 
 
 Da ongann monn secgan be Then began men to say of the 
 
 |?am hearpere, ]?aet he mihte harper, that he might harp [so] 
 
 hearpian Jaet se wudu wagode, that the woods wagged and the 
 
 and Ja stdnas hi styredon for stones stirred themselves for the 
 
 bam swege, and wild-deor J>aer sound, and the wild -deer there 
 
 woldan to-irnan and standan, would to-run and stand as they 
 
 swilce hi tame wasron, swa stille, tame were, so still that though 
 
 ]?eah hi men o65e hundas wiS they with men or hounds yode, 
 
 eodon, bast hi hi na ne onscune- they did not onscunner x them, 
 
 don. Da saedon hi baet Sass Then said they that this harper's 
 
 hearperes wif sceolde acwelan, wife should quail and her soul 
 
 and hire sawle mon sceolde man should lead to hell. Then 
 
 laedan to helle. Da sceolde se should the harper become so 
 
 hearpere weorban swa sarig, bset sorry that he not might in among 
 
 he ne mihte on gemong oSrum other men be, and drew to 
 
 mannum bion, ac teah to wuda, woods and sat on the mountains, 
 
 and sast on bam muntum, aegber whether by day or night, and 
 
 ge daeges ge nihtes, weop and wept and harped, so that the 
 
 hearpode, baet ba wudas bifodon, woods trembled and the waters 
 
 and ba ea stodon, and nan heort stood, and no hart onstunnered 
 
 ne onscunode nasnne Icon, ne any lion, nor no hare any hound, 
 
 naii hara naenne hund, ne nan nor no neat ne wist any hatred 
 
 1 I have chosen this northern form for "scunian" instead of "shun," 
 because it keeps the rhythm better, and also preserves the sense of " loathing," 
 in addition to that of mere " avoidance."
 
 OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 nor any fear of others, for the 
 mirth of this sound. 1 
 
 BOETHIUS. 
 
 Quondam funera conjugis 
 Vates Threicius gemens, 
 Postquam flebilibus modis 
 Silvas currere, mobiles 
 Amnes stare coegerat, 
 Junxitque intrepidum latus 
 Saevis cerva leonibus, 
 Nee visum timuit lepus 
 Jam cantu placidum canem. 
 
 neat nyste naenne andan ne 
 naenne ege to oSrum, for J?aere 
 mirh]?e bass sones. 
 
 CHAUCER. 
 
 The poete of Trace (Orpheus), 
 that whilome hadde ryght greet 
 sorwe for the deth of his wyf, 
 aftir that he hadde makid by his 
 weeply songes the wodes moev- 
 able to renne, and hadde makid 
 the ryveris to stonden stille, and 
 hadde maked the hertes and the 
 hyndes to joynen dreedles here 
 sydes to cruel lyouns (for to 
 herknen his song), and hadde 
 maked that the hare was nat 
 agast of the hound, whiche was 
 plesed by his song. 
 
 When, however, we pass from the ninth century to the The tenth 
 tenth, remarkable changes and developments are dis- ce 
 covered. Unfortunately, the study of these is beset by 
 all sorts of difficulties. The exact relation of date of 
 MSS. to date of composition seems often impossible to 
 discover. For instance, we know that 971 is a " fixture " 
 of some sort in reference to the Blickling Homilies, but 
 whether it is " date of writing " in one sense, or " date of 
 writing" in another, we do not seem to know. Further, 
 the editors of the texts (to whom we owe, of course, 
 infinite thanks) have very rarely paid the least or more 
 than the least attention to literary points. The Germans 
 do not often touch at all on this side of the matter, and 
 perhaps it is as well that they do not. Thorpe, J. M. 
 Kemble (who surely would have had something to say), 
 and other earlier scholars say little or nothing. Professor 
 Skeat, as for instance in the final words on his completion 
 of ^Elfric's Homilies, seems to have designedly cut his 
 remarks down to the lowest point. Professor Napier's 
 long-promised edition of further texts in completion of 
 
 1 This is a good opportunity for the reader to notice the constant sub- 
 stitution, in modern English, of an abrupt termination for a trochaically 
 modulated one in all the infinitives, in "woods" for "wudu," in "stones" 
 for "stanas."
 
 26 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Morris, Thorpe, and Skeat has never appeared. One has 
 therefore to do what one can unassisted. 
 
 The Blickiing The very first page of the Blickling collection 1 shows 
 us that we have before us a writer or a group of writers 
 (the authorship is, I believe, utterly unknown, and if I 
 am any judge of style it was certainly not JElfric in any 
 case) who knows the rhetorical ropes, who has a definite 
 bag of stylistic tricks to draw upon. There is not much 
 alliteration, which of itself would almost exclude ^Elfric. 
 But there is a tendency, much stronger than in earlier 
 writers, to antithetic balance in the sentence. 
 
 Maria cende ["kindled," as we still say of cats] }>onne Drihten 
 on blisse ; Eua cende ]mrh firen \sinf ul\ lust. 
 
 Now this (of course most common) opposition of Mary 
 and Eve is kept up, sometimes by actual use of the same 
 words at the clause-ends, for several sentences. And it is 
 most curious to mark how this antithetic arrangement, 
 although the trochaic words blisse, cende, Drihten, etc. 
 continue, sets up, as it always does, a general iambic 
 drift ; the combative tendency of the iamb manifesting 
 itself. But we have not long to wait for the more flowery 
 variety. The close of the Archangel's address to Our 
 Lady, which Dr. Morris partly quotes in his brief intro- 
 duction, has almost all the accomplishment of the verse 
 arrangement of the Authorised Version : 
 
 Wes bu hal, Maria, geofena ful ; Drihten is mid be, on binre 
 heortan & on binum innobe, & eac on binuw fultome. Ac blissa bu, 
 faemne, forSon be Crist of heofona heanessum & of baem engelicum 
 brymmum on binne innob astigeb ; and he hine to bon geeabmedeb 
 b<^/ he of his }?asm federlican sedate be him to meder. 
 
 There is a flaw in the MS. at the close of the sentence. 
 But the probable whole may be Englished : 
 
 Wassail to thee ) , , , , , T , . ... ., 
 
 T> L -i j > Mary of graces full : the Lord is with thee in 
 
 Be thou hailed I 
 
 thy heart and in thy womb, and eke in thine assistance. But joy 
 thyself, maiden, for that the Christ from heaven's highnesses, and 
 from the glories of the angels, into thy womb shall descend ; and he 
 
 1 Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S. (London, 1880).
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 27 
 
 shall thus condescend him that from the bosom of his father 
 [coming ?] he thee to mother [shall take ?]. 
 
 And later : 
 
 Seo readnes Jjaere rosan lixe]? on J>e, & seo hwftnes J?aere lilian 
 scinej) on >e, & mid eallum missenlicuw afedduw blostmum sy se 
 Cristes brydbur gefraetwod. 
 
 The redness of the rose glitters in thee, and the whiteness of the 
 lily shineth in thee, and with all mingling of flowers that blow be 
 Christ's bride-bower befretworked. 
 
 It is true that we have some evidence here of the 
 earliness of our stage, for, as it happens, the preceding 
 sentence has concluded with the same word gefrcetwod 
 a serious blemish, though the word is excellent in itself. 
 But one does not want a faultless precocity. Very inter- 
 esting too is the special passage which Dr. Morris indicated 
 as perhaps based on Beowulf ^ and as affording a key to a 
 corrupt phrasing there. It is (though he did not say so) 
 also obviously connected with the famous Vision of St. 
 Paul one of the oldest specimens of hagiology, and in a 
 way a distinct precursor of Romance. Here it is with a 
 translation (mine, not his) : 
 
 Swa Sanctus Paulus wass As S. Paul was seeing towards 
 
 geseonde on norSanweardne Jnsne the northward of the middle 
 
 middangeard, J?asr ealle waetero earth, where all waters pass 
 
 niSergewitaS, & he ]?aer geseah away down, he there saw, over 
 
 ofer Saem waetere sumne harne the waters, a hoary stone ; and 
 
 stdn ; & wseron norS of Saem there were north of the stone 
 
 stdne awexene swiSe hrimige waxen very rimy woods, and 
 
 bearwas, 1 & Saer wseron ]?ystro- there were mists of darkness, and 
 
 genipo, & under ]?aem stalne wass under the stone was the dwell- 
 
 niccra eardung & wearga. & he ing of nicors and cursed things, 
 
 geseah ]?aet on Saem clife hang- And he saw that on the cliff there 
 
 odan on Saem isgean bearwum hanged on the icy woods many 
 
 manige swearte saula be heora swart souls by their hands y- 
 
 handum gebundne ; & }?a fynd binded ; and the fiends there 
 
 J>ara on nicra onlicnesse heora in nicor's on-likeness on them 
 
 gripende waeron, swa swa grzedig gripping were just like a greedy 
 
 wulf ; & \<zt waeter wees sweart wolf ; and the water was swart 
 
 under Ipsem clife neoSan. & betuh under the cliff beneath. And 
 
 ]?aem clife on Saew waetre waeron betwixt the cliff and the water 
 
 1 In the Beowulf passage (2731) " hrinde bearwas," " barky [?] groves," 
 had been read.
 
 28 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 swylce twelf mfla, & Sonne 5a were some twelve miles, and 
 
 twigo forburston )>onne gewitan when the twigs forbursted then 
 
 J>a saula niSer J?a J?e on Sasm went the souls nether [wards] 
 
 twigum hangodan, & him on- that on the twigs hanged, and 
 
 fengon Sa nicras. them on-catched the nicors. 
 
 The single phrase " hrimige bearwas " (and perhaps the 
 " nicors " who, though not in the actual context of Beowulf, 
 are not far off) may be a reminiscence of the old epic, 
 but it is clear that the whole passage was not composed 
 under the influence of that or any other alliterative verse 
 place as far as form goes. The imagery of poetical land- 
 scape of the gloomy kind is somewhat stock. But the thing 
 has undergone a complete transformation. Even where 
 there is alliteration, and more, cross-alliteration, as in 
 the " swaerte saula be heora handum " and " gripende 
 waeron swa swa gratdig wulf," it is not poetically arranged. 
 So in another passage on the birth of St. John Baptist : 
 
 & he aer to heofonum becom asr]?on Ipe he eorj>an aethrine, & J?aer 
 Halgum Gaste onfeng aer]?on J>e he menniscne haefde ; }?am god- 
 cundum gifum he ger onfeng, aerjwn J>e he mennisc lif haefde ; & he 
 ongan lifgean ongean God, sermon J>e he him sylfum lifgean mihte ; 
 swa Sanctus Paulus se apostol cwae]?, " Ne lybbe ic, ac Crist leofa}?." 
 
 Now such echo of Anglo-Saxon verse rhythm as I 
 at least have in my ears does not enable me to hear, 
 despite the abundance of vowel-, the presence of con- 
 sonant-alliteration and the usual trochaic run, any close 
 approach to the general tune of that poetry. 
 
 But perhaps the most interesting part of this inter- 
 esting book for our purpose is the " St. Andrew," which 
 of course directly suggests comparisons with the poem 
 attributed to Cynewulf. The original legend (which must 
 have been Greek-Eastern) is full of poetical inspiration, 
 and thus maintains itself very fairly in the various forms 
 verse and prose, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English 
 which we have. The Homily, however, has no room for 
 the poetical detail, but it might, as we found in other cases, 
 have kept traces of poetical form. Here I can find none 
 the Blickling man may or may not have known 
 Andreas, which was pretty certainly older by a good deal ;
 
 OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 29 
 
 but no fraction stuck in his mind, whether the other one 
 of Beowulf did or not. The torture-scene by dragging 
 occurs in both ; and if the circumstances are slightly 
 different, the differences of the manner are not slight, but 
 absolutely those of prose and verse. Let any one, with 
 however little or however much knowledge of Anglo- 
 Saxon, compare the passages, in the first case with, in the 
 second without, the translations and see for himself. 
 
 Hetow ]?a laedan 
 ofer landsceare, 
 ]?rasgmaslum teon, 
 
 torngeniS Ian, 
 swa hie hit frecnost 
 finden meahton ; 
 drogon deormode 
 sefter dun scraefum 
 
 ymb stanhleoSo 
 
 waes J>aes halgan lie 
 sarbennum soden, 
 swate bestemed, 
 ban hus abrocen, 
 blod y5um weoll 
 hat of heolfre. 
 
 And Ipa. call J>ast folc ]?aet 
 gehierde, hit him licode, and 
 hraSe hie sendon rap on his 
 sweoran, and hie hine tugon 
 geond J>aere ceastre lanan. Mid 
 YI J>e se eadiga Andreas waes 
 togen his lichama waes gemenged 
 mid J>aere eorSan, swa baet blod 
 fleow ofer eorSan sw waeter. 
 
 Then might [bid] they lead him 
 Over the land-shares, 
 Time-meal [at intervals'] to tow 
 
 him 
 
 The angry enemies, 
 As they it most frackly 
 Find might. 
 
 They dragged him damagingly 
 Through the down- [mountain] 
 
 caves 
 
 Around the stone cliffs 
 [Also through roads and streets^ 
 Was the saint's body 
 With sore-wounds sodden, 
 With blood besteamed, 
 The bone-house broken, 
 The blood in waves welled, 
 Hot with gore. 
 
 And when all the folk that 
 heard, it liked them ; and rathely 
 they sent a rope on his swire 
 \?ieck~\, and they him tugged 
 around the cester's lanes. While 
 that the holy Andrew was tugged, 
 his body was mingled with the 
 earth, so that his blood flowed 
 over the earth like water. 
 
 Thus, at this very early date, Anglo-Saxon was interim 
 already provided with what Victor Hugo (showing at the pr 
 same time his ignorance of English, by denying it to our /Eifric. 
 language while asserting it for French) postulated, and 
 rightly so, as the main differentia of a finished literary 
 tongue the existence of distinct styles for prose and 
 verse. Thus did our English, in almost its earliest form,
 
 30 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 anathematise, condemn, and antiquate by anticipation the 
 Wordsworthian heresy as to the identity of the two. 
 Moreover, which is our special business, the prose form in 
 the Chronicle, in Alfred, and in the Blickling man or men 
 is, though of no great elaborateness or periodic com- 
 plexity, very far from rudimentary or childish. It is, in 
 fact, much more symphonically accomplished, and less 
 " thought out in pellets," than some latish Middle English 
 prose at the end of the fourteenth century. It owed, no 
 doubt, a good deal to Latin, of which so much in these 
 very Homilies was to some extent a direct imitation or 
 paraphrase ; and the fact of this following, with the 
 inferiority of the imitating language in demonstratives, 
 etc., led to some confusion. But it was assisted by its 
 inflections, and though, as already pointed out, the 
 trochaic run continued, it has succeeded in forging for 
 itself a fair prose cadence already. 
 
 There were some, however, who were not satisfied 
 with this, and among them was perhaps the most 
 accomplished writer of Anglo-Saxon prose at any time 
 certainly the Anglo-Saxon prose writer of widest learn- 
 ing and most ambitious tentative yElfric. So to him 
 let us turn. 
 
 /Eifric the With regard to the well-known, interesting, and in 
 
 Colloquy. f act positively amusing Colloquy * a conversation between 
 a monastic schoolmaster and the boys and servants of 
 the community there are two little difficulties in our 
 way. One is the fact that it was certainly auctum (a 
 word susceptible of very many meanings) by his pupil 
 and namesake ^Elfric Bata ; the second is that there is 
 some doubt whether the Anglo-Saxon version, which 
 alone interests us, is original. But in one form of the 
 title, Bata is made, in his own person, to say that his 
 master composed it, and he only added multas appendices ; 
 while the whole point of the hand-book seems to necessi- 
 tate a vernacular interpretation, whether written before- 
 
 1 A " Hamiltonian " word-for-word doublet in Latin and Anglo-Saxon. 
 Most conveniently found in Thorpe's Analecta Anglo-Saxonica (new 
 edition, London, 1868), p. 1 8.
 
 n OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 31 
 
 hand, or made at the time of teaching, and embodied 
 afterwards. Nor would it, I think, be easy for any 
 person, pretty widely practised in translation, to be 
 positive which version was written first. The word-order 
 is not more that of one language than that of the other ; 
 or, if there is any difference, it seems rather to incline to 
 the vernacular. 1 At any rate, this vernacular itself is 
 straightforward, but fairly polished, ordinary language 
 with nothing of " talking-book " about it. If ^Elfric 
 wrote it his learning had in no way " sicklied " his English ; 
 nor had it infected him with any love of " inkhorn terms " 
 for their own sake. 
 
 In his regular literary work, however, and especially The Homilies. 
 in his famous and extensive Homilies? something quite 
 different meets us something indeed which has not yet 
 precisely united critical judgments as to its exact nature. 
 His earliest editor naturally printed them as prose : 
 naturally, but we must remember that it was not at first 
 that any Anglo-Saxon composition (from the fact of all 
 being written straight on) was discovered to be verse. 
 But later editors have printed large quantities as 
 verse, though admitting that it is a kind of verse appar- 
 ently of ^Elfric's own invention. And some readers, not 
 merely lazily taking the easy via media, have regarded 
 none of it as exactly verse, but a great deal of it as 
 elaborately rhythmed prose, something like Ossian or 
 Blake. Let us take some specimens. 
 
 THE CENTURION (Thorpe, i. 126) 
 
 PCS hundredes ealdor genea- The hundred's elder drew Specimen 
 
 laehte Sam Haelende na healf- nigh to the Healer, not halflings passages, 
 
 unga, ac fulfremedlice. He but full-framedly. He drew nigh 
 
 genealaehte mid micclum ge- with mickle belief, and with 
 
 leafan, and mid soSre eadmod- soothful humility and wisdom, 
 
 1 Mr. Cockayne (Preface to Anglo-Saxon Leecfidoms) whom, as I mention 
 elsewhere, I am specially bound to respect, and who knew infinitely more 
 Anglo-Saxon than I do, thought the translation later and a mere "crib." 
 But I speak as a critic, not as a linguist. 
 
 2 Partly published by Thorpe (London, 1844) in the very desirable and 
 beautifully printed issues of the yElfric Society, which also contain Kemble's 
 Vercelli MS., Solomon and Satumus, and other things. Completed by Skeat, 
 E.E.T.S. (London, 1890 and 1900).
 
 32 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 nysse, and snotornysse, and 
 soSre lufe. Micelne geleafan he 
 haefde, pa]?a he cwaeS, " Drihten, 
 cweS J>in word, and min cniht 
 biS hal." SoSHce he geswute- 
 lode micele eadmodnysse, mid 
 pam Se he cwaeS, " Drihten, ne 
 com ic wyrSe paet ]>u innfare 
 under mine Secene." He haefde 
 micele snotornysse, Ipalpa. he 
 understod paat Crist is aeghwaer 
 andweard Jmrh godcundnysse, 
 seSe lichamlice betwux mannum 
 gesewenlic code. 
 
 and soothful love. Much belief 
 he had in that he quoth, " Lord ! 
 speak thy word, and my knight 
 shall be whole." Soothly he 
 manifested mickle humility in 
 this, that he said, " Lord, not am 
 I worthy that thou infare under 
 my thatch." He had mickle 
 wisdom in that he understood 
 that Christ is eachwhere present : 
 through his god-kindness 1 he 
 who once bodily betwixt men 
 seeably yode. 
 
 DIVES AND LAZARUS (ibid. i. 330) 
 
 Sume beladunge mihte se rica 
 habban his uncyste, gif se reoflia 
 waedla ne lasge aetforan his 
 gesihSe : eac waere Sam earman 
 leohtre on mode, gif he Saes 
 rican mannes welan ne gesawe. 
 Mislice angsumnyssa he forbaer, 
 SaSa he naefde ne bigleofan, ne 
 haelSe, ne haetera, and geseah 
 Sone rican halne and deorweor- 
 Slice geglencgedne brucan his 
 
 estmettas. Genoh waere | }>am 
 waedlan | his untrumnys, || J>eah 
 Se | he wiste | haefde ; || and eft 
 him | waere genoh | his hafen- 
 least, | Seah Se | he gesundful | 
 waere. || Ac seo | menigfealde | 
 earfoSnys | waes his sawle | 
 
 :=: ^ :r ^ 
 
 claensungj and Saes rican | un- 
 
 Some letting-off might the rich 
 man have for his uncostliness, 2 
 if the leprous beggar had not 
 lain before his sight. Eke were 
 it to the poor man lighter in his 
 mood if he the rich man's wealth 
 had not seen. Mingled angsome- 
 nesses h^e bare in that he had 
 neither victuals, nor health, nor 
 garments ; and saw the rich 
 man hale and dearworthly be- 
 dizened, 3 brook [enjoy, make use 
 of] his feast -meats. Enough 
 were to the beggar hisuntrimness, 
 though he food had ; and again 
 to him were enough his have- 
 lessness though that he soundful 
 were. But the manifold hard- 
 ship was his soul's cleansing ; 
 and the rich man's uncost and up- 
 a-heavedness were his degrada- 
 tion ; for that he saw the other's 
 misery, and him with puffed-up 
 mind look down on. But when 
 
 1 Divine nature. 
 
 2 Stinginess, parsimony. "Cyst" is of course "choice," not strictly 
 "cost," but it is used in the sense of "generosity." 
 
 3 I had wished to translate this "glancing," with the special sense of the 
 German gZanzend. But I find the philologists disinclined to admit connection 
 between this group and "glengcan." Now it is wrong to hurt even a philo- 
 logist's feelings, unless it is a matter of principle. And "bedizened" comes 
 nearer the rhythm.
 
 OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 33 
 
 cyst and | up-ahefednys | waes 
 his | geniSerung : || forSon | Se he 
 geseah j Saes oSres | yrm.Se, || 
 and hine | mid toSundenum | 
 
 mode | forseah. | l Ac SaSa he 
 wass fram mannum forsewen, Sa 
 genealashton Sa hundas, and his 
 wunda geliccedon. Hundes lic- 
 cung gehaelS wunda. 
 
 he was of men despised, then 
 drew nigh the hounds and his 
 wounds licked. Hounds' licking 
 heals wounds. 
 
 ST. CUTHBERT (Thorpe, ii. 138) 
 
 PCS foresgeda halga wer waes 
 gewunod baet he wolde gan on 
 niht to see, and standan on Sam 
 sealtan brymme oS his swyran, 
 syngende his gebedu. pa on 
 sumere nihte hlosnode sum oSer 
 munuc his faereldes, and mid 
 sleaccre stalcunge his fotswaSum 
 filigde, oSbaet hi begen to see 
 becomon. Da dyde CuSberhtus 
 swa his gevvuna waas, sang his 
 gebedu on seelicere ySe, standende 
 oS bone swyran, and sySSan his 
 cneowa on Sam ceosle gebigde, 
 astrehtum handbredum to heofen- 
 licum rodore. Efne Sa comon 
 twegen seolas of SEelicum grunde, 
 and hi mid heora flyse his fet 
 drygdon, and mid heora blaede 
 his leoma beSedon, and siSSan 
 mid gebeacne his bletsunge 
 bsedon, licgende ast his foton on 
 fealwum ceosle. 
 
 The aforesaid holy man was 
 wonted that he would go at night 
 to the sea, and stand on the salt 
 brim up to his swire \neck\ sing- 
 ing his beads. Then on a certain 
 night waited another monk his 
 faring ; and with slack stalking 
 his footswathes followed till that 
 they both to sea came. Then 
 did Cuthbert as his wont was ; 
 sang his beads in the sea-like 
 ooze, standing up to the swire, 
 and sithence his knees on the 
 chesil 2 bowed, with outstretched 
 handbreadths to the heavenly 
 firmament. Lo ! then came 
 twey seals from the sea-ground, 
 and they with their flix 8 his 
 feet dried, and with their breath 
 his limbs warmed, and sithence 
 withbeckonings his blessing bade, 
 lying at his feet on the fallow 
 chesil. 
 
 1 On the principles of quantification adopted, v. sup. p. 21, note 2. They 
 may cause horrification of friends and scorn of foes ; but they are not so un- 
 reasonable as they look. For instance, both e's of "hefed" may be techni- 
 cally short ; but nothing shall persuade me that any English mouth ever got 
 through "up-ahefednys" without a stress. Nor is there any other syllable 
 for this than " hef." I have, however, in several places, given the alternative 
 = to show knowledge of the orthodox vowel-value. 
 
 2 " Shingle," as in the Chesil Beach at Portland. 
 
 3 Used by Dryden for a hare's fur.
 
 34 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 ST. THOMAS (Skeat, iv. 408) 
 
 y^fter J>ysum wordum he efste After these words he hastened to 
 
 to ]?am cwearterne . the quarter [prison] 
 
 And ge-sohte ]?one apostol sec- And sought the Apostle, saying 
 
 gende mid wope , with weeping : 
 
 " Min bro]?or nyste leof ]?aet J>u " My brother wist not, dear one, 
 
 Jjaes lifigendan godes . that thou of the living God 
 
 Apostol waere . and he haefS Apostle were, and he hath highly 
 
 healice agylt" . sinned." 
 
 He un-band hine sona . and baed He unbound him soon ; and 
 
 J>aet he under-fenge begged that he would take 
 
 DeorwurSe gyrlan . ])a. cwae<5 Dearworth garments. Then said 
 
 drihtnes J>egen . the Lord's thane : 
 
 " Git J?u nast J?aet ne weriaS " Yet thou wist not that not 
 
 wuldorfulle gyrlan wear they glorious garments 
 
 Ne flaesclice fraetewunga J>a J>e Nor fleshly fretwork, those that 
 
 folgiaS criste . follow Christ, 
 
 And gewilniaS to haebbenne J>a And will them to have the 
 
 heofonlican mihta . heavenly mights. 
 
 PCS pallium J>e ic werige wyle This pallium that I wear 'will 
 
 me gelaestan . me last out 
 
 And min syric ne tosihS . ne mine And my sark will not to-spoil, 
 
 sceos ne to-baerstaS . nor my shoes to-burst, 
 
 ./Er J?an }?e min sawl siSaS of Ere that my soul goeth from the 
 
 J>am lichaman." body." 
 
 Now these four pieces give, I believe, fair presentations, 
 and as many as we can afford here, of ^Ifric's various and 
 most remarkable fashions of handling his native language 
 in prose. 
 
 Remarks The first is prose pure and simple. It is possible, of 
 on them. course it is so in all prose of all languages, to break up 
 some of the clauses and sentences into something like 
 Anglo-Saxon half-staves ; but never continuously, and not 
 often with any satisfactory sound. There is little or no 
 alliteration, and what there is such as " Haelende " and 
 "healfunga" is not of a rhythmical character at all. 
 It is quite good prose ; but the only rhetorical device 
 about it is the inversion which was almost natural to the 
 language, and which, by an interesting coincidence, we 
 shall find revived in the prose of another great ecclesiastical 
 writer, Bishop Fisher, at the beginning of a new stage of 
 English, many centuries beyond ^Elfric. 
 
 The second is much more ornate in fact, it seems to
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 35 
 
 have been touched upon by a German critic as " semi- 
 metrical." I should not call it so. There is still little 
 alliteration, and that rarely of a rhythmical character. 
 " Hundes liccung gehealS wunda " is something of an 
 exception, but is probably a proverb. On the other hand, 
 if it be compared with the Centurion passage, very much 
 more attempt to achieve elaborate prose - rhythm is 
 observable. The matter goes in long balanced clauses, 
 not stave-like, but by no means dissimilar to the antithetic 
 arrangement of much later English prose ; and some 
 particular care seems to be taken to choose words of 
 similar cadence in particular places. To the passage 
 which I have scanned we may return. 
 
 In the pretty and vivid picture of St. Cuthbert and the 
 seals and the peeping Tom of a monk (who, by the way, 
 was punished for his peeping) there is much further 
 change in the method. The alliteration is laid on with 
 a butter-knife, if not with a trowel ; and the clauses are 
 susceptible of stave-division, though not very well. The 
 pictorial-poetical nature of the subject excuses much ; 
 but perhaps a severe critic might say, " There is prose and 
 there is poetry ; you have outstepped one and not quite 
 reached the other." 
 
 In the fourth example, on the other hand (where I 
 have kept Professor Skeat's line-division, though I have 
 made the translation, as in other cases, to suit myself), it 
 seems to me that we have ylfric at almost his formal best. 
 He is less prodigal of alliteration, but what there is is well 
 managed, and while he undoubtedly has something very 
 like stave-division, it is stave-division of a peculiar kind, 
 deliberately made to serve the ends of prose, and unques- 
 tionably fine. Blake might have had the passage before 
 him. 
 
 But I am very much deceived if the sentence given 
 above, which I have divided into its proper rhythmical 
 clauses and have even ventured (at the risk of tuggings 
 and torments like St. Andrew's) to quantify, is not an 
 example better deserving the title of " fine prose " than the 
 whimsical passage from the probably later " Paternoster "
 
 36 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 of Solomon and Saturn * which Professor Earle more 
 whimsically selected for that designation : 
 
 he is reSra and scearpra Sonne He is fiercer and sharper than 
 
 eal middangeard, Seah he sy all the world, though it be within 
 
 binnan his feower hwommum its four corners full-driven of wild 
 
 fulgedrifen wildeora, and anra deer, and each several deer have 
 
 gehwylc deor hasbbe synderlice severally twelve horns of iron, 
 
 xii hornas irene, etc. etc. 
 
 That is fantastic, and, though not devoid of rhythm, it owes 
 most of this to the simple multiplication of numerical 
 fancies. Ours, though it has, of course, none of the 
 flowery language for which these Homilies are rather 
 famous, has a division and a variation of the kola 2 which 
 are by no means rudimentary. And already we see the 
 differentia of harmonious prose, in all languages perhaps, 
 in English certainly, emerging to wit, that while in verse 
 the rhythmical effect of the larger integral values shduld 
 be similar, in prose it should be as various as possible, yet 
 so that it shall not jog or jar. The simpler trochaic run 
 of the other passages quoted already combines itself here, 
 it will be seen, into the three-, four-, and even five-footed 
 sections of the most accomplished prose amphibrachs, the 
 bacchius and its opposite, paeons, and even dochmiacs 
 perhaps ; the balance not "regular," but extended to that 
 antithetic parallelism which, with the ascent and descent 
 that cannot quite come yet, is the great prose engine, 
 already emerges. 3 From my reading of ^Elfric I could 
 give many more passages equal to this, and perhaps some 
 better ; but not, I think, anything that stands out more 
 remarkably or more naturally from a context good in 
 itself, but, on the whole, of a lower level. 
 
 Later Whether, and if so, to what extent, these interesting 
 
 WuTfstan an ^ elaborate experiments of ^Elfric were followed up by 
 
 1 Earle, p. 382. The full passage in Kemble's Salomon and Saturnus 
 (yElfric Society, London, 1848), pp. 150, 151. " Hems " for " hwommum " is 
 tempting, and I had once succumbed to it, but it is no doubt wrong. Kemble 
 gives " pinnacles.'" 
 
 2 This Greek word for the " members" or divisions of a sentence seems 
 to me better than the Latin " clause," especially for rhythmical use. 
 
 8 A friendly objection has been taken to this sentence as too difficult ; but 
 I hope better things of those readers who care to attend to the scanning given 
 before, with its attendant note, that sup. at p. 33, and the Table of Feet.
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 37 
 
 any of his numerous pupils or others, the unfortunately 
 restricted body of Anglo-Saxon prose literature does not 
 allow us to know. It is, on the whole, improbable, for, 
 after the tenth century, the literary gift of the nation and 
 language was obviously dwindling, and preparing itself 
 for a transformation. Our later fragments or complete 
 documents do not show much, if any, sign of it. The 
 eccentric " Paternoster " description just referred to is 
 little more than a jeu d 'esprit probably (from what we 
 know of the Anglo-Saxon manner and of the source of 
 the " Solomon and Marcolf " dialogues in which it occurs) 
 Eastern or Lower Greek in origin. Nor, in going through 
 these once more, can I find anything in the prose part 
 (much is sheer if not very regular verse) that manifests 
 peculiarity or individuality of style. The Chronicle con- 
 tinues now and then to furnish examples of good straight- 
 forward historical narration, but there is nothing new to be 
 said about it. Neither can I discover much deserving 
 special analysis in the sometimes highly praised work of 
 Archbishop Wulfstan. It is very far from contemptible, 
 and shows that the writer, who was doubtless a fair Latin 
 scholar, followed his Latin masters without too much 
 slavishness, but with a wise capacity for taking hints. 
 However, Wulfstan has sometimes been so much, lauded 
 that perhaps a specimen should be given. Let us take 
 one of those on which Professor Earle based the rather 
 excessive statement that " of all the writers before the 
 Conquest whose names are known to us, Wulfstan is the 
 one whose diction has the most marked physiognomy." 
 
 Uton beon a urum hlaforde Let us be aye to our lord leal 1 
 
 holde and getreowe and asfre and true, and ever with all our 
 
 eallum mihtum his wurSscipe mights his worship rear [set up, 
 
 raeran and his willan wyrcan, maintain] and his will work ; for 
 
 forSam call, bet we asfre for that all that we ever for right 
 
 riht hlafordhelde doS, eal we hit lord-loyalty do, all we it do our- 
 
 dotS us sylfum to mycelre bearfe, selves to mickle thrift, 1 inasmuch 
 
 1 It is a pity that we have lost, while the Germans possess, hold and georne; 
 nor is " thrift " etymologically = ' ' ]>earfe " ; but the above renderings, " leal " 
 and "gladly," are near enough in sense and pretty close in rhythm to the 
 first-mentioned words, while "profit" may replace "thrift" if desired.
 
 38 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 forSam Sam bi5 witodlice God as is certainly God leal l to him 
 
 hold, }>e bi5 his hlaforde rihtlice that is rightly leal to his lord ; 
 
 hold ; and eac ah hlaforda ge- and eke to any lord what- 
 
 hwylc J>aes for micle bearfe, }>set soever it is for mickle thrift l 
 
 he his men rihtlice healde. And that he his men rightly hold, 
 
 we biddaS and beodaS, J>aet Codes And we bid and bode that God's 
 
 beowas, be for urne cynehlaford theows [slaves, servants'] who for 
 
 and for eal cristen folc bingian our king-lord and for all Christian 
 
 scylan and be godra manna ael- folk intercede shall, and by good 
 
 messan libbaS, J>aet hy baes georne men's alms live, that they this 
 
 earnian, libban heora lif swa gladly 1 strive to live their life as 
 
 swa bee him wisian, and swa their books wise [guide'] them 
 
 swa heora ealdras hym taecan, and as their elders them teach, 
 
 and began heora beowdom georne, and perform their theow&om 
 
 ponne maegon hy aegper ge hym [service] gladly. Then may they 
 
 sylfum wel fremian ge eallum each whither both to themselves 
 
 cristenum folce. well frame [do] and to all 
 
 Christian people. 
 
 This is good enough, but not, I think, very specially 're- 
 markable ; and the Archbishop, as many descendants of his 
 flock were to do later, has got into a very clumsily hinged 
 and jointed sentence to open with. As for pure rhythm, 
 there is little but the trochaic and sometimes dactylic 
 ending (which is ubiquitous) to notice. 
 
 The one Anglo-Saxon production of the latest period 
 before the Conquest which seems to me to display distinct 
 idiosyncrasy, and a promise the performance of which 
 was unfortunately to be postponed for more than three 
 centuries by the necessity of remoulding the language, 
 is the little story of Apollonius of Tyre? 
 
 us We have, of course, nothing to do here with the very 
 vre ' interesting literary associations of this story ; but perhaps 
 we may have a little to do with its immediate original. 
 Thorpe's statement 3 that it was translated from " a chapter 
 of the Gesta Romanorum " was, of course, either an effect 
 of ignorance or a slip of expression, for the Gesta 
 certainly dates centuries after Anglo-Saxon ceased to be 
 
 1 See preceding note. 
 
 2 The peculiar excellence of Anglo-Saxon narrative had been shown much 
 earlier. The "Slaying of Cynewulf" itself promises this; the translation, 
 at Alfred's decree, of Pope Gregory's Dialogues by Bishop Wserferth of 
 Worcester (ed. Hecht, Leipzig, 1900) displays it in many places. 
 
 3 Apollonius of Tyre (London, 1834), p. iv.
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 39 
 
 a literary or even a living language. It would rather seem 
 not improbable (and this is quite in our division) that 
 the original, at short second or even at first hand, was 
 Greek. The clear, straightforward medium of the Greek 
 Romances (excepting the Euphuist-Meredithian ambages 
 of the much later Hysminias and Hysmine) comes nearer 
 to the manner of our Apollonius than most " Dark Age " 
 Latin. 
 
 At any rate, the terms just used are certainly deserved 
 by what we have (it is but a portion) of the story. 
 There is not the slightest tendency either to definite 
 rhythmical alliteration or to the forging of long balanced 
 sentences though both these had, as we have seen, been 
 freely used by ^Elfric. It is narrative style as simple 
 as Bunyan's and even simpler, with the conversation 
 as naturally and unrhetorically adjusted as might be. 
 Except once more in Sir John Mandeville, it is difficult to 
 find an equally good vehicle for simple non- romantic 
 story-telling before Bunyan himself, if not before Defoe 
 and the eighteenth century. But then the narrative itself 
 is of the simplest character pure, though not ex- 
 travagant, adventure (without mystical or chivalrous 
 sublimation) and simple exchange of thought being the 
 matter that has to be given. There had been a good deal 
 of this straightforward narrative faculty displayed by the 
 language in different places of Homily and translation. 
 But the story, which, though prudishly or whimsically 
 rejected by Chaucer, was to attract Gower and Shake- 
 speare, is, in this form, the best piece of the kind that Old 
 English has to show ; and its author is almost the head 
 of the race and lineage not merely of Bunyan and Defoe 
 themselves, but of Fielding and Scott and Thackeray. 
 Here is a piece of it, which surely needs no translation : 
 
 Mid J>i Se se cyning J>as word gecwaeS, Sa faeringa \suddenly\ 
 J>ar code in Saes cynges iunge dohtor, and cyste hyre faeder and Sa 
 ymbsittendan. Da heo becom to Apollonio, j>a gewasnde heo ongean 
 to hire faeder, and cwaeS, Du g6da cyningc, and min se leofesta 
 faeder, hwaet is )>es iunga man, J>e ongean Se on swa wurSlicum setle 
 sit, mid sdrlicum andwlitan ? nkt ic hwaet he besorgaS. Da cwaeS 
 se cyningc, Leofe dohtor, J>es iunga man is forliden [shipwrecked],
 
 40 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 and he gecwemde [pleased] me manna betst on Sam plegan ; forSam 
 ic hine gelaSode to Sysum urum gebeorscipe. Nat ic hwast he is, ne 
 hwanon he is ; ac gif Su wille witan hwaet he sy, axsa hine, forSam 
 be gedafenaS [it befits'] bast bu wite. Da eode baet maeden to 
 Apollonio, and mid forwandigendre [respectful] spraece cwaeS, Deah 
 Su stille sy and unrot [sad], beah ic bine aeSelborennesse od Se 
 geseo : nu bonne, gif Se to hefig ne bince, sege me binne naman, 
 and bin gelymp arece [accident tell] me. t)a cwaeS Apollonius, Gif 
 Su for neode axsast aefter minum naman, ic secge be, ic hine forleas 
 on se. Gif Su wilt mine aeSelborennesse witan, wite Su baet ic hig 
 forlet on Tharsum. Daet masden cwaeS, Sege me gewislicor, baet ic 
 hit msege understandan. Apollonius ba soSlice hyre arehte ealle his 
 gelymp, and aet bare spraecan ende him feollon tearas of Sam eagum. 
 
 General It seems unnecessary to take any minute notice of 
 
 summary d tne l atest fragments of pure Anglo-Saxon writing, such as 
 the well-known passage from the Chronicle about the 
 sufferings of the people in the castles of the robber barons 
 during Stephen's reign. There is nothing new to be 
 found in them, and there was not likely to be. It will be 
 more profitable to take some general (if still interim} view 
 of the rhythmical and " stylistic " character of the litera- 
 ture as a whole a posteriori, as a counterpart to the 
 examination given above of the apparent characteristics 
 of the language as capable of such expression a priori. 
 
 A sane criticism will certainly not put either its 
 capabilities or -its performance very low ; though such a 
 criticism will hardly endorse the enthusiastic estimate of 
 Mr. Earle. 1 For what may be called, without the least 
 insulting intention, the childish things of prose narration, 
 simple instruction, or, in other words, conveyance of 
 information in a straightforward, not slovenly, intelligible 
 way, Anglo-Saxon displays itself as excellently suited. 
 If the famous definition of style, 2 as being nothing else 
 but the clear expression of the meaning, be accepted, the 
 oldest form of our language may certainly be said to 
 possess it in a very high degree. 
 
 1 If anybody should say, "Why do you quote Earle? He is quite ob- 
 solete as a scholar," my answer is ready : " Please show me any scholar 
 of the present day who has shown himself to be equally conversant, from the 
 literary point of view, with Old, Middle, and Modern English. " I know 
 one, perhaps two ; but neither has written in extenso on the matter. 
 
 2 Coleridge's, though not quite in his words.
 
 ii OLD ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 41 
 
 Neither, as we have seen, is it incapable of proceeding 
 to a degree (in the other sense) still higher, and of 
 expressing that meaning in a fashion a cujusque natura 
 fluens a style expressing the idiosyncrasy of the writer 
 or speaker by ornament and suggestion of various kinds. 
 
 On the whole, however, these gifts are expended on 
 too small a range of subjects, and the writers are too 
 busy with the subject itself. Every now and then, as 
 in the well-known description of the mandrake and the 
 process of safely collecting it, with some others in the 
 Leechdoms l and elsewhere, as well as in the works previ- 
 ously noted, one receives the suggestion that, if the range 
 had been less limited and the temptation to original 
 composition 2 larger, a much greater development might 
 have taken place. Yet it may seem more probable that 
 the stock-in-trade of the language was as yet too limited 
 for prose of the first quality. And the phenomena which 
 we have seen in ^Elfric confirm this in a striking manner. 
 Here is a literature which seems to some extent to contra- 
 dict the general adage, "Verse first, prose afterwards." 
 Yet after centuries of exercise in both, it seems to know 
 hardly any other way of attaining elaborate prose than to 
 fall back on the very forms and fashions of verse itself. 
 Now this is an evil sign. There is nothing unhealthy in 
 the process so long as the form of prose itself is kept. 
 On the contrary, we have since seen three, if not four, 
 periods in which prose has borrowed something from 
 verse to its immense advantage : in the mid-seventeenth 
 century, after the great Elizabethan period ; in the later 
 eighteenth century, after the work of Dryden and Pope ; 
 in the third decade of the nineteenth, after the first 
 
 1 Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms, etc. (3 vols., " Rolls Series," London, 1864-66), 
 a book which, if it were not full of interest in itself, I should cherish for the 
 memory of its editor, Thomas Oswald Cockayne, one of the least pedantic 
 and most original schoolmasters that any one ever had the luck to be taught 
 by. The " Mandrake" is also in Thorpe's Analecta, p. 116. 
 
 2 The extreme care with which interlined translations or glosses were 
 made, and the effect they must have exercised, can be best seen from the 
 Liber Scintillarum, possibly eighth century (E.E.T.S., 1889). They also 
 extended (see Cockayne's Preface to Leechdoms} to Greek in separate words, 
 if not in continuous passages.
 
 42 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP, n 
 
 Romantic group ; in the seventh or eighth, after the work 
 of those about Tennyson. But none of the great prose 
 masters of these periods, neither Browne nor Taylor, 
 neither Johnson nor Burke, neither Landor nor De 
 Quincey, neither Mr. Pater nor any one else, becomes a 
 mere transfuga from prose to verse like ^Elfric in his 
 occasional and indeed frequent use of alliteration and stave- 
 division. There is something apparently like it in Mr. 
 Ruskin's excessive addiction to blank-verse insets ; but, as 
 we shall see, I hope, in due time, the appearance is partly 
 if not wholly deceptive. Such a falling back upon the 
 tricks of verse, especially of a verse which was itself losing 
 its stamina, and turning to rhyme and other formerly 
 uncongenial things, is an almost unmistakable hand- 
 writing on the wall, prophetic of the passing of a 
 kingdom.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FORMATION OF PROSE RHYTHM IN MIDDLE 
 ENGLISH BEFORE C. 1 3 SO 
 
 Importance and difficulty of Early and Middle English in our sub- 
 ject The Ancren Riwle Analysis of passages " The Wooing 
 of Our Lord " Other twelfth and thirteenth century pieces 
 General remarks on early Middle English prose Influence of 
 the Vulgate, and of French prose. 
 
 I HAVE endeavoured elsewhere a to make good the position importance 
 that if any one would English prosody win, with Middle O f Early TnJ 
 English he must needs begin. The truth (though a Middle 
 
 e ,. . *v 1 English in our 
 
 stage of preliminary enquiry, then almost unimportant, is subject. 
 now of great importance) remains still true in regard 
 to prose ; and it could not but be so, seeing that 
 it is in this period that the English language proper 
 is formed, and that, in consequence, we must look to it 
 for the origin of all the formal characteristics of English 
 literature. But the quest is here much more dark- 
 ling, and the results scantier and more doubtful, than 
 in the case of verse. In the first and main place, we have 
 now returned to the usual law of literary order which 
 Anglo-Saxon seems to violate, or at least to ignore. The 
 new blend achieves itself slowly ; and such achievement 
 as there is, for the first two or three centuries, is mainly 
 in verse. Moreover, while the great preponderance of 
 ecclesiastical and theological literature in Anglo-Saxon 
 had not been without effects, and those not wholly bene- 
 ficial effects, on the development of prose in the new 
 
 1 In the History of English Prosody, and also in A Historical Manual of 
 English Prosody. 
 
 43
 
 44 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 period, it is not a case of preponderance, it is one of 
 monopoly. With the exception of the later parts of the 
 Chronicle, which are almost pure Anglo-Saxon, and have 
 been dealt with in so far as they need dealing, it may 
 almost be said that there is not a single piece of prose of 
 a profane kind in English from the Conquest to the birth 
 of Chaucer all but three hundred years. The great 
 twelfth-century school of historians employs Latin solely ; 
 and hands on the vehicle. There are no prose vernacular 
 scientific or miscellaneous treatises worth speaking of in 
 early Middle English ; there are no prose romances except 
 Saints' Lives. In these, therefore, in Homilies, and in 
 other divisions of the same kind of literature, we have to 
 seek our only quarry. This is almost all translation, 1 and 
 even among it there is but one piece of bulk and merit 
 combined, the Ancren Riwle. 
 
 It is particularly important to remember that in the 
 earlier part of this time there was no French prose to 
 imitate ; though it is barely possible that by the time of 
 the Riwle there was ; indeed, there are theories of a 
 French original. French words, as we shall see, there 
 are, and they are most important ; while the author dis- 
 tinctly anticipates reading of English or French 2 on the 
 part of his disciple-ladies. But even earlier there had 
 been some strivings. Professor Earle, enthusiast as he 
 was, could find nothing (he does not even mention the 
 Ancren Riwle] to cite and comment on except the beautiful 
 if rather morbid " Wooing of Our Lord," to which we shall 
 come in due course. But it will be desirable here to 
 select and comment a little more widely. The various 
 treatises and homilies included in Dr. Morris's Old English 
 Miscellany and Old English Homilies may be scattered 
 over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, according to 
 
 1 There was, of course, preaching in English all along ; we know, for 
 instance, that the famous Abbot Samson of St. Edmund's "preached to the 
 people in English, but in the Norfolk dialect." This must have been years 
 before the probable date of the Ancren Riwle ; for Samson became abbot in 
 1182, and was then forty-seven years old. He also "read English rolls," 
 which seems not to have been a common accomplishment. But we do not 
 know what he read. 
 
 2 Ancren Riwle (ed. Morton, Camden Society, London, 1853), p. 44.
 
 in THE FORMA TION OF PROSE RHYTHM 45 
 
 an order difficult to settle as to actual MSS., and im- 
 possible to correct according to their originals. I shall 
 therefore take my examples avowedly pell-mell, though 
 not without indicating any flashes of internal evidence as 
 to prose accomplishment. 
 
 There used to be a theory whether it has, like most The Ancren 
 such theories, been given up and revived again, and how 
 often in each case, I do not know that the author of 
 the Ancren Riwle was also the author of the " Wooing of 
 Our Lord," of Soul's Ward," of " Holy Maidenhead," etc. 
 The innocent, but rather monotonous, restlessness of philo- 
 logists seems to have only two ways of exercising itself 
 in this direction to lump anonyma on a single head, or to 
 distribute assigned work to other folk than the traditional 
 assignees. In neither of these little games has it ever 
 amused me to take a hand. I take the fords as I find 
 them. But as the Ancren Riwle, whether the work of 
 Bishop Richard Poore or of anybody else ; whether 
 originally Latin, French, or English, or first Latin, then 
 French, then English ; whether written by the author of 
 the others or not is the most important, the most varied, 
 and the most interesting, it might undoubtedly be well 
 to take it first. We have long been promised newer and 
 newer-fangled editions of it; but as they have not 
 arrived, we can stick to the old Camden Society one by 
 Canon Morton, which, whatever its philological short- 
 comings, is amply sufficient to literature. 
 
 The monitor of the anchoresses writes with no rude- 
 ness, but with a great simplicity ; and if, as has been 
 also suggested, the passionate and florid " Wooing of Our 
 Lord " is a paraphrase of any part of his work, it must 
 either be by a different hand, or by the same hand in a 
 most curiously different frame of mind and "habit of 
 oration." His speech is singularly straightforward, and 
 the changes of vocabulary and syntax have brought his 
 style much nearer to modern form than anything we 
 have yet seen. The effect, especially of his few Romance 
 words, is very striking. And sometimes, as we shall 
 see, his prose-structure promises really mighty things to
 
 46 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 come, when the actual word -store shall have been 
 sufficiently varied and enriched. 
 
 Eue heold ine Parais longe tale mid te neddre, & told hire al pe 
 lescun pe God hire hefde ilered, & Adam, of pen epple ; & so the 
 ueond 1 purh hire word, understond anonriht hire wocnesse, and 
 ivond l wei touward hire of hire uorlorenesse. Vre lefdi, Seinte 
 Marie, dude al anoSer wise : ne tolde heo pen engle none tale ; auh 
 askede him ping scheortliche pe heo ne ku5e. Ye, mine leoue 
 sustren, uoleweS ure lefdi & nout pe kakelinde Eue. 
 
 This ought to require no translation ; but perhaps an 
 exact modernising, on the lines of previous attempts, 
 will bring out the very great advance that has been made 
 in the direction of modernity itself : 
 
 Eve held in Paradise long tale with the adder, and told her all 
 the lesson that God her had learnt, and Adam, of the apple ; and 
 so the fiend, through her word, understood anonright her weakness, 
 and found way toward her of her forlornness [rum]. Our Lady, 
 St. Mary, did all anotherwise ; not told she the angel no tale ; 
 but asked him [the] thing shortly that she knew not. Ye, my lief 
 sisters, follow our Lady and not the cackling Eve. 
 
 Here is a longer passage : 
 
 Euerichon of peos wordes wolde habben longe hwule uorte beon 
 wel iopened [explained] ; and gif ich hie swuSe \yery\ uorSward 
 [forthivard, onward], demeure ge pe lengre. O [one] word ich sigge 
 [say] efter [after = about\ ower su[i]nnen : pet hwonne se ge penche<5 
 of helle wo & of heoueriche wunne ; vnderstondeS pet God wolde a 
 sume wise scheawen ham to men iSisse worlde bi worldliche pinen 
 & worldliche wunnen ; and scheawede ham uorS ase pauh hit were 
 a scheadewe uor no likure ne beoS heo. Ye beo5 ouer pisse 
 worldes see, uppen pe brugge of heouene. LokeS pet ge ne beon 
 nout iliche pe horse pet is scheouh, & blencheS uor one scheadewe 
 upo pe heie brugge, & falleS adun into pe watere of pe heie brugge. 
 To scheowe heo beoS mid alle pet fleoS uor ane peinture, pet 
 punches ham grislich & grureful uorto biholden. Wo and wunne 
 ipisse worlde al nis bute ase a scheadewe al nis bute ase a peinture. 
 
 Every one of these words would have long for to be well opened. 
 But if I hie very forthward, abide ye the longer. One word I say 
 about your sins : that when ye bethink yourselves of Hell's woe and 
 Heaven's win, understand that God would on some wise show them 
 to men in this world by worldly pains and worldly wins. And he 
 
 1 Note "z/iend" and "wound," as they said in Tarrant-Keynes that day, 
 as they certainly did, not many years ago, in its neighbourhood, and as I 
 hope they do still in spite of board-schools and other abominations.
 
 in THE FORMATION OF PROSE RHYTHM 47 
 
 showed them forth as if it were a shadow : for no liker be they. 
 Ye be over this world's sea upon the bridge of Heaven. Look that 
 ye be not like the horse that is shy and blencheth at a shadow upon 
 the high bridge and falleth adown into the water from the high 
 bridge. Too shy they be withal that flee for a painting, that 
 thinketh them grisly and gruesome to behold. Woe and win in 
 this world, all is not but as a shadow ; all is not but as a picture. 
 
 Here a shorter : 
 
 Schrift schal beon wreiful, bitter, mid seoruwe, ihol, naked, ofte 
 imaked, hihful, edmod, scheomeful, dredful, & hopeful, wis, soS 
 & willes ; owune & studeuest ; biSouht biuoren longe. 
 
 Followed by separate sections on each characteristic, as 
 thus : 
 
 Schrift schal beon wreiful. 
 Schrift ouh forte beon soS, etc. 1 
 
 And here the longest we can give : 
 
 Peonne beo ge dunes iheied up to be heouene ; vor lo ! hwu 
 spekeS be lefdi iSet swete luue boc : " Venit dilectus meus saliens 
 in montibus, transiliens colles." 2 "Mi leof kume<5," he seiS, 
 " leapinde o5e dunes ouerleapinde hulles." Dunes bitocneS beo bet 
 ledeS hexst lif ; hulles beoS be lowure. Nu, seiS heo bet hire leof 
 leapeS o5e hulles [should be dunes] ; bet is, to-tret ham, & to-mleS 
 ham, & boleS bet me to-tret ham, & tukeS ham alto wundre ; 
 scheaweS in ham his owune treden bet me trodde him in ham, & 
 iuinde hwu he was to -treden, ase his treoden scheaweS. pis 
 beo5 be heie dunes, ase be munt of Mungiue, & be dunes of 
 Armenie. PCO hulles bet beo<5 lowure, beo, ase be lefdi seiS, hire 
 sulf ouerleapeS, ne trusted heo so wel on ham, uor hore feblesce ; 
 uor ne muhte heo nout iSolien swuche to-tredunge, and bereuore heo 
 ouerleapeS ham, & forbereS ham, & forbuweS ham uort bet heo beon 
 iwaxen herre, urom hulles to dunes. His schedewe hure & hure 
 ouergeo" and wriS ham be hwule bet he leapeS ouer ham ; bet is, 
 sum ilicnesse he leiS on ham of his liue on eortfe, ase bauh hit were 
 his schedewe. Auh be dunes underuoS be treden of him suluen, 
 and scheaweS in hore liue hwuch his liflode was hwu & hwar he 
 code i hwuche uilte i hwuche wo he ledde his lif on eorSe. 
 
 1 Most of this must be clear to any one. Wreiful ="\>\wrayi\d." 
 "accusing"; hihful hie-ful, "hurrying," "swift"; /wa? = humble. 
 Willes and owune, which may look as if they were tautological, or at least 
 connected, are quite separate ; willes is " voluntary " but owune, which 
 Canon Morton hastily translated " voluntary," is explained in the text to 
 mean "personal" not gossip about other folk. Studeuest, which may suggest 
 "studious" to the unwary, is simply " stud -7>est" = " steadfast." 
 
 2 A shortened form of Cant. Cant. ii. 8 : " Vox dilecti mei ! ecce iste venit 
 saliens in montibus, transiliens colles."
 
 48 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Then are ye mountains heightened up to Heaven ; for lo ! how 
 speaketh the lady in that sweet love -book, Venit dilectus meus 
 saliens in montibus, transiliens colles. " My love cometh," she 
 saith, "leaping on the downs, overleaping the hills." Downs 
 betokeneth them that lead the highest life, hills are the lower. 
 Now saith she that her love leaped on the downs, that is, to-treads 
 them \the intensive "to-" as in "to-brake"] and to-fileth them, 
 and tholeth that men should to-tread them, and tucketh them 
 all to wonder ; sheweth in them his own treadings that men trod 
 in him ; and they find how he was to-trodden, as his treadings shew. 
 These are the high downs as the Mount of Mungiue x and the downs 
 of Armenia. The hills that be lower, these, as the lady saith 
 herself, 2 she overleapeth, and she trusteth not so well in them 
 because of their feebleness. For they might not thole such to- 
 treading, and therefore she overleapeth them and forbeareth them, 
 and forboweth \avoidetti\ them till that they be waxen higher, from 
 hills to downs. His shadow, however, overgoeth and wrappeth 
 them the while that he leapeth over them ; that is a likeness he 
 layeth on them of his life on earth as though it were his shadow. 
 But the downs undergo the treading of himself, and shew in tljeir 
 life what his life was how and where he yode, in what vileness, 
 in what woe, he led his life on earth. 
 
 Analysis of Now the first of these pieces is quite simple ; the 
 passages, often-made contrast between Eve and Mary could not be 
 put with less rhetorical flourish. But it might be put 
 much worse. There is the sense of balance, knowledge of 
 the value of mixed short and long sentences ; and though 
 the prose runs quite fluently there is no attempt at poetic 
 rhythm. Nor does it very much matter whether this is 
 due to a definite sense of the difference of the harmonies. 
 But there is something else to notice here, and this is the 
 absence of Romance words. Not one of the important 
 vocables is other than pure English : the familiar note of 
 " cackle " sounds throughout. 
 
 In the next passage the effect is strikingly different, 
 
 1 Morton, " Montjoye." I had thought it might be " Montgibel " = Etna. 
 Ararat and Etna, the most famous and storied " downs " (smoke the Dorset 
 man) of Ponent and Levant, would go well together. But Mr. Ker corrected 
 this vain imagination, pointing out to me that it is simply " Mons_/bz/z.r" = the 
 Great St. Bernard, or the Alps generally. In fact, reading Layamon almost 
 simultaneously, I came upon the two forms "Mungiue" and "Montjoye" 
 opposite each other in the two versions, and meaning "Alps." Hence, prob- 
 ably, Morton's rendering; elsewhere in Layamon II. it is "Montagu." 
 
 2 " Lefdi " has led the copyist astray. It is the Lord Christ Aimself.
 
 in THE FORMA TION OF PROSE RHYTHM 49 
 
 and the causes are as strikingly evident. Whether the 
 author had any particular model I must leave to Homiletic 
 specialists to determine ; my subject is the means whereby 
 he effected it may be imitation, it may be invention. 
 The piece, I say, is eminently rhetorical, and Rhetoric uses 
 her well-tried weapons. The figurative character of the 
 whole is only indirectly of moment ; but the amount oi 
 this indirect moment is great. For figures, as has been 
 known of old, always bring with them and indeed can 
 hardly exist without other devices. We have definite 
 and not merely accidental alliteration, " hellish woe and 
 heavenly win," "worldly pains and worldly wins," "showed 
 as a shadow," and perhaps " bridge " and " brink." We 
 have repetition and turn of words. We have already 
 phrase in ranged clauses " all is not but as a shadow ; all 
 is not but as a picture." And lastly we have Romance 
 words. 
 
 One MS. indeed seems to have " abode " instead of 
 " demeure," and it is curious that this latter has not 
 abided in our language, which has adopted so many 
 French synonyms. Neither has " peinture," but of this 
 there was not, so far as I know, any vernacular variant : 
 " painting " or " picture " had not come in. Even if there 
 were, it would be probable that it was rather an effort of 
 a particular copyist to get a stumbling-block out of the 
 way than an endeavour in several to unfamiliarise a 
 familiar word. And the effect of these two or three 
 French words, with their different sound and different 
 accent, among the Teutonic, can escape no ear that is 
 naturally given, or that has been trained, to the discrimi- 
 nation of literary resonance. There are not enough of 
 them yet, and they keep their original form too much to 
 be very powerful : there is more conflict than influence. 
 But the influence is on the way, and before long it will 
 arrive, bringing with it the alternation, if not the actual 
 substitution, of " rising " for " falling " rhythm. For the 
 tendency of French to throw such accent as it has to the 
 last syllable inevitably provides iambic or anapaestic 
 cadence instead of trochaic or dactylic. 
 
 E
 
 50 A HISTOR Y OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 The third passage, or rather bunch of beginnings, 
 shows that this prose knew how to be emphatic. The 
 selection of short sharp words, the alliteration, the avoiding 
 of any " panning out," are all noteworthy. Some silly 
 things have been said about the superiority of " Saxon " 
 to " Latin " phrase, but it must be admitted (as one looks 
 at Canon Morton's text and his translation on the two sides 
 of the page-opening) that " Shrift ought to be sooth " is 
 better than " Confession ought to be truthful," though the 
 very contrast itself shows how language and literature 
 will gain when the two horses draw together in the 
 same car. 
 
 The last passage is perhaps the most interesting of all, 
 because it attains the highest level of rhythm without 
 any special device. As before, I must leave to some 
 student of homiletics the question whether any particular 
 treatise on the Canticles may yield the material of these 
 remarks ; as before also, the discovery of an original 
 would not in any way affect our study except as it might 
 assist it. I think that any one who reads the text with 
 the assistance of the " construe " which the modernising 
 of the original language enables us to make extremely 
 close will see that a by no means ordinary brand of 
 rhythmed prose, depending mainly on balance, but on 
 that balance varied very considerably, is here attained. 
 There is hardly a single word that is really obsolete, 1 
 though in one or two instances the change of form may 
 hide the meaning from very careless or purblind eyes ; 
 and though inflections to some extent alter the " specific 
 gravity " of individual words, they do not do so to a very 
 important effect, because they balance each other. For 
 instance, " treden " and " tredde " maintain the relation in 
 " tread " and " trod," the weak syllable being eliminated 
 on either side. There is very little Romance vocabulary, 
 though " feblesce " (for " wocness ") of course strikes one, 
 and " vilt " still more. On the other hand, there is little 
 
 1 " Tucian " = " chastise " is really such, though perhaps "teach" and 
 "taught," as in the A.V. for "torment," may represent it. There are, 
 indeed, some vernacular and dialectic uses of " tuck " itself, which seem not 
 very distant. But they tell us that " tuck " is only " tug," or " touch."
 
 in THE FORMATION OF PROSE RHYTHM 51 
 
 alliteration, though " ledeth hexst lif : hulles beoth the 
 lowure " has a kind of cross-suggestion, and so have one 
 or two other places. 1 The accomplishment of the passage 
 and to my ear this is not inconsiderable arises 
 solely from the attainment of that undulating movement, 
 balanced but varied, parallel but not stichic, which con- 
 stitutes the rhythm of prose. 
 
 If we compare with this the passionate passage which "The Woo- 
 Mr. Earle selected 2 from the " Wooing of Our Lord," and 
 which some have thought to be a paraphrase of other 
 things in the Ancren Riwle itself, the very great difference 
 of the styles will emerge at once. The matter of both is 
 largely supplied by the Canticles, and the intention of 
 both was to supply nuns or anchoresses with matter for 
 meditation. But the two writers, whoever they were, set 
 about their work in the most different ways possible, 
 whether the selection of words or the arrangement of 
 them be considered. We saw that the author of the 
 Ancren Riwle selected his words soberly, by no means 
 indulged in " spilth of adjectives," and rather eschewed 
 obtrusive or profuse alliteration. This writer lavishes ad- 
 jectives and adverbs " ahefulle deueles," " unimete mihti," 
 etc. ; and simply wallows in alliteration " dradst with 
 
 1 As " sum i/icnesse he /ei5 on ham of his /iue on eorSe." 
 
 2 " A ihesu swete ihesu leue J>at te luue of )>e beo al mi likinge. 
 
 " Bote moni man )>urh his strengSe and hardischipe ek makes him luued and 
 3erned . And is ani swa hardi swa artu ? Nai . for Jm J>e ane dreddes nawt 
 wiS J>in anre deore bodi to fihte ajaines alle J>e ahefulle deueles of helle . J>at 
 hwuch of ham swa is lest laSeliche . and grureful . mihte he swuch as he is to 
 monkin him scheawe ' al )>e world were offeard him ane to bihalde . for ne 
 mihte na mon him seo and in his wit wunie . bute 3if ]>e grace and te strengSe 
 of crist baldede his heorte. 
 
 " PU art 3ette her wiS swa unimete mihti J>at wiS )>i deorewurSe hond nailet 
 on rode ' Jm band ta helle dogges . and reftes ham hare praie }>at tai hefden 
 grediliche gripen and helden hit faste for adames sunne. 
 
 " PU kene kidde kempe robbedes helle hus . lesedes tine prisuns and riddes 
 ham ut of cwalm hus and leddes him wiS )>e self to {>i 3immede bur . bold of 
 eche blisse . for J>i of )>e mi lefmon was soSliche quiddet . Drihti[n] is mahti 
 strong and kene ifihte . And for }>i 3if me likes stalewurSe lefmon f luue iwile 
 J>e ihesu strongest ouer alle . J>at J)i maht felle mine starke sawle fan . and te 
 strengSe of J>e helpe mi muchele wacnesse . and hardischipe of )>e balde min 
 herte. 
 
 "A ihesu swete ihesu leue |>at! te-, luue of J>e beo alfmi likinge." English 
 Prose, pp. 395-397 ; or Morris, First Series, pp. 271-273.
 
 52 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 thy dear body," " greedily grips," " thu kene kidde kempe." 
 On the other hand, he has little command of balance in 
 any cunning or varied form, and throws his clauses 
 together with either a complete disregard of general 
 harmonic effect or a singularly bad ear for it. The 
 undoubting if somewhat overstrained sentiment, and the 
 echo of some beautiful but borrowed phrases, may give 
 the piece a sort of glamour ; but it is not really good 
 prose in any division. For variety's sake I have not 
 translated it ; indeed nobody who is not merely scared 
 by the displacing of a few letters can have any difficulty 
 with most of it 
 
 Other twelfth The short Homilies (accompanying the " Wooing ") 
 which Dr - Morris gave in his collection, 1 and assigned 
 partly at least to the twelfth century, 2 do not generally 
 show any particular attempt at style or rhythm. In fact, 
 as would be natural from the large amount of actual 
 scriptural citation that they contain, they suggest oftenest 
 versicular arrangement of the Vulgate. Some of them 
 seem to be inspired by, if not directly modelled on, 
 ^Elfric ; but though this attempt at archaism is interesting 
 (a twelfth or thirteenth century " Wardour Street," as 
 some scornful moderns would say), it does not come to 
 much. Most of the " Wooing " itself is rapturous and 
 almost hysterical ejaculation, making itself a style, if style 
 it can be called, congenial to its mood. 
 
 On the contrary, the much more vigorous and mascu- 
 line " Soul's Ward " 3 strikes into a style, also suitable, but 
 approaching much nearer to that of the Ancren Riwle, 
 with rather more alliteration. And this applies also 
 to the striking piece, untitled, which Morris has christened 
 as " An Bispel " (A Parable). Here the flowing narrative, 
 which has been praised in the Gregory and the Apollonius, 
 reappears, with additions of sententious comment some- 
 times of great merit, in the simpler oratorical style. It 
 
 1 Old English Homilies, two vols., E.E.T.S. (London, 1868 and 1873). 
 
 2 Some of them, in their original forms, may be of the eleventh. None 
 can be younger than the thirteenth. 
 
 3 It appears to be a translation from a Latin piece, belonging to the great 
 school of St. Victor.
 
 in THE FORMATION OF PROSE RHYTHM 53 
 
 is, on the whole, the most sinewy example of what they 
 used (by no bad term) to call " semi-Saxon " composition. 
 But it could only be well exhibited in an extract rather 
 too long for us. 
 
 In this second stage, then (for there is not much good General 
 in dealing with the Ayenbite of Inwyt l and other purely 
 dialectic examples), we see in some respects a falling-off English prose. 
 in others, or one other, a distinct if not very great 
 advance. The falling-off is mainly connected with the 
 great contraction of matter, with a strict limitation to 
 one kind, and with the further limitation of models con- 
 ditioned inevitably by the examples of precedent homiletic 
 writing in the same language, and by the omnipresent 
 influence of Latin work in similar kinds, and still more of 
 the Vulgate. In reading that consummate production 2 
 with a view to such purposes as we have now before us, 
 we must at once keep in view the continuous and the 
 versicular structure and division. The paragraphs of the 
 so-called Revised Version are, like most other things of 
 that unfortunate enterprise, of very little use from the 
 literary point of view ; but while the versicles themselves 
 generally justify themselves completely in any language 
 to a good ear, it will, to such an ear, be clear that they 
 frequently group themselves also into larger integers 
 sentences longer than the verse, or even groups of 
 sentences. Of the paragraph, as such, it may be doubted 
 whether any Anglo-Saxon or Middle English writer had 
 much notion from the purely rhythmical-stylistic point of 
 view. He had done with one subject and he took to 
 another : that was all. 
 
 But as you turn over the Vulgate itself you see how influence of 
 many, and what different, models of style it offers to the Vulgate> 
 competent followers. Take the story of Naaman, Reg. IV. 
 (V. in A.V.), and you find a long narrative, capable of 
 being divided up into various integers, but with no, or 
 
 1 Which indeed hardly belongs here, having been probably written at the 
 time of, or only just before, Chaucer's birth. 
 
 2 Naturally, tenth to thirteenth century writers did not read the Clementine 
 redaction, and perhaps not many of them read the same version exactly ; but 
 that did not matter.
 
 54 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 few, rhetorical tricks of style. Take any of the so-called 
 poetical books in the wide sense, Job, the Psalms, the 
 Proverbs, Isaiah, and you find the famous parallelism, the 
 short aphoristic statement divided in stave. Take such a 
 passage as Ecclesiasticus xxv. 1 8-21 and you find the rhet- 
 orical figure, epanaphora et omnem . . . et non at the 
 beginning and middle of four consecutive verses. Take, 
 above all, as it is in another sense " above all " but the 
 highest flights of the older " poetical " books, Wisdom, 
 and you find the Greek sense of the paragraph fighting, 
 as it were, with the Hebrew balanced versicle, and a most 
 interesting Latin blend or mosaic resulting. 1 It is more 
 interesting still, no doubt, in the whole Septuagint, but 
 for much direct influence of that or of the Hebrew we 
 shall have to wait till the sixteenth century. All these 
 things influenced, of course, Anglo-Saxon homilists mtich, 
 and their Middle English followers (in so far as they had 
 a less accomplished though more accomplishable medium) 
 still more. Their practice provided exercises which were 
 to turn into really excellent work before very long; but 
 the range of these exercises was as yet not sufficiently 
 extensive, and the all-powerful consequence of the dose of 
 French-accented words was too small and had not had 
 time to work. 
 
 an( i O f But there was another influence which must also be 
 
 French prose, taken into consideration, though to take it " craves wary 
 walking " : and that is the influence of actual French prose 
 itself. This prose, it is well known, was not early ; it is 
 questionable whether there was any worth speaking of 
 fifty years before the Ancren Riwle was written. But 
 St. Bernard may have written prose sermons (and such 
 sermons must have been spoken long before) in the 
 middle of the twelfth century, and Maurice de Sully pretty 
 certainly wrote them in its later half. By the beginning 
 of the thirteenth and not long after the Riwle, Geoffroi de 
 Villehardouin had no difficulty in composing the admirable 
 
 1 I am, of course, aware that Biblical critics speak of the diction of 
 Wisdom as being ' ' unfettered by Hebrew idioms. " But there is certainly 
 Hebrew parallelism, and, I think, other Hebraic features.
 
 in THE FORMATION OF PROSE RHYTHM 55 
 
 true romance which goes by his name ; and people were 
 soon busy " unrhyming " recent verse work. The director 
 of the anchoresses himself, as we have seen, thinks it 
 equally probable that they may have read English or 
 French books of devotion, and these must pretty surely 
 have been in prose. The first of the great French prose 
 Arthurian romances, even if not so old as they did seem to 
 most critics not long ago, and still seem to some, were not 
 to be long in coming. From the thirteenth century itself 
 onward there were undoubtedly French models before 
 English prose-writers, though even at the end of it even 
 at the beginning of the next the unripeness of the 
 language and its subjection to the general law of "verse 
 first, prose afterwards " make Robert of Gloucester and 
 Robert of Brunne choose the former rather than the 
 latter as their implement in the task of recovering History 
 for English. Manning's original had actually employed 
 French verse in preference to English prose. Let us 
 therefore see what French prose, in this its earliest stage, 
 had to offer to the new pupil for which it was doing so 
 much in verse, and which yet was showing so much 
 independence in its discipleship. But for this purpose we 
 had better start a new chapter, all the more so that almost 
 our sole predecessor, Mr. Earle, has relinquished Chaucer 
 and Mandeville, if not Wyclif, to " the beneficial effect of 
 French culture " it is French culture that has " improved 
 the habit of the native prose." ] Voyons I 
 
 1 Some readers will no doubt say, ' ' Where is Hampole ? " My copies of 
 Horstmann's Hampoliana would show a fair, and fairly long, acquaintance 
 with him. But the difficulties of dates and personalities are great ; and I 
 doubt whether, in prose, anything attributable to him with any certainty 
 would do us much good. The general remarks of this chapter apply, though 
 there are beautiful passages.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 
 
 English made a school language The four prosemen of the late 
 fourteenth century Wyclif The Tracts and Sermons The 
 translation of the Bible Trevisa Sir John Mandeville 
 Chaucer His various prose pieces Their somewhat neglected 
 importance The Parson's Tale The Tale oj Melibee Its 
 blank verse The Astrolabe The Boethius The fifteenth 
 century Its real importance Pecock and the Represser 
 His syntax His compound equivalents The Paston Letters 
 Malory His prose and the earlier verse Morte Guinevere's 
 last meeting with Lancelot The Lancelot dirge The Throw- 
 ing of Excalibur His devices His excellence a rather lonely 
 one Berners Style of his romance translations And contrast 
 of their Prefaces Fisher. 
 
 English made THE historical circumstances which helped, if they did 
 language not w ^oHy cause, the second stage of Middle English 
 Literature, and thereby produced, in effect, the first stage 
 of Modern, are, or ought to be, well known. Mere 
 political history the severance of England and France 
 as kingdoms, and the greater and greater Anglification x 
 of the kings and nobles of England had much to do with 
 it. Social and educational changes had perhaps not a 
 little. The famous passage 2 of John of Trevisa himself 
 
 1 It is doubted, seemingly on good grounds, whether Richard Coeur de 
 Lion knew any English at all ; and Jocelyn of Brakelonde in the passage 
 noted above (p. 44) seems to be rather more surprised that Abbot Samson 
 could read English than that he could speak it. In fact, it would be not a 
 little interesting to know what English books Samson did read and could 
 have had to read. 
 
 2 Whether part of this is repeated from others does not matter ; but the 
 text should be given, from Morris and Skeat's Specimens : 
 
 " Pys manertf was moche y-vsed to- fore ]>e furste moreyn, & ys seethe somdel 
 
 56
 
 CHAP, iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 57 
 
 one of the remarkable group of English prose-writers who 
 adorn the latter part of the fourteenth century explains 
 these latter in all detail the disuse, about the time of the 
 Black Death, of the older practice of employing French 
 as the medium of teaching and translation in schools, and 
 the substitution for it of English, wherewith is associated, 
 and should be handed down for honour to all ages, the 
 name of John Cornwall, schoolmaster. 
 
 That this might or must, in itself, stimulate writing in 
 English for ordinary purposes may be self-evident ; but 
 some people may be not unreasonably inclined to ask 
 whether it would not rather repress than stimulate that 
 further blending of Romance and Teutonic vocabulary 
 which has been repeatedly pointed out as being the 
 indispensable preliminary to real accomplishment in the 
 language. A little thought, however, will show that this 
 is a mistake that the wider range of subjects dealt with 
 necessitated a wider vocabulary, and that English, freed 
 from its inferior position, was sure to anglicise the 
 numerous French words that it was forced to borrow. 
 
 The quartette above referred to, and composed, besides The four 
 Chaucer and Trevisa, of Wyclif and of the persona (if not t p h r s ^ e en of 
 personality) of " Sir John Mandeville," were all, for fourteenth 
 literary purposes, so nearly contemporary that it does not wyciifT" 
 matter which is taken first as far as chronology goes. In 
 point of subject and perhaps of date, though not of literary 
 
 ychaunged. For lohan Cornwal, a mayste^ of gramere, chayngede {>e lore in 
 
 gramtfr-scole, & construccion of Freynsch in-to Englysch ; & Richard Pencrych 
 
 lurnede J>at manere techyng of hym, & o]>er men of Pencrych ; so ]>at now, ]>e ' 
 
 3er of oure Lord a J)ousond )>re hondred foure score & fyue, of {>e secunde kyng 
 
 Richard after ]>e conquest nyne, in al }>e grains- scoles of Engelond childern 
 
 leue)> Frensch & construe)) & lurne)) an Englysch, and habbe|> Iper-by avauntage -^ 
 
 in on syde & desavauntage yn anojw ; here avauntage ys, ]>at a lurne)) here 
 
 granw yn lasse tyme Jjan childern wer ywoned to do disavauntage ys, ]>at 
 
 now childern of gram^r-scole conne]> no more Frensch J)an can here lift heele, , 
 
 & f>at ys harm for ham, & a scholle passe ]>e se & trauayle in strange londes, & 
 
 in meny caas also. Also gentil men habbe}> now moche yleft for to teche hertf 
 
 childern Frensch. Hyt seme]) a gret wondwr hou3 Englysch, ]>at ys ]>e bur))- 
 
 tonge of Englysch men & here oune longage & tonge, ys so dyuers of soun in 
 
 Jris ylond ; & ]>e longage of Normandy ys co/wlyng of &-no)>er lond, & haj) on 
 
 maner soun among al men Jwt spekej) hyt ary3t in Engelond. Nopeles ]>er ys 
 
 as meny dyuers maner Frensch yn J)e rem of Fraunce as ys dyuers manere 
 
 Englysch in ]>e rem of Engelond."
 
 58 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 importance, Wyclif may have precedence. He deserves, 
 however, the less notice, because he did not write his 
 purely philosophical works in English, and because the 
 works which he did write in English were mainly of the 
 same class as those which we considered in the last 
 chapter, though a little more popularly scholastic in style. 
 To call him " the first writer of English prose " is merely 
 an unconscious aposiopesis, and an equally unconscious 
 confession of ignorance. If there be added to it, " of 
 whom the writer or speaker ever heard," it might, no 
 doubt, be admitted pro tanto. The tracts 1 attributed to, 
 and certainly in some cases written by, Wyclif show, as 
 one might expect, a certain advance in facility of handling, 
 and, as one would expect, a certain greater advance still in 
 violence. All bad language has a positive tendency to 
 vivacity, though also to monotony. I do not know 
 whether any German or English " enumerator " has ever 
 counted the number of times the word " cursed " occurs in 
 Wyclifs tracts. And the abundance, enthusiasm, and 
 popularity of Wyclifs wandering preachers must have 
 done something for our speech. But " father of English 
 prose " is, as applied to him, one of the silliest of these 
 usually silly expressions, and is perhaps most frequent in 
 the mouths of those who also consider him and perhaps 
 really mean by it " father of English Protestantism." 
 However, from a person with such a reputation, if not 
 such a record, some specimen should doubtless be given, 
 especially as he might, without any absurdity, be called 
 father of English philosophical prose, even with the caution 
 above. Here is a passage of an argumentative kind : 2 
 
 Nisi granum frumenti. JOHN xii. 24. 
 
 The Tracts In this short Gospel be doubts, both of conscience and of other. 
 
 and Sermons. First philosophers doubt, whether (the) seed loseth his form when 
 it is made a new thing, as the Gospel speaketh here ; and some 
 men think nay, for sith the same quantity or quality or virtue 
 
 1 Select English Works of Wyclif, 3 vols. (1869-1871), ed. T. Arnold. 
 Wyclifs English Works [not included in the above], ed. Matthew (E.E.T.S.). 
 
 2 From this point onwards, with a few exceptions, the extracts are 
 modernised in spelling, on the principle adopted in Sir H. Craik's Selections 
 (v. Preface).
 
 iv FROM CHA UCER TO MALOR Y 59 
 
 that was first in seed, liveth after in the fruit, as a child is often 
 like to his father or to his mother, or else to his eld father, after 
 that the virtue lasteth, and sith all these be accidents, that may 
 not dwell without subject, it seemeth that the same body is first 
 seed and after fruit, and thus it may oft change from seed to fruit 
 and again. Here many cleped philosophers glaver [clover, chatter\ 
 diversely ; but in this matter God's law speaketh thus, as did eld 
 clerks, that the substance of a body is before that it be seed, and 
 now fruit and now seed, and now quick and now dead. And thus 
 many forms must be together in one thing, and specially when the 
 parts of that thing be meddled together ; and thus the substance of 
 a body is now of one kind and now of another. And so both these 
 accidents, quality and quantity, must dwell in the same substance, 
 all if it be changed in kinds, and thus this same thing that is now 
 a wheat corn shall be dead and turn to grass, and after to many 
 corns. But variance in words in this matter falleth to clerks, and 
 showing of equivocation, the which is more ready in Latin ; but 
 it is enough to us to put, that the same substance is now quick 
 and now dead, and now seed and now fruit ; and so that substance 
 that is now a wheat corn must needs die before that it is made 
 grass, and sith be made an whole ear. And thus speaketh holy 
 writ and no man can disprove it. Error of freres in this matter is 
 not here to rehearse, for it is enough to tell how they err in belief. 
 
 This, of course, is very far from contemptible ; indeed, 
 it is distinctly good. Still, we can as distinctly perceive 
 the man thinking in Latin and translating as closely as 
 he can. Even the English order he does not always 
 keep, as in the last sentence, " Error of freres," etc. 
 " The which is more ready in Latin " is a phrase of 
 further reach than its author intended. 
 
 If any one wishes to appreciate further the value of 
 the translations of the Bible by Wyclif and his followers * 
 as regards English prose style and rhythm, the process 
 is facilitated for him by Bosworth's parallel edition of 
 the Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Wyclifian Gospels, with 
 Tyndale's to fill the fourth place. The enormous advance 
 made by the latter must be, in fairness, postponed till 
 we come to its luckless author ; and with Ulphilas we 
 
 1 The distribution of the work between Wyclif, Hereford, Purvey, etc., 
 would, in any case, hardly concern us much ; but as the gospels are almost 
 item. con. attributed to the Master himself, it becomes practically irrelevant. 
 But Purvey did certainly improve on that master's rhythm. The great edition 
 of Forshall and Madden must, of course, be consulted by any one who wants to 
 investigate the subject ; but there are excellent specimens in Morris and Skeat, 
 the latter of whom has also reprinted Job and the Psalms (Clarendon Press).
 
 60 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 have nothing to do. But I have inserted the Vulgate, 
 from which, beyond all question, the Wyclifian version is 
 a remarkably uninspired (or ^-inspired) but direct and 
 pretty slavish version, distinctly inferior to the Anglo- 
 Saxon. This is how the three give the Parable of the 
 Sower, St. Luke viii. 5-8 : 
 
 The trans- Anglo-Saxon. Sum man his sded sedw. Dd he Saet seow, sum 
 lation of the f eo u w jg g one we g ? an( j we ar]? fortreden, and heofones fugulas hit 
 frtaeon. 
 
 And sum feoll ofer Saene stan, and .hit forscranc, foroam oe hit 
 wsetan naefde. 
 
 And sum feoll on 5a }x>rnas, and 5a ]?ornas . . . hyt forbrysmodon. 
 And sum feoll on gode eorban, and worhte hundfealdne wsestm. 
 Dd clypode he and cwse]?, Gehyre, se Se earan haebbe. 
 
 Vulgate. Exiit qui seminat, seminare semen suum ; et dum 
 seminat, aliud cecidit secus viam, et conculcatum est, et volucres 
 coeli comederunt illud. 
 
 Et aliud cecidit supra petram ; et natum aruit quia non habebat 
 humorem. 
 
 Et aliud cecidit inter spinas ; et simul exortae spinae suffocaverunt 
 illud. 
 
 Et aliud cecidit in terram bonam ; et ortum fecit fructum 
 centuplum. Haec dicens clamabat, " Qui habet aures audiendi, 
 audiat." 
 
 Wyclif. He that sowith, 3ede out for to sowe his seed. And 
 the while he sowith, sum felde by sydis the weye, and was defoulid, 
 and briddis of the eyr eeten it. 
 
 And another felde doun on a stoon, and it sprungen vp dryede, 
 for it hadde not moisture. 
 
 And anothir felde doun among thornes, and the thornes sprungen 
 vp to gidere strangliden it. 
 
 And another felde doun in to good erthe, and it sprungen vp 
 made an hundrid foold fruit. He seyinge thes thingis criede, He 
 that hath eeris of heeringe, heere he. 
 
 This last is " the vernacular " with a vengeance a 
 mere slavish rendering, of word for word and construction 
 for construction, out of the Latin. The man does not 
 see the awkwardness, in the English context, of " he that 
 soweth," and it never enters into his head that if you 
 must keep this Latin, " There has gone out he who 
 soweth " will be the thing. So also he does not dare 
 to get out of the tense of seminat, as the Anglo-Saxon 
 translator had done, and as Tyndale and his followers
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 61 
 
 did later. " Defoulid " is interesting as a word, because 
 it exhibits the confusion between the English " foul " (to 
 " dirty ") and the French " fouler " (to " tread under foot ") ; 
 but for that reason it lacks the vividness of " fortreden " 
 and " conculcatum " and our later English, and gives a 
 weaker idea. The intrusive and suspended participles, 
 " sprungen up," are ugly Latin aliens, but Wyclif or his 
 man had not the sense to avoid them as his Old English 
 predecessor and his Tudor follower had. The whole thing 
 misses fire ; and the only part that has a satisfactory 
 rhythm is the first verse, which itself is not superexcellent. 
 A much better example is to be found in the Sermons 
 paraphrase of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. But 
 those who care to do so should compare it with the 
 actual (and far inferior) translation, to be found most 
 easily in Bagster's English Hexapla (London, 1841), or in 
 Bosworth and Waring's four- version Gospels, 3rd edition 
 (London, 1888). 
 
 Luke saith that Christ told how a man had two sons ; and the 
 younger of them said unto his father, Father, give me a portion 
 of the substance that falleth me. And the father de-parted him his 
 goods. And soon after this young son gathered all that fell to him, 
 and went forth in pilgrimage into a far country ; and there he wasted 
 his goods, living in lechery. And after that he had ended all 
 his goods, there fell a great hunger in that land, and he began to 
 be needy. And he went out and cleaved to one of the citizens of 
 that country, and this citizen sent him into his town to keep swine. 
 And this son coveted to fill his belly with these holes ["hulls," 
 "^husks "] that the hogs eat, and no man gave him. And he, 
 turning again, said, How many hinds in my father's house be full 
 of loaves, and I perish here for hunger. I shall rise, and go to my 
 father, and say to him, Father, I have sinned in Heaven and before 
 thee ; now I am not worthy to be cleped thy son, make me as one 
 of thy hinds. And he rose and came to his father. And yet 
 when he was far, his father saw him, and was moved by mercy, 
 and running against his son, fell on his neck and kissed him. 
 And the son said to him, Father, I have sinned in Heaven and 
 before thee ; now I am not worthy to be cleped thy son. And 
 the father said to his servants anon, Bring ye forth the first stole, 
 and clothe ye him, and give ye a ring in his hand, and shoon 
 upon his feet. And bring ye a fat calf, and slay him, and eat we, 
 and feed us ; for this son of mine was dead, and is quickened 
 again, and he was perished, and is found. And they began to 
 feed him. And his elder son was in the field ; and when he came
 
 62 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 and was nigh the house, he heard a symphony and other noise of 
 minstrelsy. And this elder son cleped one of the servants, and 
 asked what were these things. And he said to him, Thy brother 
 is come, and thy father hath slain a fat calf, for he hath received 
 him safe. But this elder son had disdain and would not come in ; 
 therefore, his father went out, and began to pray him. And he 
 answered, and said to his father, Lo, so many years I serve to 
 thee, I passed never thy mandement ; and thou gavest me never 
 a kid, for to feed me with my friends. But after that he, this thy 
 son hath murthered his goods with hooris is come, thou hast 
 killed to him a fat calf. And the father said to him, Son, thou 
 art ever more with me, and all my goods be thine. But it was 
 need to eat and to make merry, for he this thy brother was dead, 
 and liveth again ; he was perished, and is found. 
 
 This is, of course, excellent ; but its excellence is due 
 to the fact that the writer has not merely kept as close 
 as possible to the Vulgate order, but has also availed 
 himself of the old English style of narrative plainness eo 
 often noted. 
 
 Trevisa. Trevisa is not much more of a definite " man of 
 letters " than Wyclif, perhaps not so much ; but he is of 
 greater importance in the history of prose style, and so (to 
 a lesser degree) in that of prose rhythm, because of his 
 important rehabilitation of English as a vehicle of prose 
 history. When Robert Manning, at the beginning of the 
 century, followed his namesake of Gloucester in restoring 
 the language as a medium of historical communication, 
 he also confined himself to verse ; when Trevisa towards 
 the end translates Higden, he ventures prose. Nor is his 
 matter of the bare chronicle kind. He finds or makes 
 occasion for discussion of the products of the country, 
 of its dialects, of such things as the educational changes 
 referred to above : and all this not only enables but obliges 
 him to use a considerable number of new words. These 
 words he arranges in good, straightforward fashion, but 
 without any special character in its ordonnance or rhythm. 
 Yet history will in time, and no long time, take care to 
 make these things also her own. 1 
 
 Sir John But when we turn from Wyclif and Trevisa to Chaucer 
 
 Mandeville. 
 
 1 It does not seem necessary to give a second example after that provided 
 earlier (v. sup. pp. 56, 57).
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 63 
 
 and Mandeville, then, once more, in the ever happy words 
 of that beloved physician and good Jacobite John Byrom, 
 " God bless us all ! it's quite another thing ! " We shall 
 finish with Chaucer, because, though his prose work may 
 not be attractive to the general, it is curiously various in 
 character and subject, and has, as it seems to the present 
 writer, been strangely undervalued as prose. Nobody 
 whose opinion is good for anything has ever undervalued 
 Mandeville as a writer. But, even as a writer, the atten- 
 tion which has been paid to him has too often been 
 diverted unduly to his matter, and to questions connected 
 with it which have for us absolutely no importance what- 
 ever. The sources of the compilation (as it pretty clearly 
 is) concern us not in the very least. The identity of the 
 compiler concerns us, if it were possible, less. That it 
 was originally written in French or Latin (probably 
 French), and that our " Mandeville," though purporting 
 to come from an English writer, is a mere translation, 
 matters, if at all, as a minus-quantity in formidable in- 
 feriority to zero. Even if there had been a real English 
 Sir John, and if he wrote (as apparently somebody did) 
 before or about the middle of the fourteenth century, he 
 would have almost certainly written in French or Latin, 
 and all our English prose of the later part is more or less 
 translation. Nor further, while giving all possible thanks 
 to Mr. Nicholson and to Colonel Yule, to Mr. Warner 
 and Mr. Pollard, need we trouble ourselves with " C " 
 and " E " and the probably older version which used to 
 be printed in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth 
 centuries. The point for us is the way in which the 
 English translator or translators, whoever he was or who- 
 ever they were, " put on helmets of gold, to follow Sir 
 John," as the Danish ballad says. 
 
 There are not many more readable books for subject 
 and manner combined ; but the secrets of the manner are 
 neither numerous nor complicated. Except in the most 
 indirect fashion, there is no need to go to " French 
 culture " to explain the English Mandeville's method, even 
 if the book which we call by his name is itself a straight
 
 64 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 translation from a French original. I have sometimes 
 felt inclined to get a rubber stamp manufactured with the 
 words "Translation of Form is Impossible," or something 
 of the kind, and impress it at hazard on the margins of 
 the " copy " of this book, that the printer may reproduce 
 it and keep it before readers constantly, in season and out 
 of season. On the whole, one may say that Sir John's 
 style is that of the better but simpler class of verse 
 romance dismetred, freed from rhyme, and from the 
 expletives which were the curse of rhymed verse romance 
 itself; but arranged for the most part in very short 
 sentences, introduced (exactly like those of a child telling 
 stories) by " And." I open a page of Halliwell's edition 
 absolutely at random : the sentences are not quite so 
 short as they are sometimes, but there are eleven of them 
 in thirty-three lines of large and widely spaced priet ; 
 ten of which begin with " and," and the eleventh with 
 " also." l Every now and then, especially when he comes 
 to the choice things the " Lady of the Land," the 
 " Watching of the Sparhawk," the " Origin of Roses," the 
 " Valley of the Devil's Head " he sometimes expands his 
 sentences and makes them slightly more periodic, but 
 they are still rather cumulative than anything more. He 
 is most elaborate (and not unequal to his elaboration) in 
 the account of the Great Cham's court, and of that of 
 Prester John. But the real secret of his extraordinary 
 success is his positive mastery of the fact that for certain 
 purposes, and among them pure narration and description, 
 a simple " writing down " of simple conversational style 
 is the best device possible. And this is how he does it : 
 
 And some men say that in the Isle of Lango is yet the daughter 
 of Hippocrates, in form and likeness of a great dragon, that is a 
 hundred fathom of length, as men say : for I have not seen her. 
 And they of the Isles call her, Lady of the Land. And she lieth 
 in an old castle, in a cave, and sheweth twice or 'thrice in the year. 
 And she doth no harm to no man, but if men do her harm. And 
 she was thus changed and transformed, from a fair damsel, into 
 likeness of a dragon, by a goddess, that was cleped Diana. And 
 men say, that she shall so endure in that form of a dragon, unto 
 
 1 Compare the Wyclifite "Prodigal Son."
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 65 
 
 the time that a knight come, that is so hardy, that dare come to 
 her and kiss her on the mouth : and then shall she turn again to 
 her own kind, and be a woman again. But after that she shall 
 not live long. And it is not long since, that a knight of the 
 Rhodes, that was hardy and doughty in arms, said that he would 
 kiss her. And when he was upon his courser, and went to the 
 castle, and entered into the cave, the dragon lift up her head 
 against him. And when the knight saw her in that form so 
 hideous and so horrible, he fled away. And the dragon bare the 
 knight upon a rock, maugre his head ; and from that rock she 
 cast him into the sea : and so was lost both horse and man. And 
 also a young man, that wist not of the dragon, went out of a ship, 
 and went through the Isle, till that he came to the castle, and 
 came in to the cave, and went so long till that he found a chamber, 
 and there he saw a damsel that combed her head, and looked in 
 a mirror ; and she had much treasure about her, and he trowed, 
 that she had been a common woman, that dwelled there to receive 
 men to folly. And he abode, till the damsel saw the shadow of 
 him in the mirror. And she turned her toward him, and asked 
 him, what he would. And he said, he would be her leman or 
 paramour. And she asked him if that he were a knight. And 
 he said, nay. And then she said that he might not be her leman : 
 but she bade him go again unto his fellows, and make him knight, 
 and come again upon the morrow, and she should come out of the 
 cave before him, and then come and kiss her on the mouth, and 
 have no dread ; " for I shall do thee no manner of harm, albeit 
 that thou see me in likeness of a dragon. For though thou see 
 me hideous and horrible to look on, I do thee to witness, that it 
 is made by enchantment. For without doubt, I am none other 
 than thou seest now, a woman ; and therefore dread thee nought. 
 And if thou kiss me, thou shall have all this treasure, and be my 
 lord, and lord also of all that isle." And he departed from her and 
 went to his fellows to ship, and let make him knight, and came 
 again upon the morrow, for to kiss this damsel. And when he 
 saw her come out of the cave, in form of a dragon, so hideous and 
 so horrible, he had so great dread, that he fled again to the ship ; 
 and she followed him. And when she saw that he turned not 
 again, she began to cry, as a thing that had much sorrow : and 
 then she turned again, into her cave ; and anon the knight died. 
 And since then, hitherwards, might no knight see her, but that he 
 died anon. But when a knight cometh, that is so hardy to kiss 
 her, he shall not die ; but he shall turn the damsel into her right 
 form and kindly shape, and he shall be lord of all the countries 
 and isles abovesaid. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to do more (in commenting on 
 this) than draw attention to the fact, natural at the time, 
 that this, beautiful as it is, is only half or, not to seem 
 
 F
 
 66 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 ungrateful, let us say three-quarters prose. It is too 
 versicular too much separated into batches like Osstan, 
 and Blake, and Whitman. But the batches themselves 
 are fairly prose-harmonised, for there was as yet no verse 
 harmony sufficiently fixed upon English to impress itself 
 unduly, and so the development of prose was helped. 
 
 Chaucer. The way in which Chaucer's prose has usually been 
 
 treated is a curious illustration of one " way of the world " 
 generally. There is nothing of which what may be called 
 the communis non-sensus is more jealous than of success 
 by the same man in different lines ; and though this 
 tendency is to some extent neutralised by one of the 
 commonplaces which spring from common sense and 
 temper common nonsense to wit, that good poets are 
 generally good prose-writers it is not quite neutralised 
 thereby. And so we find a rather general tendency to 
 dismiss the prose wellings of the well undefiled as .a kind 
 of waste overflow to be apologised for, or at best patron- 
 isingly dismissed, before turning to the real thing, the 
 poetry. I shall endeavour to show that this is unjust, 
 and to indicate the nature and causes of the injustice. 
 
 His various There is, of course, no doubt that Chaucer's matter (by 
 se pieces, ^j^ a f ter a jj j ninety-nine people out of a hundred 
 judge) is, in all his prose pieces, comparatively uninter- 
 esting ; that it is glaringly so beside that of Mandeville 
 for the general reader ; and that it appeals to far fewer 
 specialists than that of Wyclif or even of Trevisa. The 
 De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius is a most inter- 
 esting book for the historical and comparative student of 
 literature ; but he is not exactly in a majority of the 
 population, and for him Chaucer's translation only shares 
 its interest with the original and the various other versions, 
 from Alfred's prose in the ninth century, and the unknown 
 Provencal's verse in the tenth, to Queen Elizabeth's 
 attempt in the sixteenth. After the very attractive 
 opening (which those who do know it generally know 
 at best in extract) the Astrolabe has no interest at all 
 for any but the small minority of scientific people who 
 are not Philistines enough to despise "science out of
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 67 
 
 date." The Tale of Melibee is, it must be admitted, of 
 a quite portentous dulness ; he who writes these words, 
 and who can read almost everything, doubts very much 
 whether, short as it is, he ever read it quite and straight 
 through until he braced himself up to the task for this 
 book. The Parson's Tale, though not quite so assommant 
 in substance, is not specially delightful ; and, but for its 
 autobiographic close, might seem, even to a diligent but 
 not quite expert reader, a mere belated example of the 
 stuff that we saw so plentifully in the last chapter. 1 
 
 But to students of prose rhythm, as of prose style Their some- 
 generally, these four books or booklets have or ought to 
 have, if they seem at times to have missed exercising it 
 in a most surprising manner distinct and strong attraction, 
 both in themselves and still more in reference to what 
 has gone before. Indeed it is probably this very ignorance 
 of what has gone before which has stood in the way of 
 appreciation, especially when we take it in connection with 
 the fact that there is, as has been said, next to nothing 
 in Chaucer's matter to attract readers. People have 
 accidentally or purposely taken up Mandeville, and been 
 caught at once by his charm ; they have gone to Wyclif 
 as to an important historical character, a " Protestant 
 hero," or something else unliterary, and have been sur- 
 prised to find his prose not so bad; but they generally 
 jump the prose Canterbury Tales, and they do not want 
 to know about Astrolabes, or to be consoled in the 
 Boethian manner. 
 
 Let us, for reasons which will appear of themselves, The Parson's 
 take the four works in reverse order, 2 chronologically Tale ~ 
 speaking, and begin with the Parson's Tale. It is, as we 
 have said, on an exact line certainly with most, probably 
 with all, of the works reviewed in the last chapter that 
 
 1 The idea that in this tale Chaucer was burlesquing contemporaries or 
 predecessors is an unhappy one. His humour was wide-ranging, almost 
 ubiquitous ; but this was not a form that it was wont, or was likely, to take in 
 such matter. 
 
 2 Of course this order which is reversed is to some extent conjectural. 
 But it is founded on some warranty of scripture and more of reason which 
 cannot always be said of such things.
 
 68 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 is to say, it is a more or less close translation of a French 
 or a Latin original, or of originals both Latin and French. 
 It has the same necessary abundance of scriptural 
 quotation to colour style as well as thought ; the same 
 prevalence of stock-subject and even stock-language ; the 
 same generally hortatory purpose distinguishing it from 
 narrative, discussion, description, and the other more 
 purely literary kinds. It could therefore hardly, unless 
 Chaucer had taken the bit in his teeth and become 
 mainly original in which case he would probably have 
 run away in verse, be other than a new exercise on the 
 old pattern. But I am much mistaken if that pattern is 
 not dealt with after a distinctly altered fashion. In the 
 first place, the contemporary, and beyond all reasonable 
 doubt the student to some extent, if not the disciple, oi 
 Wyclif, being at the same time the most expert man 
 alive at catching up and adapting literary forms and sug- 
 gestions, could hardly fail to exhibit something of that 
 logical-rhetorical connection of sentence and argument 
 which is perhaps Wyclif's one real contribution to English 
 prose. In the second, he could hardly fail himself to 
 contribute to his individual sentence that new " well- 
 girtness," that alert selection and disposition of vocabulary 
 and phrase, which did him such yeoman's service in his 
 verse. It is true that the application of these often leaves 
 the piece little better than a Wyclifite tract on one side, 
 or a pious but uninspired exhortation on the other ; but 
 (especially at beginning and end) they do raise it somewhat 
 out of this, while the genuineness of the coda might be 
 proved by style alone. But certainly if Chaucer had left 
 no prose save this Tale, the common estimate of him as a 
 prose writer would have little that is unjust in it. 
 
 In the coda itself occur two of those curious and 
 interesting waifs of blank verse 
 
 And many a song and many a lecherous lay, 
 
 And grant me grace of very penitence, 
 
 The Tale of which are to count for so much, and at the same time to 
 be of such dangerous account, in English prose henceforth.
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 69 
 
 But for more examples of these (as may be known to 
 some who do not know much else about the subject) we 
 must go backwards or onwards to the Tale of Melibee. 
 Gruesome thing as it is to read, it has this as a whole for 
 the mere casual observer, and still more for the student of 
 English prose, that in its beginning the author seems to 
 have got the swing of his " riding rhyme " so thoroughly 
 in his head that, though completely eschewing rhyme 
 itself, he cannot avoid metre. Why the Host, who, with 
 the apparent approval of the company, had cut short the 
 very promising and delightful parody of Sir Thopas, 
 should, even in deference to the courteous and piteous 
 request of the poet 
 
 And lat me tellen al my tale, I pree 
 
 have (apparently with the same approval) forborne all objec- 
 tion to, and even intimated some admiration of, Melibeus, 
 is one of the Chaucerian lesser mysteries, not unfathom- 
 able perhaps, but not to be solved in any one fashion 
 that can be taken as certain, and of course irrelevant 
 here. 
 
 In point of form, however (though it also presents 
 something of a problem there), the difficulty is not con- 
 siderable, though the fact is most interesting. The Tale 
 opens with a batch of almost exactly cut blank verse lines 
 with a sequence, that is to say, of rhythmical clauses 
 which is, almost as it stands, an example of Shakespearian 
 blank verse, lengthened and shortened at discretion, as 
 thus: 
 
 A young | man called | Melibe|us, might |y and rich, | begat its blank 
 
 Upon | his wife, | that calljed was | Prudence, verse. 
 
 A daughter which | that call|ed was | Sophie. 
 
 Upon | a day | befell 
 
 That he for his | disport | is went | into 
 
 The field | es him | to play. 
 
 His wife | and eke | his daughter hath | he left 
 
 Inwith | his house, | of which | the dorjes werjenfast | yshette. 
 
 Three of | his old|e foes | it han | espyed . . . 
 
 After this the run is more broken, but the cadence 
 occurs scatteredly for some pages, as follows :
 
 70 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Prudence, | his wife, | as far | forth as | she durst, 
 Besought | him of | his weep (ing for | to stint 
 
 For which | resoun | this nojble wife | Prudence 
 Suffered | her hus|band for | to weep | and cry 
 As for | a cerjtain space : | and when | she saw 
 
 This Mel|ibee | answered | anon | and said, | 
 
 "What man," | quoth he, | "should of j his weep | ing stint 
 
 That hath | so great | a caus|e for | to weep. 
 
 And I could add dozens more, though they become less 
 numerous and less consecutive as the Tale goes on. 
 
 Now the explanation of this curious phenomenon is, 
 I think, not very far to seek. There is not the slightest 
 probability that it is the case of Layamon over again, only 
 in more surprising circumstances that Chaucer is really 
 trying to write blank verse a hundred and fifty years, or 
 so before Surrey, but cannot keep it up. Any logic which 
 could lead to such a conclusion would be the logic of Bake- 
 spearism. The only unrhymed verse he could have known 
 was alliterative and unmetred (a scheme which he dis- 
 tinctly eschewed) or else allied with totally different metres. 
 
 On the other hand, there is nothing more natural than 
 that a man who has an exquisite ear for rhythm, who has 
 been writing thousands and almost tens of thousands of 
 five-foot iambics for years past, and who is endeavouring 
 to write somewhat elaborate prose, should let it, perhaps 
 not at first quite consciously, run into the mould most 
 familiar to his brain. As he goes on he either finds the 
 attempt too troublesome or (which is on the whole more 
 likely) finds the effect disagreeable and drops it though, 
 as a matter of fact, he cannot avoid falling into it again 
 and again : 
 
 And this | same Sojlomon | saith af|terward 
 
 That by | the sorrow |ful vi|sage of | a man 
 
 The fool | correct | eth and | amend[e]th | himself. 
 
 Nor is Melibee deficient in interest, from the same point 
 of view, as a fairly elaborate attempt, though in the most 
 dreary material, to tell a tale in prose a thing which, 
 outside of the stories with which preachers embellished
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 71 
 
 their sermons, was not yet common. But its chief value 
 is as an experiment (conscious or unconscious) in an 
 obvious, a never entirely abandoned, but, on the whole, a 
 mistaken, attempt to adorn prose by calling in the direct 
 aid of metre. And when it is remembered that this 
 attempt of itself impresses and expresses the change of 
 generally dominant rhythm from trochaic to iambic, it 
 may seem hardly extravagant to call it immense in its 
 consequences and its symptomatic value. 1 
 
 The Astrolabe treatise could not give us very much, The 
 but it gives us something more than a little. As the 
 bulk of it consists in strictly practical and indeed 
 mechanical rules, put as shortly and simply as possible 
 for the instruction of a child, nothing but clearness could 
 or ought to be expected from its style ; and it is, no 
 doubt, translated pretty closely be it from Messahala, 
 be it from another. But, even as our first practical 
 scientific treatise by an accomplished man of letters in 
 English, it must count, and for the sake of its admirable 
 exordium it must count still more. This has escaped 
 notice less than almost any other piece of Chaucer's 
 prose ; and it certainly exhibits, more than any other, 
 that astonishing ease which distinguishes his verse. The 
 archaisms in it are exceedingly few, and the construction 
 flows with an urbane and well-bred mean between mere 
 colloquialism and elaborate rhetoric which reminds one of 
 the best French or English examples of the late seven- 
 teenth and earlier eighteenth century, but which does not 
 remind the present writer of any French prose before a 
 period considerably later than Chaucer's. 
 
 Little Lewis, my son, I have perceived well by certain evidences 
 thine ability to learn sciences touching numbers and proportions ; 
 and as well consider I thy busy prayer in special to learn the 
 treatise of the astrolabe. Then, forasmuch as a philosopher saith, 
 he wrappeth him in his friend that condescendeth to the rightful 
 
 1 It ought not to be lost sight of that Chaucer makes the same mistake 
 (naturally enough) that Surrey and all the early dramatic and other blank 
 versers made, that of keeping to the single-moulded line. The devices whereby 
 Mr. Ruskin used and almost abused blank verse in prose to no fatal effect, and 
 even to great advantage, were necessarily hidden from a first experimenter.
 
 72 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 prayers of his friend, therefore have I given thee a sufficient astrolabe 
 as for our horizon, compounded after the latitude of Oxenford, upon 
 which by mediation of this little treatise, I purpose to teach thee a 
 certain number of conclusions appertaining to the same instrument. 
 I say a certain of conclusions, for three causes. The first cause is 
 this ; trust well that all the conclusions that have been found, or else 
 possibly might be found in so noble an instrument as an astrolabe, 
 be unknown perfectly to any mortal man in this region, as I suppose. 
 Another cause is this ; that soothly in any treatise of the astrolabe 
 that I have seen there be some conclusions that will not in all things 
 perform their behests. And some of them be too hard to thy 
 tender age of ten year to conceive. 
 
 The But by far the most interesting piece that Chaucer 
 
 tus ' has left for our purpose is his most considerable and very 
 probably his earliest the translation of the Boethian 
 Consolation of Philosophy. It happened, most fortunately, 
 that the original is a mosaic of verse and prose in alternate 
 instalments ; and more fortunately still, that Chaucer o*id 
 not attempt, with one external exception, 1 to translate the 
 metra into verse. Those who have regretted that he did 
 not have surely been most short-sighted. Translations of 
 verse in verse are, very frequently, not worth the paper 
 they are written on ; become of supreme value scarcely 
 once in a hundred years ; and in almost every case, when 
 written by a poet, take the place of something that would 
 have been of much greater value. But verses of the more 
 ambitious kind and the metra of Boethius are nearly 
 always that, and not seldom justify the ambition of their 
 writer necessitate, if they are not to be simply tortured 
 or travestied, a certain height of style in the prose which 
 is to render them. Now about 1380, shortly after which 
 date the English Boethius was probably composed, an 
 English Longinus might have overhauled all Middle 
 English prose writing without finding any " height of 
 style " anywhere. He must have gone back to Anglo- 
 Saxon and yElfric to find anything like that ; and the 
 sources of it, which had been open to ^Ifric, were now 
 
 closed to a writer of the modern tongue ; though much 
 
 
 
 1 The piece called "The Former Age," which, for the last half century, 
 has been included among the Minor Poems, and which is, in part at least, a 
 version of Bk. ii. Met. v.
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 73 
 
 more splendid and abundant springs were waiting for 
 him to tap them. 
 
 The extreme sensitiveness of ear to such cadences as 
 he knew, which we have noted in the Meliboeus, shows 
 itself at first in the Boethius, also and still more curiously. 
 At the close of the first metrum occurs what is * un- 
 doubtedly an echo of the elegiac metre of the original. 
 But this must have been simply an accidental retention 
 of rhythm in an ear abnormally gifted with the power not 
 merely of recognising but of recording it. That was only 
 the way not to do it. 
 
 But the way to do it was not far off; and Chaucer 
 soon struck into that way. My favourite example of his 
 proficiency has always been the Fifth Metrum of the 
 First Book, O stelliferi conditor orbis. The Latin and the 
 English appear side by side below, and will give a good 
 example of the manner in which Chaucer rises to the 
 difficulty of vocabulary. But the beautiful Quisquis 
 composite serenus aevo, which precedes it, has an English 
 representative which is even better for our purpose, 
 because it is, as a whole, worth studying by itself, and 
 not mainly as a translation. 
 
 stelliferi conditor orbis, O thou maker of the wheel 
 Qui perpetuo nixus solio that beareth the stars, which that 
 Rapido caelum turbine versas, art y-fastened to thy perdurable 
 Legemque pati sidera cogis, chair, and turnest the heaven 
 Ut nunc pleno lucida cornu with a ravishing sweigh, and 
 Solis fratris et obvia flammis constrainest the stars to suffer thy 
 Condat Stellas Luna minores. law ; so that the moon some time 
 
 shining with her full horns, with 
 all the beams of the sun her 
 brother, hideth the stars that be 
 less. 
 
 1 I do not wish to repeat the argument stated in Hist. Pros. i. pp. 8-10. 
 
 1 shall only say that the reproduction in 
 
 O ye, my friendes, what or whereto avaunted ye me to be weleful ? 
 
 For he that hath fallen stood not in stedfast degree, 
 of the rhythm of 
 
 Quid me felicem toties jactastis amici, 
 
 Qui cecidit stabili non erat ille gradu. 
 
 admits, to my mind, of no dispute. (The hexameters of the A.V., though 
 undoubted curiosities, are still purer accidents, needing no notice here. )
 
 74 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Whoso | it be | that is clear | of virtue, | sad, | and well ordinal 
 of living, | that hath put | under foot | the proud words, j and looketh 
 upright | upon either fortune | he | may hold | his cheer | undis- 
 comfited. | The rage nor the menaces of the sea, commoving or 
 chasing upward heat from the bottom, ne shall not move that man ; 
 ne the unstable mountain that hight Vesevus, that writheth out 
 through his broken chiminees l smoking fire ; ne the way of thunder 
 light that is wont to smiten high towers, ne shall not move that man. 
 Whereto then, o wretches, dread ye tyrants that be wood and 
 felenous without any strength ? Hope after nothing nor dread 
 naught ; and so shalt thou disarm[en] the ire of this unmighty 
 
 tyrant. But who so that, | quaking, j dreadeth | or desireth | thing 
 that | nis not stable | of his right, | that man [ that so doth | hath 
 cast | away | his shield | and removed | from his place | and enlaceth 
 him | in the chain | with the which | he may be drawen. 
 
 The first of these indicates, it has been said, a fipe 
 choice of vocabulary and a command of stately phrase ; 
 but the second, as it seems to me, betrays something 
 higher and something more directly in a concatenation 
 with our enquiry. The hendecasyllabics of the original 
 are very good ; they show the power of that remarkable 
 metre for dignity as well as for the Catullian grace. 
 You might, with an ear so apt to catch an alien rhythm 
 as Chaucer's, keep it exactly as, with a single change of 
 word-place only, he does or could have done in 
 
 Fortujnamque tujens ujtramque | rectus. 
 And up | right upon | either | fortune | looketh. 
 
 But Chaucer avoids this throughout, and substitutes 
 throughout a grave prose clause-and-sentence order which 
 need not fear comparison with things much later and 
 better furnished with patterns. Suggestions have, I 
 believe, been made that he was indebted to French 
 versions as well as to the Latin original for his translation ; 
 and as far as the mere construing goes I should think 
 it not unlikely. But (as I have already had, and shall 
 have, frequently to remind readers) French prose order 
 will give very little help indeed for English composition ; 
 
 1 Chimzhees in original, nearer French, and slightly varying, though not 
 really altering, the rhythm.
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 75 
 
 on the contrary, the more you keep it the worse your 
 translation will be, and the less you keep it the better. 
 Such a repetition of which there is no suggestion in the 
 
 Latin as " ne shall not move that man " may be regarded 
 from different points of view as an ornament, and as a 
 blemish ; and some might prefer " smoking fires " moved 
 back to a place before " through his," etc. But the last 
 sentence, as scanned and divided above, is, I venture to 
 think, a very fine English sentence indeed, and one of 
 which no English prose writer of the greater clans, from 
 Hooker to Cardinal Newman, need be ashamed ; while 
 the dochmiac for clause-ending in " undiscomfited " could 
 not have been surpassed if Chaucer had been " doing it on 
 
 purpose." " Hope | after nothing | nor dread | naught " 
 is similarly complete in its larger way. With such a 
 diploma-piece it is Chaucer who may claim the fatherhood 
 of English rhythmical prose, much more securely than 
 that of English metrical poetry. And I have begun the 
 process of regular foot-analysis with him accordingly. 
 
 The contribution to prose form thus made at the close The fifteenth 
 of the fourteenth century has, therefore, been somewhat ce 
 undervalued or misvalued generally; the much -abused 
 and belaboured fifteenth has had the blows and bad 
 language usually bestowed upon its poetry a little softened 
 in respect of its prose. Mr. Earle, always enthusiastic 
 when he saw his opportunity, perceived in it once more 
 " a great era of prose," " prose mature and excellent," 
 " an elevated position in the history of English prose," 
 " the second time [the tenth was the first] when the 
 language has reached what may be described as a 
 summit, a stage of perfection." I could only subscribe 
 to this in respect of Malory and (borrowing l a little from 
 the sixteenth) of part of Berners. But I should myself 
 describe it as an age of most various and important 
 development in prose, which was not in the least 
 
 1 This borrowing is, in fact, almost always made by literary historians, 
 for both prose and verse, in regard to Skelton and Hawes, as well as to 
 Berners and Fisher.
 
 76 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Its real 
 importance. 
 
 Pecock and 
 the Represser. 
 
 " eclipsed," as Mr. Earle thought, by the prose of the 
 Renaissance, but, on the contrary, was a necessary stage 
 to that Renaissance prose itself. And, what is more, 
 the latter part of this stage was, to a great degree, what 
 we have never had since Old English, if then a 
 conscious one. 
 
 The widening and varying of the range and methods 
 of prose by its application to new subjects, which we 
 have seen beginning in the late fourteenth, now widens 
 and varies itself still more. In history the translation 
 (with a few original insets) of Trevisa is followed by a 
 series of really original or at least first-hand English 
 chroniclers, with Capgrave at their head, who, if they are 
 not yet historians, will teach their successors to be so. 
 The famous collection of the Paston Letters shows us 
 vernacular letter -writing one of the most powerful 
 instruments in the formation of general prose style in 
 full operation. The work of Sir John Fortescue intro- 
 duces to the same vernacular new subjects of the most 
 important kind law, what we may almost call political 
 economy, and their kindred matters. Above all, on the 
 serious side, we have the remarkable document one of 
 the most remarkable in the formal history of English 
 prose style of Pecock's Represser. 
 
 This book was written by an equally remarkable 
 person, whose faculty of making himself hated l was 
 probably not unconnected with a certain vigour and 
 originality of character, and who certainly was among 
 the most vigorous and original of writers in the older 
 English prose. The fact that his experiments were 
 
 1 That he was so at the time is certain. He has had vicissitudes since. 
 Although he attacked the Lollards, Foxe and other early Protestant writers 
 " took him up " as a victim of his brother bishops. When he came to be 
 thoroughly studied by an impartial editor, Babington, his levity of doctrine, 
 his self-seeking and other bad things, made themselves clear. ' But Mr. 
 James Gairdner rather champions him in his Paston Letters ; and I have seen 
 other recent attempts in the same way. He seems to me and I have paid 
 some attention to him to have been not unlike his later compatriot, 
 Archbishop Williams, a born "schemer" (Mr. S. R. Gardiner slipped the 
 word in his D.N.B. apology for Williams) and a very untrustworthy person 
 both in politics and religion, but one of great ability, in almost all ways, and 
 specially notable in English prose.
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 77 
 
 directed in the wrong way only gives him the greater 
 interest. The general principle of the Represser was to 
 carry the war into the enemy's country by using the 
 enemy's weapon. Wyclif, his immediate followers, and 
 the Lollards who carried his methods to furthest degrees 
 of exaggeration and extravagance, had employed the 
 vernacular, had " appealed to the people." But Wyclif, 
 who, though he could argue well enough, preferred, as was 
 natural, to argue in Latin for the most part, mainly 
 employed assertion and abuse in English ; and we may 
 be certain that the usual Lollard did this still more. 
 Now Pecock obviously wished to carry the whole 
 scholastic method of argument into English, and into 
 the service of his (at that time) dangerous attempt to 
 support authority by reason. In order to do this he 
 essayed the enormous task of transferring bodily the 
 argumentative style and method of the schoolmen, and 
 the technical terms of theology and philosophy, into the 
 vulgar tongue. The latter he effected by reviving the 
 Anglo-Saxon practice (which is sparingly observable 
 throughout the earlier Middle English period, but never 
 pursued on anything like his scale) of manufacturing 
 English compounds for those of Greek and Latin. 
 " Circumscription " is " about-writing " ; to " prevent " is 
 to " before-bar." But in the further part of his endeavour 
 he had to lift the elaborate Latin periodic clause and 
 sentence, with their intricate keyings and gearings of 
 accord between adjectives and substantives, relatives and 
 antecedents, nouns and verbs, into a language which had 
 already lost most of its inflexions, and was almost daily 
 losing more. Here is a passage or two : 
 
 Even as grammar and divinity be two diverse faculties and 
 cunnings, and therefore be unmeddled, and each of them hath his 
 proper to him bounds and marks, how far and no farther he shall 
 stretch himself upon matters, truths, and conclusions, and not to 
 entermete, neither entermeene, with any other faculty's bounds ; 
 and even as saddlery and tailory be two diverse faculties and 
 cunnings, and therefore be unmeddled, and each of them hath his 
 proper to him bounds and marks, how far and no farther he shall 
 stretch himself forth upon matters, truths, and conclusions, and
 
 78 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 not intercommune with any other craft or faculty in conclusions 
 and truths : so it is that the faculty of the said moral philosophy 
 and the faculty of pure divinity, or the Holy Scripture, be two 
 diverse faculties, each of them having his proper to him bounds 
 and marks, and each of them having his proper to him truths and 
 conclusions to be grounded in him, as the before -set six first 
 conclusions shew. 
 
 Of which first principal conclusion thus proved followeth further 
 this corollary, that whenever and wherever in Holy Scripture, or 
 out of Holy Scripture, be written any point or any governance of 
 the said law of kind, it is more verily written in the book of man's 
 soul than in the outward book of parchment or of vellum ; and if 
 any seeming discord be betwixt the words written in the outward 
 book of Holy Scripture and the doom of reason, writ in man's 
 soul and heart, the words so written withoutforth ought be ex- 
 pounded and be interpreted and brought for to accord with the 
 doom of reason in thilk matter ; and the doom of reason ought 
 not for to be expounded, glazed, interpreted, and brought for to 
 accord with the said outward writing in Holy Scripture of the 
 Bible, or aughtwhere else out of the Bible. Forwhy, when ever 
 any matter is treated by it which is his ground, and by it which 
 is not his ground, it is more to trust to the treating which is made 
 thereof the ground than by the treating thereof by it which is 
 not thereof the ground ; and if thilk two treatings ought not 
 discord, it followeth that the treating done by it which is not the 
 ground ought to be made for to accord with the treating which is 
 made by it the ground. And therefore this corollary conclusion 
 must needs be true. 
 
 His syntax. It will, of course, be obvious to everybody that if this 
 example of Pecock's had been followed we should have 
 been in more than danger of falling into the same slough 
 of despond into which Germany fell some centuries later, 
 and from which she was scarcely extracted till our own 
 days by Heine, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Pecock's 
 propositions are all perfectly logical ; they are disposed 
 with all the art, though with none of the lightness, of a 
 Socratic-Platonic dialogue ; the repetitions are defensible, 
 as showing a clear determination to leave no loophole 
 open ; and the compound phrases like " proper-to-him " 
 (sibi proprium} are just and exact equivalents of the Latin 
 in which beyond doubt the Bishop was thinking as he 
 wrote. But the total result is simply ghastly, and it is 
 eminently un-English. As to any harmonious adjustment
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 79 
 
 of rhythm, or indeed any distinct rhythm at all, being got 
 out of such a' farrago of technicalities, it is obviously 
 impossible. 
 
 The curious Anglifications of compounds do not appear His compound 
 in these passages ; indeed, as is again obviously natural, equiv 
 they appear only now and then sporadically as occasion 
 requires them, though a very long list could be drawn 
 up at need. But they could hardly in any case be 
 improvements, and there is an important general objection 
 to them which may not be so obvious. As was pointed 
 out above, the nascent advantages of the new tongue were 
 already, and were to be still more, due to the mingling of 
 Teutonic and Romance elements, and to the different 
 rhythmical values which distinguished them. By surrender- 
 ing Greek, Latin, and French words for merely " Saxon " 
 equivalents you remain possessed of the Saxon word- 
 rhythm only. We shall meet the objection to naturalising 
 foreign words in English again and again ; in fact, it is 
 quite lively to-day among many respectable folk. But 
 there is no doubt that it is to this perpetual admission of 
 new blood to the naturalising of words, often with 
 anglicised forms and generally with anglicised pronuncia- 
 tion, yet retaining something of the balance, the colour, 
 the rhythmical value of the original tongue that English 
 owes its unmatched richness and variety. 1 
 
 Nevertheless though it may be quite certain that 
 Pecock's immediate object was merely to convey his 
 meaning, and that the means which he adopted would 
 have been imitated by English prose generally at the 
 peril of loss of all style, and to certain destruction of 
 harmonious rhythm his writings still bear testimony to 
 an unconscious exploration and prospecting in the realms 
 of prose itself. 
 
 1 I remember once startling, or rather horrifying, a foreign man of letters 
 by saying that a language could not have too many synonyms or quasi- 
 synonyms for expressing the same idea. And one of the subsidiary excellences 
 of this diversity is that each of these synonyms will bring its different 
 rhythmical and acoustic colour for use on the ear-palette. The excellent 
 Mason (v. App. II.) saw this already before the middle of the eighteenth 
 century. The ever unfortunate "Revisers" of the Bible did not see it, 
 towards the end of the nineteenth.
 
 8o A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 How these writings can be described as " clear and 
 pointed in style," as they have been in the Dictionary of 
 National Biography, I profess myself humbly unable to 
 understand. It is quite true that there are sentences 
 which, to use a phrase of his own very context, " by great 
 cunning of preaching and by savoury uttering thereof" 
 might deserve such commendation. But again in the 
 same context occurs a sentence like this : 
 
 This is now said of me (God I take thereto into witness) for 
 harm which I have known come by default, and the unhaving and 
 the unknowing of this now said consideration, and for peril that 
 such harms should in time after here come, if of this consideration 
 no mention and warning were by me or by some other in writing 
 before made. 
 
 That is not absolutely despicable writing, but it is not 
 " clear and pointed " ; it is clumsy, and rather Latin than 
 English in general ordonnance. It is no shame to Pecock, 
 who would certainly have done much better later ; but it 
 should put him in his proper place and not out of it. 
 The Paston The special and direct interest of the famous Paston 
 Letters for our matter could not be great ; but they, like 
 the much duller stuff of Capgrave and others, still bear 
 indirectly upon it. The main interest and attraction of 
 the Letters themselves is that subtracting the large 
 amount of technical and documentary matter which could 
 not concern us they are genuine, direct, and unforced 
 utterances of private persons about their own affairs. 
 The alloy, if not of actual insincerity and " faking," yet 
 of a certain side-eye on a possible reader who is not the 
 person addressed an alloy present in nearly all the most 
 famous collections of letter - writing except perhaps 
 Cowper's, 1 is nowhere and could not possibly be anywhere 
 in them. Even such a man as William Botoner, Worcester 
 or Wyrcester 2 chronicler, and, as we should now put it, 
 professional man of letters, with the hankering after 
 
 1 And yet a poet so inevitably writes urbi et orbi, that some publicaturience 
 may unconsciously exist even in his familiar prose. 
 
 2 Not "William 0/" Worcester," as he is sometimes improperly called. In 
 that order of designation he was "William of Bristol."
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 81 
 
 French literature which is characteristic of the time, a 
 good liberal education, and what we may call fair scholar- 
 ship, does not " write book " any more than the notable 
 and really admirable Margaret Paston herself, though he 
 spells a little less wildly. But it is of almost the first im- 
 portance to remember that, at a very short time previously, 
 it is of the highest improbability that even one of these 
 Letters would have been written in English at all. They 
 would have been in French (as a few of them actually 
 are) or in Latin, as almost equally private letters of 
 Ascham's, for some part of his life, are nearly a century 
 later. And this handling " of all things and some others " 
 again in the written vernacular, could not but exercise its 
 effect on style, which is our wider, and prose -rhythm, 
 which is our narrower, subject. 
 
 In Pecock's younger contemporary, Caxton, on the 
 other hand, we find, perhaps for the first time, the 
 conscious research of style. Again and again he tells us 
 how, in that process of study and translation through 
 which he went before devoting himself to the great accom- 
 plishment of popularising, through the printing-press, 
 literature of the most diverse kinds in English, he had 
 been struck and daunted by the inferiority of his English 
 instrument, the difficulty of getting an adequate effect 
 out of it, and the superiority of the " fair language " of 
 French. Except his production (how Heaven knows) of 
 Malory, and his reproduction of Chaucer, nothing that 
 Caxton printed is of the first value intrinsically. But all 
 deserves the benefit of the definition of Goethe as to the 
 duty of the scholar, that " if he cannot accomplish he 
 shall exercise himself." And here at last he has the 
 further benefit of our knowledge, due to himself, that he 
 was exercising himself consciously. 
 
 It would not be exactly critical to say that these pains 
 of Caxton's own brought him great profit as a translator 
 from the point of view of style, or largely increased the 
 treasury and pattern-storehouse of accomplished English 
 prose. But they certainly show more than decent 
 accomplishment ; and by the variety of their subjects 
 
 G
 
 82 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 they must have exercised that subtle influence which has 
 been so much dwelt on, while their direct evidence of 
 conscious rhetorical study is invaluable. Moreover, for 
 one thing that he did, if only ministerially, Caxton cannot 
 be thanked too much or set too high. For the position 
 which the fifteenth century (with its, in literature, necessary 
 annexe of the first quarter or third of the sixteenth) bears 
 in the history of English prose, is due to three persons 
 Malory, Fisher, and Berners ; and the greatest of these 
 three is Malory ; and, so far as investigation has hitherto 
 gone, we should have known nothing of Malory but 
 for Caxton which thing, if the sins of printers and 
 publishers were twenty times as great even as they 
 seemed to the poet Campbell or to my late friend Sir 
 Walter Besant, let it utterly cancel and wash them 
 away. 
 
 Malory. I do not know (or at least remember) who the person 
 of genius was who first announced to the world that 
 Malory was " a compiler." The statement is literally 
 quite true (we may even surrender the Beaumains part 
 and wish the receivers joy of it) in a certain lower sense, and 
 exquisitely absurd as well as positively false in a higher. 
 But it does not directly concern us. The point is that this 
 compilator compilans conipilative in compilationibus com- 
 pilandis has, somehow or other, supplied a mortar of style 
 and a design of word-architecture for his brute material 
 of borrowed brick or stone, which is not only miraculous, 
 but, in the nature even of miraculous things, uncompilable 
 from any predecessor. Even if that single " French 
 book " which some have used against him from his own 
 expressions, were to turn up, as it has never turned up 
 yet, his benefit of clergy would still remain to him, for 
 no French originals will give English clerkship of this 
 kind and force. Moreover, as shall be more fully shown 
 and illustrated presently, he had certainly English as well 
 as French originals before him, and how he dealt with 
 one at least of these we can show confidently, and as 
 completely as if we had been present in Sir Thomas's 
 scriptorium, in the ninth year of the reign of King
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 83 
 
 Edward the Fourth, and he had kindly told us all 
 about it. 1 
 
 " Original " in the only sense that imports to us, His prose and 
 Malory can have had none except perhaps the unknown ^^Morte. 
 translator or author of " Mandeville," on whom he has 
 enormously improved. The idee mere of both styles an 
 idea of which in all probability both writers, and the 
 earlier almost certainly, were quite unconscious is the 
 " metring " without " #whythming " of the best kind of * 
 romance style, with its easy flow, its short and uncompli- 
 cated sentences, and its picturesque stock phrases freed 
 from verse- or rhyme -expletive and mere catchword. 
 But the process, in Malory's case, had better be illustrated 
 without further delay by comparison of the two passages 
 cited above, from Malory's Morte itself and the verse 
 Morte, which is almost certainly of the first half of the 
 century if not earlier, and the verbal identities in part of 
 which cannot be mere coincidence. 
 
 Abbess, to you I knowlache here, Through this man and me Guinevere's 
 
 That throw this elke man and me, hath all this war been wrought, la . st meeting 
 
 (For we to-gedyr han loved us and the death of the most noblest Wlth Lancelot - 
 
 dere), knights of the world ; for through 
 
 All this sorrowful war hath be ; our love that we have loved to- 
 
 My lord is slain that had no pere, gether is my most noble lord 
 
 And many a doughty knight and slain. Therefore, Sir Launcelot, 
 
 free. wit thou well I am set in such a 
 
 plight to get my soul's health ; 
 
 Ysett I am in suche a place, and yet I trust, through God's 
 
 1 It is difficult, or rather impossible, for those who have scant shelf-room 
 and a shallow purse to afford themselves many editions of the same book. 
 But as the Morte riP Arthur is, taking various sorts and elements of greatness 
 together, about the greatest book in Middle and early Modern English prose 
 next to the Authorised Version, I have tried to provide myself with most of 
 the modern editions, and have Southey's quartos ; the two little beloved but 
 badly printed sets (1816) in two and three duodecimos respectively ; Wright's 
 of 1858 ; Sir Edward Strachey's "Globe" edition of ten years later (rather 
 unnecessarily castrated and modernised, but undoubtedly good for general 
 use) ; Dr. Sommer's of 1889, giving a careful reproduction, scarcely elsewhere 
 to be found, of the original Caxton text, a great deal of learned apparatus 
 and Quellenforschung, and an interesting essay by Mr. Lang ; and that with 
 Sir John Rhys' introduction and Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations (2 vols. 
 4to, 1894). Of the variations in text the only considerable one is the 
 "Placebo and Dirige" 1 on Lancelot, which first appeared in Wynkyn de 
 Worde's edition of 1529, which is, however magnificent, rather more 
 rhetorical than the rest, and which may be later.
 
 84 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 My sowl& heal I will abide 
 Telle God send[e] me some 
 
 grace, 
 Through mercy of his woundes 
 
 wide, 
 
 After to have a sight of his face 
 At Doomsday on his right side : 
 Therefore, Sir Lancelot du Lake, 
 For my love I now thee pray 
 My company thou aye forsake, 
 And to thy kingdom thou take 
 
 thy way, 
 And keep thy realm from war 
 
 and wrack, 
 And take a wife with her to play ; 
 
 Unto God I pray, almighty king, 
 He give you together joy and 
 bliss. 1 
 
 grace, that after my death to 
 have a sight of the blessed face 
 of Christ, and at doomsday to 
 sit on his right side, for as sin- 
 ful as ever I was are saints in 
 heaven. Therefore, Sir Launce- 
 lot, I require thee and beseech 
 thee heartily, for all the love 
 that ever was betwixt us, that 
 thou never see me more in the 
 visage ; and I command thee on 
 God's behalf, that thou forsake my 
 company, and to thy kingdom 
 thou turn again and keep well 
 thy realm from war and wrack. 
 For as well as I have loved thee, 
 mine heart will not serve me to 
 see thee ; for through thee and 
 me is the flower of kings and 
 knights destroyed. Therefore, 
 Sir Launcelot, go to thy realm, 
 and there take thee a wife, and 
 live with her with joy and bliss, 
 and I pray thee heartily pray for 
 me to our Lord, that I may 
 amend my misliving. 
 
 Now here, it will be observed, the verse is emphatic- 
 ally " no great shakes." It is not so bad as the con- 
 temporary exercitations of the abominable Herry [sic] 
 Lonelich or Lovelich ; but it has a great deal of the ever- 
 recurring expletive, the flat and nerveless phrase, and 
 the slipshod rather than flowing movement of the worst 
 verse-romances. Still, it gives a fair " canvas," and this 
 Sir Thomas takes, not even disdaining the retention of a 
 few brighter stitches of his predecessor's, which he patches 
 in, not fearing but welcoming, and mustering them into 
 a distinct prose rhythm treating them, in fact, just as 
 
 1 Morte <f Arthur, Harl. 2252 ; ed. Furnivall (London and Cambridge, 
 1864), p. 148. It had been printed earlier (1819) for the Roxburghe Club, 
 and has been reprinted since (1903) by the E.E.T.S. with such alterations 
 as the separation of the text into octaves. The editor thinks that the 
 parallels with Malory are only such as must occur when two writers "are 
 following closely the same original." If this is the case, I know nothing of 
 criticism. It ought, however, perhaps, to be added that there are curious 
 differences of opinion as to the value of the poem itself. I cannot rank it 
 high ; but it is certainly better than Lonelich.
 
 IV 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 
 
 Ruskin does his doses of blank verse. And so, out of 
 the substance and the general procession of the verse, he has 
 woven a quite new rhythm, accompanying and modulating 
 graceful and almost majestic prose of the best type. 
 There had been nothing in English prose before like the 
 Queen's speech here ; and it had been manufactured, as 
 genius manufactures, out of a very commonplace web of 
 English verse. 
 
 The Lancelot dirge, as has been said, may be a later The Lancelot 
 composition, at a time when (v. inf.} definite rhetorical irge< 
 devices were attempted. It has at any rate no parallel 
 in the verse, though this deals with the actual scene. 
 But that, more famous than either of them, of the 
 " throwing of Excalibur," with its immensely interesting 
 addition of Tennyson's re-versing from Malory himself, 
 requires more notice. 
 
 The kynge tornyd hym there he 
 
 stode 
 To syr Bedwere, vf_yt/i wordys 
 
 kene, 
 " Have Excalaber, my swerd 
 
 good, 
 
 A better brond was neuyr sene, 
 Go, Caste it in the salt flode, 
 And thou shalt se wonder, as I 
 
 wene, 
 
 hye the faste, for crosse on Rode 
 And telle me what thou hast 
 
 ther sene." 
 The knyght was bothe hende 
 
 and free ; 
 To save that swerd he was fulle 
 
 glad, 
 And thought, whethyr I better 
 
 bee 
 
 yif neuyr man it After had ; 
 And I it caste in to the see, 
 Off mold was neuyr man so mad. 
 The swerd he hyd vndyr A tree, 
 And sayd, "syr, I ded as ye me 
 
 bad." 
 " What saw thow there ? " than 
 
 sayd the kynge, 
 " Telle me now, yiff thow can ; " 
 
 Therefore, said Arthur, take The Throwing 
 thou Excalibur, my good sword, of Excalibur. 
 and go with it to yonder water 
 side, and when thou comest 
 there, I charge thee throw my 
 sword in that water, and come 
 again, and tell me what thou 
 there seest. My lord, said 
 Bedivere, your commandment 
 shall be done, and lightly bring 
 you word again. So Sir Bedivere 
 departed, and by the way he be- 
 held that noble sword, that the 
 pommel and haft were all of 
 precious stones, and then he 
 said to himself, If I throw this 
 rich sword in the water, thereof 
 shall never come good, but harm 
 and loss. And then Sir Bedi- 
 vere hid Excalibur under a tree. 
 And as soon as he might he 
 came again unto the king, and 
 said he had been at the water, 
 and had thrown the sword into 
 the water. What sawest thou 
 there ? said the king. Sir, he 
 said, I saw nothing but waves 
 and winds. That is untruly
 
 86 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 " Series syr," he sayd, " nothynge 
 But watres depe, And wawes 
 
 wanne." 
 " A, now thou haste broke my 
 
 byddynge ! 
 Why haste thou do so, thow 
 
 false man ? 
 A-nother bode thou muste me 
 
 brynge." 
 Thanne careffully the knyght 
 
 forthe Ranne, 
 And thought the swerd yit he 
 
 wold hyde, 
 And keste the scauberke in the 
 
 flode, 
 " Yif Any Aventurs shalte be- 
 
 tyde, 
 There - by shalte I se tokenys 
 
 goode." 
 
 In-to the see hee lette the scau- 
 berke glyde ; 
 A whyle on the land hee there 
 
 stode ; 
 Than to the kynge he wente 
 
 that tyde 
 And sayd, " syr, it is done by 
 
 the Rode." 
 
 " Saw thow Any wondres more ?" 
 " Sertys syr, I saw nought." 
 " A ! false traytor," he sayd 
 
 thore, 
 "Twyse thou haste me treson 
 
 wroght ; 
 
 That shalk thow rew sely sore, 
 And be thou bold it shalbe 
 
 bought." 
 The knyght than cryed, " lord, 
 
 thyn ore," 
 And to the swerd[<F| sone he 
 
 sought. 
 Syr bedwere saw that bote was 
 
 beste, 
 
 And to the good swerde he wente ; 
 In-to the see he hyt keste ; 
 Than myght he see what that it 
 
 mente ; 
 There cam An hand, wyt^-outen 
 
 Reste, 
 
 said of thee, said the king ; 
 therefore go thou lightly again, 
 and do my command as thou 
 art to me lief and dear, spare 
 not, but throw it in. Then Sir 
 Bedivere returned again, and 
 took the sword in his hand ; 
 and then him thought sin and 
 shame to throw away that noble 
 sword ; and so eft he hid the 
 sword, and returned again, and 
 told to the king that he had 
 been at the water, and done his 
 commandment. What saw thou 
 there ? said the king. Sir, he 
 said, I saw nothing but the 
 waters wap and the waves wan. 
 Ah traitor, untrue, said king 
 Arthur, now hast thou betrayed 
 me twice. Who would haVe 
 wend that thou that hast been 
 to me so lief and dear, and thou 
 art named a noble knight, and 
 would betray me for the riches 
 of the sword. But now go again 
 lightly, for thy long tarrying 
 putteth me in great jeopardy of 
 my life, for I have taken cold. 
 And but if thou do now as I bid 
 thee, if ever I may see thee, I 
 shall slay thee with mine own 
 hands, for thou wouldest for my 
 rich sword see me dead. Then 
 Sir Bedivere departed, and went 
 to the sword, and lightly took it 
 up, and went to the water side, 
 and there he bound the girdle 
 about the hilts, and then he 
 threw the sword as far into the 
 water as he might, and there 
 came an arm and an hand above 
 the water, and met it, and caught 
 it, and so shook it tfirice and 
 brandished, and then vanished 
 away the hand with the sword 
 in the water. So Sir Bedivere 
 came again to the king, and 
 told him what he saw. Alas,
 
 IV 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 
 
 Oute of the water, And feyre it 
 
 hente, 
 And brandysshyd As it shuld 
 
 braste, 
 And sythe, as gleme, A-way it 
 
 glente. 
 To the kynge A-gayne wente 
 
 he thare 
 And sayd, " leve syr, I saw An 
 
 hand ; 
 Oute of the water it cam Alk 
 
 bare, 
 And thryse brandysshyd that 
 
 Ryche brande." 
 " helpe me sone that I ware 
 
 there." 
 
 he lede hys lord vnto that stronde ; 
 A ryche shippe wylh maste And 
 
 ore, 
 
 FulL? of ladyes there they fonde. 
 The ladyes, that were feyre and 
 
 Free, 
 Curteysly the kynge gan they 
 
 fonge, 
 And one, that bryghtest was of 
 
 blee, 
 
 Wepyd sore, and handys wrange, 
 " Broder," she sayd, " wo ys me ; 
 Fro lechyng hastow be to longe, 
 I wote that gretely greuyth me, 
 For thy paynes Ar full* stronge." 
 The knyght kest A rewfulte 
 
 rowne, 
 There he stode, sore and 
 
 vnsownde, 
 And say, "lord, whedyr Ar ye 
 
 bowne, 
 Alias, whedyr wylk ye fro me 
 
 fownde ? " 
 The kynge spake wyt/z A sory 
 
 sowne, 
 
 " I wylle wende A lytelk stownde 
 In to the vale of Avelovne, 
 A whyle to hele me of my 
 
 wounde." 
 
 We may indeed note here how this " compiler " suc- 
 ceeded, as to his mere matter, in compiling out Bedivere's 
 
 said the king, help me hence, 
 for I dread me I have tarried 
 over long. Then Sir Bedivere 
 took the king upon his back, 
 and so went with him to that 
 water side. And when they 
 were at the water side, even fast 
 by the bank hoved a little barge, 
 with many fair ladies in it, and 
 among them all was a queen, 
 and all they had black hoods, 
 and all they wept and shrieked 
 when they saw king Arthur. 
 Now put me into the barge, said 
 the king : and so he did softly. 
 And there received him three 
 queens with great mourning, and 
 so they set him down, and in 
 one of their laps king Arthur 
 laid his head, and then that 
 queen said, Ah, dear brother, 
 why have ye tarried so long 
 from me ? Alas, this wound on 
 your head hath caught over 
 much cold. And so then they 
 rowed from the land ; and Sir 
 Bedivere beheld all those ladies 
 go from him. Then Sir Bedi- 
 vere cried, Ah, my lord Arthur, 
 what shall become of me now 
 ye go from me, and leave me 
 here alone among mine enemies. 
 Comfort thyself, said the king, 
 and do as well as thou mayest, 
 for in me is no trust for to trust 
 in. For I will into the vale of 
 Avilion, to heal me of my griev- 
 ous wound. And if thou hear 
 never more of me, pray for my 
 soul.
 
 88 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 silly compromise of throwing the scabbard the second 
 time ; but still more the real things his fashion and 
 manner of style and treatment. These are weaker in 
 the verse than in the original of the Guinevere passage, 
 and he hardly takes anything literal in phrase, altering 
 importantly when he does take something, as in the feeble 
 expletive " deep." But he weaves the whole once more 
 into the most astonishing tissue of pure yet perfect prose 
 rhythm. That it takes but little, as Tennyson showed, 
 to make it once more into splendid verse of character as 
 different as possible from the bald shambling sing-song of 
 the early fifteenth-century man, is nothing against this. 
 That you can get some actual blank verse or fragments 
 of blank out of it is nothing again : 
 
 That hast been \un\io me so lief and dear . . . 
 
 And thou art named a noble knight ... 
 
 For thou wouldst for my rich sword see me dead . . . 
 
 For these (as such things in the right hands always do) 
 act as ingredients, not as separable parts. They colour 
 the rhythm, but they do not constitute it. They never 
 correspond with each other. 
 
 His devices. It is not, however, to the great show passages of " the 
 death and departing out of this world of them all," of the 
 Quest of the Graal, of the adventures of Lancelot and the 
 rest, that it is necessary to confine the search for proof of 
 Malory's mastery of style and rhythm. One general 
 symptom will strike any one who has read a fair amount 
 of the Morte from our point of view. There are plenty 
 of sentences in Malory beginning with " and " ; but it is 
 not the constant go-between and usher-of-all-work that it 
 is in Mandeville. The abundance of conversation gets 
 him out of this difficulty at once ; and he seems to have 
 an instinctive knowledge hardly shown before him, never 
 reached after him till the time of the great novelists of 
 j weaving conversation and narrative together. Bunyan, 
 and certainly most people before Bunyan's day, with 
 Defoe to some extent after him, seem to make distinct 
 gaps between the two, like that of the scenes of a play 
 to have now a piece of narrative, now one of definite
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 89 
 
 " Tig and Tiri " l drama. Malory does not. His narra- 
 tive order and his dialogue are so artistically adjusted that 
 they dovetail into one another. 2 Here is an instance, taken 
 entirely at hazard, not better than a hundred or a thou- 
 sand others, and perhaps not so good as some : 
 
 And with that came the damosel of the lake unto the king and 
 said, " Sir, I must speak with you in private." " Say on," said the 
 king, "what ye will." "Sir," said the lady, "put not on you this 
 mantle till ye have seen more, and in no wise let it come upon you 
 nor on no knight of yours till ye command the bringer thereof to put 
 it upon her." " Well," said King Arthur, " it shall be done as ye 
 counsel me." And then he said unto the damosel that came from his 
 sister, " Damosel, this mantle that ye have brought me I will see it 
 upon you." " Sir," said she, " it will not beseem me to wear a 
 knight's garment." "By my head," said King Arthur, "ye shall 
 wear it or it come on my back, on any man that here is ; " and so 
 the king made it to be put upon her ; and forthwith she fell down 
 dead, and nevermore spake word after, and was brent to coals. 
 
 Here, in a sample as little out of the common way as 
 possible, you may see the easy run of rhythm, the presence 
 of a certain not excessive balance, tempered by lengthen- 
 ing and shortening of clauses, the breaking and knitting 
 again of the cadence-thread ; and even (which is really 
 surprising in so early a writer) the selection, instinctive 
 no doubt, but not the less wonderful, of an emphatic 
 monosyllable to close the incident and paragraph. If a 
 more picked example be wanted, nothing better need 
 be sought than the often-quoted passage of the Chapel 
 Perilous. While one of the best of all, though perhaps 
 too long to quote, is that where Lancelot, after the great 
 battle with Turquine (the exact locality of which, by the 
 way, is given in the old histories of Manchester), comes to 
 the Giant's Castle of the Bridge, and slays the bridge- 
 ward, but riding into the castle yard, is greeted by " much 
 people in doors and windows that said, ' Fair Knight : 
 thou art unhappy,' " for a close to the chapter. 
 
 1 The fit reader will not have forgotten this vivid Johnsonism (which for 
 the moment puzzled two such not blunt wits as Hester Thrale's and Frances 
 Burney's), dismissing all that was dramatic of a dialogue printed as between 
 "/Cranes" and " TVrzbazus." 
 
 2 It has been urged that he owes this also to "the French book." Not 
 in this quarter will any one meet depreciation of the prose Arthurian romances. 
 But I think my often-repeated caution as to translation applies here.
 
 90 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 The dominant of Malory's rhythm, as might indeed 
 be expected in work so much based on French prose and 
 verse and English verse, is mainly iambic, though he does 
 not neglect the precious inheritance of the trochaic or 
 amphibrachic ending, nor the infusion of the trochaic run 
 elsewhere. His sentences, though sometimes of fair 
 length, are rarely periodic enough, or elaborately descrip- 
 tive enough, to need four-syllable and five-syllable feet : 
 and you may resolve sentence after sentence, as in the 
 last passage noted, into iambs pure, iambs extended by 
 a precedent short into anapaests and iambs, or curling 
 over with a short suffix into amphibrachs, and so getting 
 in the trochee. 
 
 And so | Sir Lanjcelot and | the damsel | departed. 1 
 
 Yet, in some mysterious way, he resists, as has been said, 
 the tendency to drop into poetry. 
 
 Now hast thou || thy payment i that thou hast so long deserved 
 
 is, as a matter of fact, an unexceptionable blank-verse 
 line, preceded by an unexceptionable fragment in a fashion 
 to be found all over Shakespeare, in Milton, and some- 
 times in all their better followers as well. Yet you would 
 never dream of reading it in prose with any blank-verse 
 rhythm, though the division at " payment " gives a fraction 
 of further blank verse, which Shakespeare in his latest days, 
 or Beaumont and Fletcher at any time, would have 
 unhesitatingly written. 
 
 I had thought of giving a few more rhythmical frag- 
 ments in the way of a bonne bouche. But on going 
 through the book (no unpleasant concession to duty) for 
 I suppose nearer the fiftieth than the twentieth time, I 
 found that, to do justice, mere fragments would hardly 
 suffice. Quintilian, I suppose, would hardly have appre- 
 ciated Malory's matter ; but he must have admitted that 
 the style was not of that " complexion sprinkled with 
 
 1 "And so | Sir Lan|celot and | the maid \ departed" would, of course, 
 be pure blank verse, and very difficult to smuggle off in prosed But the little 
 
 extra short of "dam|sel" saves the whole situation, and abolishes the blank - 
 verse tendency.
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 91 
 
 spots, bright, if you like, but too many and too different," 
 which the sober Roman hated. Every now and then, 
 indeed, there comes a wonderful symphonic arrangement, 
 as in the close of the story of Balin : " Thus endeth the 
 tale of Balin and Balan, || two brothers born in North- 
 umberland, I good knights," where I have put the double 
 division to mark what we may almost call the prose-line, 
 making a prose-stanza with no trace of verse in it. More 
 complicated and more wonderful still is the rhythm of the 
 dialogue between the sorceress Hellawes, damsel of the 
 Chapel Perilous, and Sir Lancelot ; while the Graal part 
 is crowded with such things. But Malory never seems 
 to put himself out of the way for them ; they surge up 
 suddenly in the clear flood of his narrative, and add life 
 and flesh to it for a moment and the flood goes on. 
 
 It must, however, be observed that this prose of His excellence 
 Malory's, extraordinarily beautiful as it is, was a sort of 
 half -accidental result of the combination of hour and 
 man, and could never be repeated, save as the result of 
 deliberate literary craftsmanship of the imitative, though 
 of the best imitative, kind. As such it has been achieved 
 in our own days ; and in the proper place I may point 
 out that the denigration of Mr. Morris's prose as 
 " Wardour Street " and the like is short-sighted and un- 
 worthy. It is then a product of the man directly, but 
 not (or only in an indirect and sophisticated way) of the 
 hour. In Malory's days there was a great body of I 
 verse-romance in English, with a half-conventional phrase- 
 ology, which was not yet in any sense insincere or 
 artificial. This phraseology lent itself directly to the 
 treatment of Malory's subject ; while the forms in which 
 it was primarily arranged lent themselves in the same 
 way, though less obviously, and after a fashion requiring 
 more of the essence of the right man, to a simple but 
 extremely beautiful and by no means monotonous prose 
 rhythm, constantly introducing fragments of verse- 
 cadence, but never allowing them to arrange themselves 
 in anything like verse -sequence or metre. That the 
 great popularity of the book which is attested by
 
 92 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 such outbursts against it as that of Ascham from the 
 mere prosaic-Protestant-Philistine point of view, almost 
 as well as by its eight black-letter editions between 1485 
 (Caxton's) and 1634 (Stansby's) was to any large, to 
 even any appreciable, extent due to conscious delight 
 in this beauty of prose, it would be idle to pretend. 
 Milton may have seen its beauty when those younger feet of 
 his were wandering in romance, and had not yet deserted 
 it for Philistia and Puritania ; when he forgathered with 
 Lancelot, and Pelleas, and Pellinore, instead of with the 
 constituents of " Smectymnuus," and the creatures of 
 Cromwell. Spenser can hardly have failed to do so 
 earlier, for though he has, with an almost whimsical 
 perversity of independence, refused to know anything of 
 Malory's Arthurian matter, the whole atmosphere and 
 ordonnance of the Faerie Queene are Malorian. But that 
 this popularity did influence Elizabethan prose few com- 
 petent students of English literature have ever failed to 
 recognise. 
 
 Bemers. . In passing from Malory to Berners (born just before 
 Sir Thomas finished his book, but probably some not 
 short time after he began it) and Bishop Fisher, who 
 was a decade older than Berners himself, there is a drop 
 even in the first case, and, as far as matter is concerned, 
 a long one in the second. But the places of both are 
 nearly as secure in our particular story. According to 
 one theory, Berners has the very great influential im- 
 portance of having brought " Euphuism " into England 
 by his version of Guevara's Horologe of Princes ; and his 
 other moral Englishings of this and that tongue must 
 have had weight. But for us he is the author, in 
 descending value, of the famous and, in its way, unsur- 
 passed Froissart, of Huon of Bordeaux, and of the rather 
 ill-selected, but still interesting, Arthur of Little Britain. 
 In these cases it is almost more probable, not to say 
 certain, that he had Malory before him, than that 
 Malory had Mandeville ; and he sometimes comes hardly 
 short of his " blessed original." But always more or les,s, 
 and in his more independent work, as in the Prefaces of
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 93 
 
 the Arthur and Froissart, very particularly, he betrays a 
 certain sophistication or " contamination." The presence 
 of the printed book, and of the influences, good and bad, 
 which accompany it, is with him. 
 
 Although the direct influence of Malory on the style of his 
 romance -translations is, as acknowledged above, hardly roma . nce ~ 
 
 J translations. 
 
 to be doubted, it is true that much which may seem to 
 a casual reader directly derived from the elder is common 
 matter for both. But these communities of origin, let it be 
 said once more, are rather deceptive things ; and even the 
 certain study of a previous pattern leaves much to be 
 credited to the student. Berners did not exhibit his 
 worthiness to the best in his romance versions. In 
 Huon, indeed 1 though his original is almost a typical 
 example of the later overgrown Chanson de Geste, which 
 has sharked up, and but half digested, all sorts of 
 romantic oddments originally extraneous to it, he has a 
 canvas of the right stuff in the earlier part of the story, 
 and not a few windfalls in the accretions. Arthur of 
 Little Britain? on the other hand, is a late romance with 
 nothing early about it a specimen of the Amadis kind 
 regrafted on its French stock ; full of " conjuror's super- 
 natural," intricate adventures, typical (and palely typed) 
 characters, with many other of the faults that are some- 
 times justly, though more often unjustly, charged against 
 romance in general. 3 The real fault of both stories, 
 however, is that they are told long-windedly, and that 
 Berners has not cared, or dared, or been able, to imitate 
 Malory in correcting this defect. If any one likes to 
 turn to Huon's adjuration of the Emperor, whereby Raoul 
 of Vienna meets his death, or to that remarkable series 
 of scenes in which Arthur successively polishes off a lion, 
 a giantess, her giant, a griffin, a few dozen knights, and 
 
 1 Edited for the E.E.T.S. by Sir Sidney Lee. 
 
 2 Ed. Utterson (London, 1814), a stately quarto, with very delectable 
 illustrations from MS. 
 
 3 One cannot quarrel with Southey when he asked what on earth made 
 Berners choose it when Giron le Courtois and Perceforest were [as they are 
 still] untranslated. The inaccessibility of Perceforest, even in any modern 
 French edition, has been a life-long grief to me ; for blackletter non legitur 
 with my eyes.
 
 94 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 a spinning " mahomet," he will find the difference pretty 
 soon. 
 
 In considering his shortcomings there would be a 
 lack of fairness, and even perhaps of aptitude in fact 
 and phrase, if we accused poor Berners of being " un- 
 grammatical." There was, thank Heaven ! no English 
 Grammar then ; though, before long, people were to 
 begin that series of " ill-mumbled masses " of the profane 
 kind which have since endeavoured, in the first place, to 
 make a ritual for English on the infinitely different basis of 
 Latin, and, in the second, to draw up rules and conven- 
 tions for a language which is almost wholly exception 
 and idiom. It was not because Berners was ungrammati- 
 cal, but because he was unrhetorical, that his sentences 
 straddle and straggle in the way they go * because he 
 had not, like Malory, a genius of ordonnance for himself, 
 or, like Fisher, a certain inherited custom of it from 
 others. 
 
 And contrast But, on the other hand (in this case again differing 
 Prefaces ^ rom Malory, but coinciding with Fisher), he has no small 
 desire to be rhetorical ; and the two Prefaces (rather well 
 known among the few students of this subject) to the 
 Arthur and the Froissart betray the fact in the most 
 unmistakable, though perhaps not in the happiest manner. 
 In both of these it is evident that the Baron, exactly 
 like the Bishop, is sedulously aping the order (v. in/,} of 
 the " secular orators," although he knew himself to be 
 " insufficient in the facondious art of rhetoric." But he 
 has a few tricks of the said rhetoric already, especially 
 the doublet " chivalrous feats and martial prowesses," 
 " uncunning and dark ignorance," etc. 
 
 These expressions, as well as a regret at his not having 
 
 1 E.g. to take an example, previously used by Professor Macaulay as an 
 example of "ungrammaticalness," "And when these knights and other men 
 of arms knew the will and answer of King Dampeter [Don Pedro the Cruel], 
 whereby they reputed him right orgulous and presumptuous, and made all the 
 haste they could to advance, to do him all the hurt they could." This is 
 really a kind of " Thucydidean " syntax, to use the comparison as to which we 
 differed with Mr. Earle in the case of "The Slaying of Cynewulf." It is 
 "schemed to meaning," and the meaning is quite clear to any intelligent 
 person.
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 95 
 
 command of " fresh ornate polished English," are from 
 Arthur of Little Britain, In the Froissart Preface he tries 
 a higher flight, having imped his wings with more and 
 gayer plumes of the same general feather. " Graces and 
 thanks " is rather more than sufficiently pleonastic ; but 
 " shew, open, manifest, and declare " exaggerates before- 
 hand (and not very improbably suggested) the ponderous 
 triads which Scott puts into the mouth of Sir Robert 
 Hazlewood of Hazlewood. " Inquire, desire, and follow," 
 " eschew, avoid, and utterly fly," succeed, not without 
 unintended application to the special subject. " Acts, 
 gests, and deeds," " labours, dangers, and perils," flock and 
 throng and press behind. Nor are the principal words of 
 these groups content to march alone " sage counsels, 
 great reasons, and high wisdoms " sees each noun provided 
 with his harbingering adjective " in the best and most 
 orgilous manner." 
 
 Now we may be tempted by our corrupt natures to 
 laugh at this, and be inclined to have none of it, and 
 greatly to prefer the rough, unpolished eloquence which 
 has given us a very different style the story of Orthon 
 and the death of the Bruce, the siege of Aiguillon and 
 the battle of Navarete, the revenging of Sir John Chandos, 
 and that wonderful " blind man's buff" when Scots and 
 English chased each other, without being able to find, in 
 the wilds of Weardale and Tynedale round " the little 
 Abbey, all brent, which was called in King Arthur's days 
 La Blaunche Launde." * And as far as mere delectation 
 goes, this preference is beyond all doubt well founded. 
 But it is not so from the historic point of view. Even 
 these inspiriting pages of Berners have something of the 
 falsetto in them : what was quite natural in Malory has 
 become half- artificial here. But the awkward and 
 exaggerated rhetoricism of the Prefaces, though it look 
 far more artificial still, is really the novice's practice in a 
 
 1 Nobody can ever hope to understand, and indeed I should have thought 
 that nobody could enjoy, mediaeval literature who is amused, or shocked, or 
 even surprised by this unhesitating unification, as historically known and 
 geographically associable facts, of the history of King Arthur and that of 
 King Edward.
 
 96 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 real art. Already, especially in the less ambitious and 
 less bedizened Arthur piece, there is balance, rhythm, 
 accompaniment of sound to sense. We may illustrate 
 him with a passage from the Froissart Preface and the 
 death of Robert Bruce. 
 
 What condign graces and thanks men ought to give to the writers 
 of histories, who, with their great labours, have done so much 
 profit to the human life ; they shew, open, manifest, and declare 
 to the reader, by example of old antiquity, what we should inquire, 
 desire, and follow ; and also, what we should eschew, avoid, and 
 utterly fly : for when we (being unexpert of chances) see, behold, 
 and read the ancient acts, gests, and deeds, how and with what 
 labours, dangers, and perils they were gested and done, they right 
 greatly admonish, ensigne, and teach us how we may lead forth 
 our lives : and farther, he that hath the perfect knowledge of 
 others' joy, wealth, and high prosperity, and also trouble, sorrow, 
 and great adversity, hath the expert doctrine of all perils. 
 
 . . . . . . 4 
 
 Then he called to him the gentle knight, Sir James Douglas, 
 and said before all the lords, Sir James, my dear friend, ye 
 know well that I have had much ado in my days, to uphold and 
 sustain the right of this realm, and when I had most ado, I 
 made a solemn vow, the which as yet I have not accomplished, 
 whereof I am right sorry ; the which was, if I might achieve and 
 make an end of all my wars, so that I might once have brought 
 this realm in rest and peace, then I promised in my mind to have 
 gone and warred on Christ's enemies, adversaries to our holy 
 Christian faith. To this purpose mine heart hath ever intended, 
 but our Lord would not consent thereto ; for I have had so much 
 ado in my days, and now in my last enterprise, I have taken such 
 a malady, that I can not escape. And sith it is so that my body 
 can not go, nor achieve that my heart desireth, I will send the 
 heart in stead of the body, to accomplish mine avow. And because 
 I know not in all my realm, no knight more valiant than ye be, 
 nor of body so well furnished to accomplish mine avow in stead 
 of myself, therefore I require you, mine own dear especial friend, 
 that ye will take on you this voyage, for the love of me, and to 
 acquit my soul against my Lord God ; for I trust so much in 
 your nobleness and truth, that an ye will take on you, I doubt 
 not, but that ye shall achieve it, and then shall I die in more ease 
 and quiet, so that it be done in such manner as I shall declare 
 unto you. I will, that as soon as I am trespassed out of this 
 world, that ye take my heart out of my body, and embalm it, and 
 take of my treasure, as ye shall think sufficient for that enterprise, 
 both for yourself, and such company as ye will take with you, 
 and present my heart to the holy sepulchre, where as our Lord 
 lay, seeing my body can not come there ; and take with you such
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 97 
 
 company and purveyance as shall be appertaining to your estate. 
 And wheresoever ye come, let it be known, how ye carry with you 
 the heart of King Robert of Scotland, at his instance and desire to 
 be presented to the holy sepulchre. 
 
 As for Fisher, it may be at once admitted that the Fisher. 
 interest of his prose is almost exclusively technical. Not 
 that it is contemptible in itself. A sentence, for instance, 
 like this : l 
 
 No creature | may express | how joyful | the sinner is | when he 
 knoweth | and understandeth | himself | to be delivered j from the 
 great | burden | and heaviness | of sin | when he feeleth | and 
 perceiveth | that he is | delivered | utterly | and brought out | of 
 the danger | of so many | and great | perils | that he was in, | whyles 
 he continued | in sin ; | when also | he perceiveth | the clearness | of 
 his soul | and remembreth | the tranquillity | and peace | of his 
 conscience. 
 
 is not an extraordinary one ; but there is something in 
 it which displays more of the period than we have usually 
 seen before something which reminds us, with not too 
 much incongruity, that there were probably not two full 
 decades between the death of its author and the birth of 
 Richard Hooker. Already there is in it as the above 
 division and quantification may help to bring out that 
 peculiar wave-like motion insurging, and recoiling, and 
 advancing again ; with individual movement not mechanic- 
 ally or mathematically correspondent, but rhythmically 
 associable and complementary which is essential to har- 
 monious prose ; and already this fluctuance demands and 
 receives the more elaborate accompaniment in expression 
 of paeons and dochmiacs. 
 
 There is still more ambition of perhaps less strictly 
 
 1 Fisher's English Works, i. in (E.E.T.S. London, 1876). It may be 
 a question whether the larger rhythms or foot-groups should not be indicated, 
 by the double || or otherwise. I have actually done this in some cases ; but 
 in most it seemed to me that the punctuation should serve. And I think that, 
 for the public taste, symbols, like other things, non sunt multiplicanda praeter 
 necessitate. 
 
 H
 
 98 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 technical accomplishment in the passage 1 which Professor 
 Mayor specified, assigning it, correctly, to Oriental origin, 
 and paralleling it from Riickert, but not seeming to know 
 or remember that it is one of the most favourite 
 apologues of the Gesta Romanorum and similar collections. 
 
 That man were put in great peril and jeopardy that should hang 
 over a very deep pit holden up by a weak and slender cord or line, 
 in whose bottom should be most woode and cruel beasts of every 
 kind, abiding with great desire his falling down, for that intent when 
 he shall fall down anon to devour him, which line or cord that he 
 hangeth by should be holden up and stayed only by the hands of that 
 man, to whom by his manifold un gentleness he hath ordered and 
 made himself as a very enemy. Likewise, dear friends, consider in 
 yourself. If now under me were such a very deep pit, wherein 
 might be lions, tigers, and bears gaping with open mouth to destroy 
 and devour me at my falling down, and that there be nothing 
 whereby I might be holden up and succoured, but a broken bucket 
 or pail which should hang by a small cord, stayed and holdert up 
 only by the hands of him to whom I have behaved myself as an 
 enemy and adversary by great and grievous injuries and wrongs done 
 unto him. 
 
 Here is another : 
 
 In which four, the noble woman Martha (as say the doctors 
 entreating this gospel, and her life) was singularly to be commended 
 and praised, wherefore let us consider likewise, whether in this noble 
 countess may any thing like be found. First, the blessed Martha 
 was a woman of noble blood, to whom by inheritance belonged the 
 castle of Bethany, and this nobleness of blood they have which 
 descend of noble lineage. Beside this there is a nobleness of 
 manners, without which the nobleness of blood is much defaced, for 
 as Boetius saith : If ought be good in the nobleness of blood it is for 
 that thereby the noble men and women should be ashamed to go out 
 of kind from the virtuous manners of their ancestry before. Yet also 
 there is another nobleness, which ariseth in every person by the 
 goodness of nature, whereby full often such as come of right poor 
 and unnoble father and mother, have great abilities of nature, 
 to noble deeds. Above all these same there is a fourth manner 
 of nobleness, which may be called an increased nobleness, as by 
 marriage and affinity of more noble persons such as were of less 
 condition may increase in higher degree of nobleness. In every of 
 these, I suppose, this countess was noble. First, she came of noble 
 blood lineally descending of King Edward III. within the fourth 
 degree of the same. Her father was John, Duke of Somerset, her 
 mother was called Margaret, right noble as well in manners as in 
 
 1 Fisher's English Works, i. 90, 91 (E.E.T.S. London, 1876).
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 99 
 
 blood. To whom she was a very daughter in all noble manners, for 
 she was bounteous and liberal to every person of her knowledge or 
 acquaintance. Avarice and covetise she most hated, and sorrowed it 
 full much in all persons, but specially in any that belonged unto her. 
 She was also of singular easiness to be spoken unto, and full 
 courteous answer she would make to all that came unto her. Of 
 marvellous gentleness she was unto all folks, but specially unto her 
 own, whom she trusted and loved right tenderly. Unkind she 
 would not be unto no creature, nor forgetful of any kindness or 
 service done to her before, which is no little part of very nobleness. 
 She was not vengeable, nor cruel, but ready anon to forget and to 
 forgive injuries done unto her at the least desire or motion made 
 unto her for the same. Merciful also and piteous she was unto such 
 as was grieved and wrongfully troubled, and to them that were in 
 poverty or sickness or any other misery. To God and to the church 
 full obedient and tractable, searching His honour and pleasure full 
 busily. A wariness of herself she had alway to eschew every thing 
 that might dishonest any noble woman, or distain her honour in any 
 condition. Trifelous things that were little to be regarded she would 
 let pass by, but the other that were of weight and substance wherein 
 she might profit she would not let for any pain or labour to take 
 upon hand. These and many other such noble conditions left unto 
 her by her ancestors she kept, and increased them with a great 
 diligence. 
 
 These are both taken from the long sermon -com- 
 mentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms, which is 
 Fisher's chief English work. But I do not know that 
 the two elaborate funeral discourses on Henry VII. and 
 his mother, Lady Margaret, are not the most important 
 places for us, because of the definite rhetorical striving 
 which they show us in their author, and of the sometimes 
 quite distinct means and instruments which we see him 
 applying. He has given us, in the discourse on the 
 King, perfectly frank acknowledgment that (as any one 
 acquainted with the matter must see at once without the 
 confession) he is " using the same order which the secular 
 orators have in their funeral orations most diligently 
 observed." But his rhetorical exercitations are by no 
 means confined to the mere " order " of Commendation, 
 Exhortation to pity, and Comfort. The divisions are 
 compounded of clauses studiously, and with no little art, 
 now paralleled, now built on each other. And we 
 observe throughout, both in this and in the " Lady
 
 ioo A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Margaret " pieces, an abundant and even superabundant 
 use of those groups of synonyms, or all but synonyms, 
 which we noted in Berners. " Wisdom, learning, and 
 virtue " is not quite an example of this as far as the 
 meanings go, though it has the group -effect in sound. 
 " Dangers and jeopardies," near to it, are more exactly 
 the thing. But the " Morning remembrance at the 
 month's mind of Margaret " an alliteration which was 
 only in one way going out of verse, and was coming again 
 into prose ten thousand strong is notable both for these 
 groupings and for other things. " Bounteous and liberal," 
 " knowledge and acquaintance," " avarice and covetise " 
 these three pairs come in fourteen consecutive words. 
 Very remarkable too, in this passage, is the abundance 
 of rhetorical inversion, contrasted with the natural order 
 sufficiently not to be irksome or a mere clumsy trick, but 
 prevailing to an extent which evidently betokens a 
 deliberate attempt to fix attention by a " strange device." 
 
 And these things, though not yet achieved in the best 
 manner, are not merely achieved to some extent, but are 
 achieved by means which are capable, in the right hands, 
 of infinite multiplication and development. The doublets, 
 triplets, and " foursomes " are often superfluous and some- 
 times absurd as they occur. But they present, in them- 
 selves, an infinite possibility of rhythmical adjustment and 
 ornament, not least because of the tendency to group 
 Romance with Teutonic equivalents, and so to get the 
 advantage of the different rhythmical values and colours. 
 
 And this we shall, I think, find to be the real import- 
 ance of fifteenth-century prose rather than its production 
 of a kind of miracle in Malory. If he had not been 
 vouchsafed to us the loss would be immense in delight to 
 a dozen generations (save some three or four who would 
 not attend) of eager readers, and not a few writers would 
 have lost a valuable pattern. But his less inspired 
 immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and followers 
 would have done the necessary pioneer -work for the 
 Elizabethans, and handed on the necessary torch to them 
 all the same. Without these elders, contemporaries, and
 
 iv FROM CHAUCER TO MALORY 101 
 
 followers, Malory himself would have been powerless to 
 provide the range of subject -treatment, the body of 
 vocabulary and prose-stuff, or to make out the " plant " of 
 a constantly growing language for the use of a constantly 
 growing literature. Now this was necessary before great 
 original kinds of various work could be done, and before 
 a perfect command of mere expression and correct com- 
 position could superadd to itself the rhythmical grace of 
 Hooker, much more the mighty fugues and fantasies of 
 the great word-virtuosos from Raleigh and Greville and 
 Donne to Milton and Taylor and Browne.
 
 INTERCHAPTER I 
 
 THE short summaries and few general remarks which 
 have been set at the close of the three preceding chapters 
 will hardly have dispensed us from a further survey back- 
 wards of the Interchapter kind. I believe these inter- 
 mediate summings-up to be of the greatest possible value 
 in all enquiries of a literary-historical nature ; and they 
 can nowhere be of more importance than in a history *of 
 this sort, which is almost entirely of the exploring and 
 pioneer variety. I have, I believe, already said in the 
 Preface, and shall take the liberty to repeat here (and 
 elsewhere it may be), that the object of the book is less 
 to arrive at definite conclusions still less to lay down a 
 cut-and-dried system than to give a rationalised survey 
 of the facts. In such a survey nothing can be of more 
 importance than to halt from time to time, and see what 
 the results, up to the point, have actually been. 
 
 Almost the whole of the country through which we 
 have passed is, relatively and analogically at least, " the 
 forest primaeval." Absolutely it is of course not so ; be- 
 cause composition in writing, and especially composition 
 in prose, is almost necessarily artificial, that is to say 
 imitative. In the case of a man like ^Elfric, or even like 
 the author of the Blickling Homilies, this artificial and 
 indeed artistic imitation is very prominent ; you can see 
 it again in the Ancren Riwle and other Middle English 
 examples. But except (and I suspect even in the case 
 of) JElirlc himself, though men may have written with 
 rhetorical treatises (in Latin, of course) before them, and 
 may have studied to reproduce their Latin original as 
 closely as possible, a deliberate conscious intention to get
 
 INTERCHAPTER I 103 
 
 prose effects out of English is almost impossible. It 
 would require an evolution and stimulation of the critical 
 sense which is antecedently improbable in the highest 
 degree, and of which we find no trace actually before the 
 time of Caxton for Chaucer, though he had it as to 
 verse, is not likely to have felt it as to prose. In refer- 
 ence, therefore, to the men of these seven or eight 
 centuries before, say, 1450, the subject of enquiry, with 
 perhaps one single exception, is not what they intended 
 to do, but merely what they did. And, as has been 
 already hinted, that single exception ^Elfric is possibly 
 no exception at all. 
 
 It is scarcely rash to say that no poetry has ever been 
 more essentially rhythmical than Anglo-Saxon. An 
 average page of it looks by no means much unlike an 
 average page of Greek choric verse. 1 But suppose a 
 person taught (as Milton inhumanly taught his daughters) 
 to read the two languages without himself understanding 
 them, and further, in copies without line- division and 
 with no knowledge of their prosody. I entertain no 
 sort of doubt that, even with a good ear, he would be 
 some time in finding out the rhythm of the Greek, whereas 
 that of the Old English would strike him at once. It 
 would be, in fact, only in certain cases that the Greek 
 rhythm, beautiful as it always is, would strike him at all, 
 till he had discovered the metre. In the English there is 
 practically no metre to find out : rhythm must strike at 
 once, and by itself, if it is ever to strike and it does. 
 
 Further, this rhythm, whatever refinements it may be 
 possible to analyse out of or into it, is generally of the 
 simplest possible character a continuous trochaic roll 
 which at the end of lines is practically omnipresent, either 
 in its full constituted self, or in a long syllable which, with 
 the natural pause, constitutes it. 2 Of these and much 
 
 1 Of course I am not referring to the blocks of anapaestic dimeter, or other 
 things of the kind, but to the chorus proper, where only the strophic and 
 antistrophic correspondence supplies the key. 
 
 2 This sort of "prose catalexis," as it may be called, continues through- 
 out our history, and the management of it, consciously or unconsciously, is 
 one of the chief word-instruments of the prose artist.
 
 104 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM . 
 
 more rarely of the dactylic ending, a piecing which has 
 always continued to be the regular substitute for the 
 trochee in English the whole edge of the print, as you 
 run your eye down page after page of Anglo-Saxon 
 poetry, will be found to be composed, while the begin- 
 ning and middle of the short lines is, if not exclusively 
 composed of it, almost equally dominated by the same 
 cadence. 
 
 It was of course impossible that this domination should 
 be equally pervading in prose ; or there would practically 
 have been no Anglo-Saxon prose at all. In the remark- 
 able verse-prose of JElfric it does appear to a very great 
 extent, as we should expect. In writers who have no 
 special thought of ornament, the closes are less invariably, 
 but still generally, trochaic or trochaoid, and the necessarily 
 much longer groups of words may seem to possess greater 
 liberty. Yet even here, in the Chronicle, in Alfred's trans- 
 lations, in the Apollonius, where not, you will find but a 
 small proportion of distinct iambic endings in sentences 
 and sentence-members, though they do exist. 
 
 This peculiarity necessarily conditions, to a large 
 extent, the whole rhythmical character of Anglo-Saxon 
 prose composition. The trochee is a very peculiar foot. 
 It may not have that all-pervading and all-conquering 
 character of the iamb which Quintilian intimates in a 
 famous phrase, but this is precisely because it has so 
 strong a -character of its own, and is practically incapable 
 of disguising itself or of combining in inseparable fashions. 
 This means, as a consequence, that compositions in which 
 it is dominant, or largely prevalent, have a necessary lack 
 of variety. Now variety, as may be unhesitatingly laid 
 down after the same wise critic, is the great essential of 
 prose rhythm. 1 
 
 Not that the writer of Old English was absolutely 
 ascriptus glebae trochaicae. From very early times, as we 
 
 1 The levity and gesticulatory character which Aristotle (v. sup. p. 7 note) 
 objected to in the foot do not appear in Old English, because of the singular 
 gravity of the language. "Their heavy rider keeps them down." And it is 
 not till the Middle English period that the invading iamb persuades the 
 trochee to join it freely in producing combinations of larger feet.
 
 INTERCHAPTER I 105 
 
 have seen in the Cyneheard and Cynewulf story and the 
 deed of gift to Worcester, he could manage a straight- 
 forward style with a certain amount of iambic or even 
 paeonic rhythm in it, which was very far from ineffective. 
 But when he took to " flights " the trochee recovered its 
 ascendency, with the consequences thereof. It has also 
 been pointed out that this trochaic underhum was to a 
 great extent a result of the character of the language 
 itself. A language which is largely monosyllabic, and at 
 the same time inflected, necessarily begets trochees ready- 
 made in still larger quantities. 
 
 Until, therefore, a much greater infusion of Latin and 
 Romance words, with the ultimate accentuation of the 
 latter, had been admitted, and until inflexion began to 
 drop off, a thoroughly flexible and variable prose word- 
 book and phrase-book could hardly be achieved : and it 
 was not. Moreover, as has also been duly pointed out, 
 the syntactical peculiarities of the language led to a 
 certain monotony of sentence-arrangement and cadencing. 
 The translations as close as possible to the original in 
 every one of these respects from vocabulary to word- 
 order which have been given above, will explain what 
 has been here said better than much expatiation of 
 comment ; and will show how it is that Anglo-Saxon by 
 no means " poor " in any fair sense of the word, and not 
 even justly to be called illiterate scarcely admitted of the 
 greater forms of prose. It had already mastered that 
 simple, straightforward faculty of narration and exposition 
 even, to a certain extent, of argument which in later 
 centuries, when the word-stuff had been reinforced and 
 polished, Latimer and Bunyan and Defoe and Cobbett 
 were to employ so admirably. But when it was simple 
 it was apt to be rather too simple ; and when it aspired 
 to greatness it was almost certain to slip into a sort of 
 prose-poetry which approached too near in form to poetry 
 itself, and to poetry of a somewhat rudimentary and 
 monotonous kind. 
 
 If, however, by some impossibility, JElfrlc had been 
 able to attain ornate rhythm like Sir Thomas Browne's,
 
 106 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 and the Chronicle men, or the author of Apollonius, a 
 pedestrian harmony like Southey's, the upper structure of 
 the work of both must have been all to do again when 
 the change from Anglo-Saxon to Middle English took place. 
 I say the upper structure, because the architects of the 
 oldest English undoubtedly provided a foundation, and 
 something more than a foundation, which has not been 
 much, if at all, disturbed or added to. But the twin 
 influences of the revolution the infusion of Latin or 
 Romance words with their different terminations and 
 balances, and the gradual disuse of inflexion could not 
 but alter the main, if not the whole, conditions of prose 
 building, and especially of prose rhythmical arrangement. 
 It is no wonder if for some three centuries we find the 
 bricks half-moulded and half-baked ; the mortar daubed 
 without the slightest attention to temper in its makicig 
 or to artistic effect in its application ; the courses out of 
 level, and the bonds irregular. Besides, there is the 
 special effect of translation. A very large proportion of 
 Anglo-Saxon had, no doubt, been translated likewise ; 
 but the translators had been good or fair masters of their 
 own tongue as far as it went, and had taken not a few 
 liberties in adding and altering. In all probability the 
 whole of the earlier Middle English prose is translation 
 pure and simple, executed by men who are, for the most 
 part, making their very imperfect dialect as they go 
 along, who do not seem to possess much original talent, 
 and who have a hampering and deadening uniformity of 
 subject to deal with. The famous passage describing 
 the cruelties of the reign of Stephen shows what Old 
 English could do almost at its last gasp ; the Ancren 
 Riwle, probably not fifty years younger, and a distinctly 
 favourable specimen of the newer form, shows what that 
 form had to content itself with. 
 
 We have been able to take some interesting examples 
 from it, but they all betray, and necessarily so, a hap- 
 hazard character now French, now Latin, now Biblical. 
 And it cannot be too often repeated that, until Middle 
 English was far on its way, French, so powerful and so
 
 INTERCHAPTER I 107 
 
 liberal in verse-patterns, had little or nothing to give us 
 as guiding stuff in prose ; while, when things improved, 
 the admirable prose of Villehardouin and Joinville un- 
 luckily coincided with a long interval during which 
 English history, and nearly all English prose not sacred, 
 was written in Latin. If only Walter Mapes or William 
 of Malmesbury had used English as a vehicle ! But the 
 thing was probably impossible. 
 
 It is equally impossible to say how long this state of 
 things might have gone on, if it had not been for the 
 great change in conversation and education indicated in 
 the famous passage of Trevisa. 1 As long as people learnt 
 Latin through French, and made no use of English in 
 school at all, they could not think of writing their 
 native language in a scholarly fashion. As soon as they 
 exchanged the foreign language for the native as a 
 vehicle and instrument of construing, etc., a definite 
 attempt to transfer something of the literary quality of 
 French or Latin into English rapidly became, in successive 
 stages, possible, probable, and certain. The almost indis- 
 pensable feeling of definite emulation does not seem to 
 have arisen till Caxton ; and, as has been said above, 
 we must not allow too much even for mere unconscious 
 copying in the first tolerably accomplished school of 
 prose that which shows itself towards the close of the 
 fourteenth century. But some influence of the kind must 
 have been exerted, in whatever degree and measure, upon 
 Wyclif and Trevisa, upon Chaucer and Mandeville. 
 
 The illustrations of rhythmical progress which the 
 work of these four gives are differentiated somewhat 
 remarkably. Trevisa supplies least, as falling most into 
 line with his predecessors, and rendering Higden " some- 
 how nohow," as the old popular phrase goes, yet with a 
 certain modernity as compared with earlier work. For us 
 his matter alone is eloquent. With Wyclif, and the tracts 
 influenced by him, and the versions of the Bible issued 
 by him and by his followers, things become decidedly 
 different. An influence which has been sporadically 
 1 V. sup. p. 57.
 
 io8 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 manifest for centuries, that of the Vulgate, now con- 
 centrates itself and becomes constant. Something of the 
 all-powerful Hebrew parallelism, which of itself creates 
 rhythmical quality, establishes itself in English. In the 
 tracts and sermons there is another cause at work less 
 beautiful in its results perhaps, but hardly less powerful. 
 Wyclif himself is a scholastic of almost the first rank, 
 and most of his grex are at least technically masters of 
 the same craft. Now, logical arrangement of thought, 
 though it has sometimes failed to be rhythmical, lends 
 itself with remarkable ease to rhythmical arrangement. 
 The barest syllogism has a certain rhythm ; and when 
 that syllogism is clothed and extended rhetorically, it is 
 the fault of the writer if he does not develop the rhythm 
 likewise. Wyclif and those about him are not very 
 highly developed in this respect ; but they are seldom 
 merely amorphous. 
 
 The infinitely greater literary ethos of Chaucer necessi- 
 tated a stronger and more various display of prose 
 manner in him. We have duly noticed those singular 
 out-croppings of blank verse in the Tale of Melibee, which 
 are not quite like anything else in literature. They show, 
 on the one hand, how, though blank decasyllabics did not 
 yet, or for long afterwards, exist in English verse, the 
 practice of decasyllabic in rhymed couplet or stanza-form 
 had subdued the poet to itself ; how, on the other, he was 
 evidently trying to impress some comeliness of form on 
 prose, and how, on the third (for three hands are as useful 
 in argument as they would be physically), English was 
 gravitating towards a strongly iambic mould. To me at 
 any rate, if not to others, the elegiac couplet at the 
 opening of the Boethius tells the same story, though I do 
 not believe that Chaucer intended to write it. In the 
 versions of the metra he came, as it seems to me again, 
 to the highest level of English prose yet attained, and 
 one not so very far below anything reached since, except 
 a few topless flights of the greatest seventeenth and 
 nineteenth century masters. And it is very noticeable 
 that here he is not betrayed into any improper echoing
 
 INTERCHAPTER I 109 
 
 of the originals. In the greater part of Melibee and 
 almost the whole of the Parson's Tale, except the remark- 
 able W/-palinode, he is more like his predecessors, and 
 therefore more formless. But the " blank " tendency re- 
 appears, with not a little less questionable rhythmification, 
 in this coda. And the treatise on the Astrolabe, debarred 
 by its subject from any flights, is a very remarkable 
 testimony to the progress which English was making, so 
 as to gain or regain a style-rhythm of all work, clear, not 
 inharmonious, but not in the least ambitious or intricate. 
 
 I do not know whether anybody, in discussing the 
 vexed question of the original language of Mandeville, has 
 attempted tests of cadence ; but I doubt whether much 
 benefit could be derived from them. As any one who 
 has ever tried translation, on more than the smallest scale, 
 and in more than the most schoolboy fashion, must know 
 for himself in his own case as the painful reviewer of 
 the baser sort of translators knows in the case of others, 
 it is possible only by an enormous tour de force, and then 
 only now and then for a short time, to keep the order 
 even, let alone the rhythm, of French in English with 
 any good effect ; while the badness of the effect in cases 
 of mere inadequacy is quite too shocking. To make 
 good English out of good French you have not only to 
 paraphrase rather than to construe, but you have to break 
 up and remake the sentences, alter the balance of the 
 clauses " transpose," in short, in almost every possible 
 way. The chief resemblance to early French prose, as, 
 for instance, in Villehardouin, and still more in his 
 continuator Henri de Valenciennes, is the already- 
 mentioned evidence of short sentences beginning with 
 "And " "El" a habit most undoubtedly derived from the 
 similar one in the laisses or tirades of the chansons de 
 geste. On the other hand, it is interesting to com- 
 pare the Voyage and Travel with its four-hundred-year 
 elder Apollonius of Tyre. Between them we shall find 
 hardly any third example of clear straightforward nar- 
 rative comparable to these two ; and between the two 
 themselves there is no want of resemblance, and no want
 
 i io A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 of effectiveness either. But it is the effectiveness, carried 
 a little farther, of a story told by a child (I do not say to 
 a child), and is almost entirely devoid of artifice, though 
 the wonderful beauty of some of the legends themselves 
 requires none, and gives the impression of a great deal. 
 
 In the fifteenth century with its nibble at the six- 
 teenth as defined above the interest for us concentrates 
 itself upon Malory in the first place, and upon Berners 
 and Fisher in the second, though the curious attempts of 
 Pecock supply us with something, and though an excursus 
 of interest in the contributory way may, and presently 
 shall, be got out of the earlier " aureators," or employers 
 of pedantic and high-flown language, none of whom can 
 be said to have much, if any, command of co-ordinated 
 rhythm, but who hit all unknowing upon a mighty 
 instrument thereof which was to be worked long after- 
 wards to perfection by Sir Thomas Browne. Nor should 
 we fail to repeat that in the widening of subject which men 
 like Capgrave and Fortescue provide, and in the insistent 
 practice of translation, not only matter but also method was 
 unconsciously accumulating. Still, the three are the three. 
 
 It has been already suggested that Malory, the most 
 interesting by far as literature, is not, historically, in the 
 most direct line of rhythmical development. He was 
 undoubtedly much read ; Ascham would hardly have 
 taken the trouble to write himself down an honest ass in 
 respect of the book, if he had not been so ; and the 
 greater Elizabethan literature is full of traces of his 
 influence in spirit. But of that influence in form we shall 
 not, I think, discover very much if we go seriously to work. 
 In the first place, his is an outbreak of genius more than a 
 development of study ; and, in the second, it is very much 
 more a summing-up of what was possible, with the means 
 already known and used, than a construction and applica- 
 tion of freshly invented plant to newly gathered material. 
 
 Berners, with far less genius, has something of the 
 same kind ; but he adds to it something else which, in its 
 turn, with less genius still but in greater concentration 
 and in higher development, constitutes the whole attraction
 
 INTERCHAPTER I in 
 
 and qualification, for us, of Fisher. These men have felt 
 like Malory's publisher, what it was perhaps impossible 
 for Malory to feel, what he most certainly and fortunately 
 did not feel as a fact dissatisfaction with their medium of 
 expression, admiration of others, determination if possible 
 to make English those others' equal. There may have 
 been, as some think, actual revived and increased teaching 
 of Rhetoric in the ordinary scholastic course ; there may 
 have been, in Fisher's case especially, a beginning of 
 resort to its classical exponents ; there was certainly 
 practice of version from French and Latin, and latterly 
 from Spanish and Greek and even Hebrew. And these 
 things supply the devices noted above, and result in the 
 practice exemplified in our specimens. It is often 
 awkward and " scholastic " in the unfavourable sense ; 
 sometimes almost puerile, with its confidence in repetition, 
 inversion, and the like. But it prepares the way, as the 
 far more beautiful and intrinsically precious style of 
 Malory never could do, for the developments and achieve- 
 ments of the future in rhythm as in other points. 
 
 This Interchapter would, however, as has been hinted, 
 be incomplete without a few more words on a subject 
 already touched in it, but not much exemplified in the 
 specimens ' previously given the great development of 
 vocabulary in the course of the fifteenth century, and in 
 particular the growth of " aureation," or the use of 
 splendid (as it were gilded} words for those words' sake. 
 
 The actual enlargement of the dictionary was, of 
 course, a consequence, partly of advancing civilisation as 
 it is called, partly of the much wider range of literature, 
 even translated literature, in respect of themes and 
 subjects. The first important English dictionaries, the 
 Promptorium Parvulorum * ( 1 440) and the Catholicon 
 Anglicum 2 (forty years later), date from this century, and 
 already have very respectable word -lists, not poor in 
 terms of Romance and Latin origin. But about the date 
 
 1 Ed. Way, Camden Society, 3 vols. (1843-65); vol. iii. very difficult to 
 get. Ed. Mayhew, E.E.T.S. (1908). 
 
 2 Ed. Heritage and Wheatley, E.E.T.S. (1881). Both this and the 
 Promptoriiim are of course English-Za/m.
 
 ii2 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 of the latter book a process, which was going on in all 
 countries more or less, 1 brought on uncritically and ex- 
 cessively perhaps, but with valuable results for all that a 
 great accession of elaborate terms of Latin origin. In 
 order not to burden the book and the reader with un- 
 necessary displays of learning, I may refer to one volume 
 only a specially suitable one for the purpose Dr. 
 Ingram's collection 2 of early translations of the Imitatio 
 Christi. The work of A Kempis, from its own remark- 
 able rhythmical character, could hardly fail to influence 
 its translators. But it is the language of the translations 
 to which I wish to draw attention. 
 
 The first or " Old " version which Dr. Ingram printed 
 may date from the middle of the century. 3 Two others, 
 printed in 1504 and perhaps written a good deal earlier, 
 are by " Lady Margaret's " chaplain, Atkinson, and L^dy 
 Margaret herself. Now in all these versions there appear 
 examples of the heavily and directly Latinised vocab- 
 ulary, which contrasts in Pecock with his curious " Saxon- 
 isings," and which in other fifteenth -century writers 
 appears without them. Dr. Ingram protested against 
 these as " unlike to genuine English." But let us see. 
 The list contains words like " claustral," " confabulation," 
 " fecundity," " intellection," " longanimity," " taciturnity," 
 " vilipend," every one of which is genuine English to-day. 
 It contains others, like the verb " abject " (why not, if 
 "/n?ject " and " interject " ?), " circumfound " (why not, if 
 " confound " ?), and many more, which have failed to survive 
 by mere accident, and some of which any writer would 
 be not ill-advised to revive. 
 
 But, dropping these daggers, let us observe the surely 
 unquestionable advantage, for rhythmical purposes, of these 
 words as synonyms, and as fresh-comers altogether. How 
 
 1 It is noticeable in English and still more in Scottish poetry, and most 
 noticeable of all in the poetry and prose of the French grands rhttoriqueurs, 
 as they were called by their countryman and contemporary, Coquillart. The 
 lingua pedantesca of Italian is half an exaggeration, half a burlesque, of the 
 same tendency. 
 
 2 E.E.T.S. (1893). 
 
 3 An attribution of the Cambridge University Library Catalogue "about 
 1400" must be wrong, for all manner of reasons.
 
 INTERCHAPTER I 113 
 
 any one can be otherwise than glad at the introduction 
 of so fine a word as " claustral," or so useful an appella- 
 tion for a too rare thing as " taciturnity," I cannot under- 
 stand. Also, whether the fifteenth - century " aureators " 
 and Browne and Johnson and others were all wrong, and 
 the stock condemnation of their practice (which Dr. 
 Ingram took from the poet Campbell directly, but which 
 is a commonplace) is all right, or vice versa, one thing 
 must be clear. For good or for evil, and for a good or 
 an evil which must depend very mainly, if not wholly, on 
 the skill of the artist, the introduction of such words 
 must alter the character, and increase the possibilities, 
 of prose rhythm to an immense extent. Here as far 
 as the mere individual word-values are concerned are 
 reinforcements of anapaest, amphibrach, paeon, and even 
 dochmiac added to the simple monosyllables, iambs, 
 trochees, and dactyls of earlier English ; here, much more 
 also, are materials for the construction, out of more words 
 than one, of endless combinations of feet. That some of 
 them will be rejected or disused does not in the least 
 matter, for, as has been shown, others of exactly the 
 same rhythmical character and value will remain, and 
 will for ever serve as examples for fresh coinage. 
 
 With this and the other new contingents to the 
 language, and with the commencement of definite 
 rhetorical study and practice, little but the application 
 of individual genius to the work was now needed. One 
 particular influence of pattern, that of the new versions 
 of the Bible, which in importance had never been 
 approached before, and has never been equalled since, 
 was to be added immediately ; was indeed in actual 
 operation before the death of Fisher. But this we shall 
 barely touch in the next chapter for reasons. In the 
 present critical summary, however, and in the three 
 chapters of positive analysis on which it is based, we 
 have given what seemed necessary as to the history of 
 our subject before the " Elizabethan " period, in that 
 larger extension of the term which includes the newer- 
 fangled writers of the later years of Elizabeth's father. 
 
 I
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 
 
 Shorter retrospect Continuance of rhetorical influence : the Cam- 
 bridge School Cheke : his "bankruptcy" theory Its fallacy 
 Wilson and " ink-horn terms " The excuses Ascham Tyn- 
 dale The Prayer-Book (Cranmer ?) Latimer Profane trans- 
 lations Lyly and Euphuism : its failure in rhythm Hdoker : 
 his achievement Rhythm-sweep And fingering of particular 
 words Sidney. 
 
 Shorter IN the preceding chapters and Interchapter we have 
 ' seen how prose style generally, and prose rhythm in 
 particular, slowly and gradually arrived at the possession 
 of its means and the comprehension of its objects, through 
 the stages of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. In the 
 older language we saw that it did what it could, and that 
 it could even do not a little, but was hampered by many 
 things by the somewhat amorphous character of Anglo- 
 Saxon verse, into which prose slipped too easily ; by 
 certain peculiarities and limitations of vocabulary ; by 
 the too-pervadingly trochaic rhythm of the language, 
 which prevented it from availing itself of the statelier and 
 more varied combinations the four-syllabled and five- 
 syllabled feet of perfect prose ; and, lastly, by the com- 
 paratively small range of subject, which hardly invited 
 great variation of tone. And we saw, further, how in 
 the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries Middle 
 English forming itself by the, at first, slow but ever- 
 increasing reinforcement and incorporation of Romance 
 words into the destined blend gradually freed itself 
 
 114
 
 CHAP, v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 115 
 
 from all its limitations, gained multiplicity and variety 
 of expression, gained also multiplicity and variety of 
 vocabulary, possessed itself of the materials of paeonic 
 and dochmiac rhythm, and, lastly, in at least the three 
 cases of Caxton, Fisher, and Berners, set itself to work 
 to achieve definite rhetoric to see whether the "fair 
 language of French" and the stately language of Latin 
 could not find, in English, something not so ill correspond- 
 ing to them. 1 
 
 In reviewing these periods and their work we found 
 that, in the first and older, there was not a little remark- 
 able achievement in passage, though less in phrase, but 
 that it could not produce a great work of prose, nor 
 even, despite ALlfric, a great and assured master of prose. 
 We found that the second, towards its end, in the Morte 
 d* Arthur and in Malory, did produce both the one and 
 the other. But we saw also that this was a sort of 
 windfall of the Ages as well as of the Muses the half 
 miraculous swan-song of a dying period of history and a 
 dying state of literature, for which one man had, as it 
 were, been chosen and called to be the special exponent, 
 and which nobody but William Morris, and he by a sort 
 of white magic, was ever really to recover. Lastly, we 
 saw in Berners who at other times has something of 
 Malory's charm, though less of his genius no longer the 
 dying swan of the past, but the ugly duckling which is 
 to be the living swan of the future, which now swatters 
 and swashes and swaps in ungainly gymnastics of 
 rhetoric such rhetoric as Leonard Coxe is about more 
 formally to introduce to English, and Thomas Wilson to 
 take up later. 
 
 As before, however, and in constantly increasing Continuance 
 measure, it is the wash and counterwash of different i 
 
 eddies and tides of influence that polishes and forms Cambridge 
 the ceaselessly vexed pebbles of style. There is, in the 
 first place, this definitely technical or rhetorical element, 
 
 1 I must apologise to any one who sees mere repetition of the Interchapter 
 in this and the next paragraph ; but it seemed to me that, in a matter so 
 little trite, a summary of the summary might not be superfluous or impertinent.
 
 ii6 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 which, as we shall see, shapes itself with a curious twist in 
 the so-called " Cambridge School " Ascham, Wilson, and 
 their friend and slightly elder, Cheke. There is the con- 
 tinuing and ever-increasing importance of the successive 
 translations of the Bible, starting with a distinct contri- 
 bution of personal and individual genius in Tyndale, and 
 winding up with an unequalled example of combined 
 energy and skill in the Authorised Version. 1 There is a 
 mass of other translation from French, Italian, Spanish, 
 German, Dutch all affecting the general complexion of 
 the literature, and to no small extent, though to the 
 wrath of the Cambridge men, directly enriching the 
 vocabulary. There is the immense multiplication of 
 subject of which a sort of exhibition in little may be 
 found in the curious literature of the so-called Pamphlet. 
 In particular, under this head, there is the growth of 
 fiction : the novella at first rather than the novel or the 
 full romance, 2 but still fiction. And finally, there is the 
 presence, at last, of an astonishingly large number of men 
 of distinct and individual genius, and (which is perhaps 
 more really astonishing) of a multitude of men of more 
 than ordinary talent, who all, consciously or unconsciously, 
 put their hands to the work. 
 
 Cheke : his The position of the three Cambridge scholars mentioned 
 
 bankruptcy a b ove j s a curious one, and though in part founded on a 
 fallacy, it was not unfortunate for English. The con- 
 ception of it was probably due to Cheke, who, though he 
 wrote little or nothing original, was a man of distinctly 
 original genius, if one with the, in genius, not infrequent 
 touch of the " crank." Among the " sports " of his wit he 
 bestowed on England the inestimable blessing of teaching 
 her to pronounce Greek so as to bring out the beauty of 
 
 1 This latter lying beyond the strict period of this chapter, the whole 
 subject (except in so far as Tyndale, Coverdale partly, and Cranmer are 
 concerned) will be postponed to the next. 
 
 2 The full-grown romance does continue, and at length, after the Amadis 
 translations of Anthony Munday and others, passes into the rather more 
 original work of Emanuel Ford Parismns and Parismenus and the rest. 
 But, except in the remarkable exceptions of the Arcadia and Euphues, each 
 to be the subject of separate and substantive notice, it has little or nothing 
 to do with style or rhythm.
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 117 
 
 Greek poetry to an English ear. 1 This wisdom, however, 
 was no doubt connected with his main and favourite folly 
 of " keeping our tongue undefiled " not in the Chaucerian 
 way at all, but by a process exactly the reverse of 
 Chaucer's by refusing admission to all foreign elements, 
 and actually expelling those that existed. I am not so 
 exhaustively acquainted with his works which, though 
 not individually important, are numerous and not easy of 
 access as to know whether he ever refers to Pecock, a 
 writer who, as we saw, was much taken up, from the point 
 of matter, by the extreme reformers. But his principles, 
 and his practice in his translation of the Gospel of St. 
 Matthew, are much in line with " about -writing" and 
 " before-bar." The principle itself is roundly stated in his 
 rather well-known Letter to Sir Thomas Hoby : " I am 
 of opinion that our own tongue should be written clean 
 and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing from 
 other tongues, wherein, if we take not heed by time, ever 
 borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her 
 house as bankrupt." 
 
 The Elizabethans loved parables, and knew the its fallacy. 
 Scriptures, so that one might have aptly asked Sir John 
 Cheke whether, after the process of borrowing jewels of 
 silver and jewels of gold from the Egyptians, Israel was 
 in much danger of bankruptcy. Yet perhaps even this is 
 not a strong enough demurrer by analogy ; for, if the 
 Red Sea had not closed the account, there might have 
 been some danger of resumption there. But what possible 
 " paying back " can there be in such a case as this ? The 
 language borrowed from is none the poorer ; the language 
 borrowing is at once, and (if the word suits and lives) 
 permanently, the richer. The lender does not want his 
 loan back with or without usury, for he loses nothing ; the 
 borrower neither need nor, if he would, could restore it 
 though he may not improbably give something in 
 exchange. These foreign borrowings were, in fact, the 
 
 1 It, of course, may be a mere coincidence that literary appreciation of this 
 poetry, as distinguished from mere philology, has been keener, more constant, 
 and more widely spread in England than in any other country. But if there 
 is no causal connection, it is odd.
 
 Ii8 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 food of the older English tongue itself, causing it to live 
 and grow and flourish. It may, perhaps, now and then 
 have taken a surfeit of them ; but in that case nature will 
 provide just as it does in other cases, and the superfluity 
 will be got rid of by disuse. One might ask Sir John, 
 again, how about the borrowed debauchery of " opinion " 
 and " bankrupt," and why he did not pay back this gold 
 of Achan at once and stick to "deeming" (he has the 
 verb elsewhere) and " bench-breaking " ? 
 
 Wilson and So, too, the second of the group, Thomas or Sir 
 terms'" Thomas Wilson, undoubtedly indulges too far in his de- 
 nunciation 1 of "ink-horn terms" (a fashionable phrase of the 
 time, obviously enough metaphored), by which he does not 
 so much mean Latinisms as technicalities, foreign words 
 generally, archaisms, and, in fact, all Aristotle's %eva as 
 opposed to his Kvpta. Once more, the demurrer has to 
 be put, "If you are going to reject all these, how are you 
 to enrich your vocabulary? How are you to avoid the 
 fatal ' stationary state ' ? " Before Wilson's death there 
 was born a certain William Shakespeare, not the least of 
 whose weapons of supremacy was the absolute equanim- 
 ity, and the unfailing resource, with which he borrowed, 
 made, revived, anticipated new and old vocabulary, using 
 technicalities in such a fashion that innocent folk think he 
 must have been of the various crafts, coining words like 
 " unwedgeable," the parallels to which at this day make 
 prudish critics gasp and gibber ; borrowing, like the very 
 spendthrifts of his fellow -dramatists, and spending the 
 benevolences he levies without stint of degree, or reck 
 of consequence. 
 
 And yet, once more, there is the excuse for Wilson 
 that excess in any one direction of this kind of xenomania 
 is undoubtedly dangerous and offensive ; that excess in 
 all kinds of it would be positively loathsome if only (to 
 keep precisely to our special sheep) that the rhythm 
 resulting would be too composite and not enough 
 symphonic. 
 
 1 Art of Rhetoric, Bk. iii. "Sir" Thomas by the custom and courtesy of 
 literary history. The D.N.B. un-knights him.
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 119 
 
 For it would be alike uncritical, unhistorical, and The excuses, 
 unjust to neglect the fact that there was, at the time 
 especially, considerable excuse for this touchiness or 
 touch-me-not-ishness on the part of scholars, jealous of 
 the honour and welfare of English. The fifteenth century 
 was not long past, and the fifteenth century (with the 
 earlier sixteenth following it in its doubtful course) had, 
 as has been said, been the time of what are called in 
 French literary history the grands rhetoriqueurs of what 
 is called in English literary history " aureate diction." 
 This had to be brought within reasonable limits. It was 
 not desirable that English should follow the French 
 patterns of Chastellain and Robertet to the hardly 
 caricatured jargon which (on suggestion from Geoffroy 
 Tory) Rabelais has preserved for the laughter and de- 
 lectation of eternity in the mouth of the Limousin 
 scholar. It was not desirable that people should be 
 encouraged to write lines, in verse, like 
 
 Mirror of fructuous intendiment, 
 
 and abuse, in prose, terminology like that of the early 
 Englishings of the Imitation. It was specially undesir- 
 able from our own special point of view ; for over- 
 Latinising would have destroyed the composite rhythm 
 which was being elaborated, and have substituted a dull 
 copying of the single rhythm of Latin itself. In so far as 
 the protests of Cheke and his comrades were prompted, 
 consciously or unconsciously, by the fear of this, they 
 were perfectly right ; but, as usual, they were enlarged 
 and exaggerated into generalisations, which were all but 
 perfectly wrong. 
 
 Both Cheke and Wilson justified their censures by Ascham. 
 their practices, though neither was a very great writer 
 of English. And to see what the school could do, but in 
 the matter not of mere criticism but of positive craftsman- 
 ship, one had better turn to their fellow, good Roger 
 Ascham, of whom wise judges of literature will not think 
 the worse because he, forgetting literature itself for the 
 while, uttered that blasphemy against the Morte d? Arthur
 
 120 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 which has been referred to above. The gods had not made 
 Ascham romantic ; and they had made him of not very 
 subtle wit, but a proper moral man, a Protestant (though 
 with a certain further protestantism as to the value of his 
 own skin), and a typical Renaissance scholar of the less 
 precious kind, with a thoroughly #scholarly contempt for 
 the Middle Ages. So that he simply knew not what he 
 did or said when he spoke against Malory. On the other 
 hand, he knew very well what he said and did when he 
 wrote that " English matter " the Toxophilus " in the 
 English tongue for Englishmen," and the sentence more 
 than sets off the other as far as his literary balance-sheet 
 is concerned. 
 
 That Ascham's style, however simple-looking, is, as 
 usual, " not so simple as it looks " is sufficiently shown by 
 the very different general notions which have been held 
 respecting it and its place in the family-tree of English 
 prose style generally some making room for it in the 
 ancestry of Lyly, some in that of Hooker. As is usual, 
 again, both views are possible and arguable ; but to the 
 present writer the Hooker lineage seems by far the 
 clearest and most certain. If you take Fisher before, 
 Hooker after, and Latimer as a trace-horse running with 
 a very loose rein at the side, using also his own, Cheke's, 
 and Wilson's observations to help your vision, the origin 
 and the object of Ascham's writing will soon become clear. 
 To begin with, he is under the ostensibly, but by no 
 means really, or at least wholly, contradictory influences of 
 the rhetorical system that of employing the traditional 
 technical methods of accomplishing and heightening prose 
 and the principle of being unflinchingly " English." 
 The mother-tongue may learn how to spend her money, 
 but she must not borrow ; she may make new furniture 
 out of her own wood, cook the products of her fields and 
 farms and fish-ponds in new ways, but not import out- 
 landish goods or foreign delicacies. Thus you will find 
 in Ascham curious and (one is bound to say) rather 
 artificial rhetorical arrangements, like the parallel contor- 
 tions (to get homceoteleuton) of the passage about the
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 121 
 
 causes of not shooting, 1 and a practically universal aiming 
 at balance ; but, side by side with these, you will find an 
 abundance, and almost a superabundance, of the intensest 
 English ornament of all alliteration. The combined 
 rhythm that results may be estimated from the following 
 passages : 
 
 It is your shame (I speak to you all, you young gentlemen of 
 England) that one maid should go beyond you all in excellency of 
 learning and knowledge of divers tongues. Point forth six of the 
 best given gentlemen of this court, and all they together show not so 
 much good will, spend not so much time, bestow not so many hours 
 daily, orderly, and constantly, for the increase of learning and know- 
 ledge, as doth the Queen's Majesty herself. Yea, I believe, that 
 beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, 
 she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than some 
 prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week. And 
 that which is most praiseworthy of all, within the walls of her privy 
 chamber, she hath obtained that excellency of learning to understand, 
 speak, and write both wittily with head, and fair with hand, as scarce 
 one or two rare wits in both the universities have in many years 
 reached unto. Amongst all the benefits that God hath blessed me 
 withal, next the knowledge of Christ's true religion, I count this the 
 greatest, that it pleased God to call me to be one poor minister in 
 setting forward these excellent gifts of learning in this most excellent 
 prince ; whose only example if the rest of our nobility would follow, 
 then might England be for learning and wisdom in nobility, a 
 spectacle to all the world beside. But see the mishap of men ; the 
 best examples have never such force to move to any goodness, as 
 the bad, vain, light, and fond have to all illness. 
 
 There is not much alliteration here, though a paragraph 
 lower down will show both it and the Fisherian doublets. 
 The actual passage above (which no doubt Ascham 
 polished as best he could, to make the flattery of the 
 substance more agreeable to its subject) is, if any one will 
 examine it, singularly well arranged as to accumula- 
 tion of short with long sentences (Ascham elsewhere 
 sometimes rather abuses short ones). And in individual 
 instances the cadence, though far from elaborate, is very 
 
 well-sufficing. It opens with a fourth paeon, " It is your 
 
 1 " Young children use not ; young men . . . dare not; sage men . . . 
 will not ; aged men . . . cannot," and so for a dozen clauses more. 
 (Toxophilus, ed. Arber, p. 48.)
 
 122 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 shame " ; and though for the most part it requires none 
 but dissyllabic or trisyllabic feet to scan it, there are a 
 fair number of paeonic sprinklings throughout 
 
 Although, therefore, Ascham's rhythm is not, as a rule, 
 very elaborate or delightful, and though both the allitera- 
 tion and some of the classical tricks are occasionally 
 overdone, it must be pretty obvious that there is here, 
 first, the foundation, and not a little of the actual struc- 
 ture, of a general style with good working and fair 
 ornamental qualities ; secondly, the possibility of much 
 further development in both directions. There is already 
 balance the first great instrument of rhythm ; and there 
 is, in the longer sentences, an approach to that undulation 
 that substitution of a curve made of minor and con- 
 trasted curves for sharp " roof-of-the-house " ascent and 
 descent which in no very long time Hooker was 'to 
 master. For much in the Schoolmaster Ascham deserves 
 well, in almost the highest degree, of English scholarship, 
 especially for his prescription of translation and retransla- 
 tion from and into Latin undoubtedly the surest (if not 
 the only) way to master English writing. 1 But in himself, 
 and as an example, he deserves even more. I always have 
 thought, and always shall think, that the titles of " Father 
 of this," " Father of that," in literature, are delusive and 
 rather puerile. But if they are to be admitted, I should 
 certainly assign that of " Father of English Prose " rather 
 to Ascham than to Wyclif, 2 in regard to whom it is very 
 nearly absurd, or to More, who (some people really seem 
 to forget it) wrote the Utopia in Latin, and did not in 
 anything else (for the Richard III. has been wildly 
 over-praised, and the Pamphlets are mostly abuse or 
 
 1 The late Mr. Charles Neate, who was not only an economist and poli- 
 tician, but an excellent scholar in both ancient and modern languages, was 
 once examining the upper forms of one of the larger Tudor grammar-schools. 
 He commented on the goodness of the' English in the papers, and asked if 
 the subject was regularly taught. The headmaster told him that it was not, 
 but that he and his senior classical assistant were very particular about trans- 
 lation. " I thought so," said Neate, "and there's no way like it." 
 
 2 As to Chaucer, see above, p. 75. But you can "have. many fathers" 
 in this sense, and Chaucer is father in a stage further back, while Wyclif is 
 hardly so in any.
 
 FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 123 
 
 v 
 
 technical logomachy) do much of real importance in 
 English. 
 
 For one of More's pamphlet-opponents, however, and 
 for the first of Wyclifs successors, a very great position, 
 if not exactly as an original writer, has sometimes been 
 claimed. 
 
 I have, I think, seen it stated somewhere that William Tyndaie. 
 Tyndale founded the rhythm and cadence of the English 
 Bible. This is a great claim, and it has to be examined. 
 To some extent it must be admitted offhand ; for Tyn- 
 dale's versions of the New Testament and of the Penta- 
 teuch were the first in English l since Wyclifs (with which 
 they have very little in common), while with the later 
 versions (comparison of all of the most important of which, 
 save the " Bishops'" of 1568, is facilitated by Bagster's 
 English Hexapld) his connections are very close indeed. 
 Let us take as an instance a short but fine and well- 
 known passage Rom. xiii. II, I2. 2 
 
 Here there is no evidence that Tyndale had as much 
 as seen Wyclif; while it is perfectly obvious that all 
 his four successors have seen Tyndale. The Vulgate has 
 given Wyclif "praecessit " for 7r/>oe/njrez/, and he takes it 
 rather literally and uninspiredly. Tyndale, with the Greek 
 before him, tries (for him rather lamely) " is passed," and 
 
 1 I put aside, as derivative and not capital in literature, the otherwise 
 interesting Scots version of Purvey by Nisbet (S.T.S., 3 vols. 1901-5). 
 
 2 Wye. (spelling only modernised, missing suffixes bracketed, and obsolete 
 words or parts of -words italicised). For now our health is near[er] than when 
 we believedif. The night went before, but the day hath nighed, therefore cast 
 we away the works of darkness, and be we clothed with the armours of light. 
 
 Tyn. For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night 
 is passed, and the day is come nigh. Let us therefore cast away the deeds 
 of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. 
 
 Cranmer [?] (the "Great"). For now is our salvation nearer than when 
 we believed. The night is past, the day is come nigh. Let us therefore 
 cast away the deeds of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. 
 
 Geneva. For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed it. The 
 night is passed, and the day hath come to us : let us therefore cast away the 
 deeds of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. 
 
 Rheims. For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The 
 night is passed, and the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works 
 of darkness and do on the armour of light. 
 
 A. V. For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The 
 night is far spent, the day is aj; hand : let us therefore cast off the works of 
 darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.
 
 124 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 though there is an evident discrepancy between this and 
 the next words, the Englishmen who got the " Great " 
 Bible almost literally out of the fire at Paris, and the hot 
 gospellers of Geneva, and the reactionaries of Rheims 
 obediently take it from him. It is true that the Author- 
 ised Version, with that extraordinary inspiration which 
 belongs to it, arrives at the huge improvement both in 
 sense and sound of " is far spent," but the rest of the 
 passage is still Tyndalian. 
 
 More remarkable still is the beginning of the next 
 chapter. 1 Wyclif has a very weak and clumsy rendering, 2 
 not worthy of the Vulgate. 3 But Tyndale sees at once 
 the advantage given by the opening Greek pronoun, and 
 grasps it : " Him that is weak in the faith receive unto you." 
 Coverdale has the sense to keep it exactly, and the Great 
 Bible (which is largely Coverdale) ditto. Geneva restores 
 " take " for " receive," and Rheims, putting in an unneces- 
 sary "And him," which the Vulgate does not authorise and 
 the Greek only permits, omits " the " before " faith." The 
 Authorised Version, reverting wisely, for it makes better 
 rhythm, to " receive," omits " unto," which, considering the 
 " re " of " receive," seems unnecessary. The whole " cast " 
 in all five and in the " Bishops' " is Tyndale's. Nor is it 
 in mere word-for-word selection that there is this disciple- 
 ship. I have no ecstatic affection for the " B. Refor- 
 mation " and its martyrs ; and I began this detailed 
 enquiry certainly with no prejudice in favour of Tyndale. 
 His original work, though my friend Professor Ker may 
 be right in pleading that it is a little less foul-mouthed than 
 the ordinary Billingsgate of the pious rebels and their 
 equally pious and equally foul-mouthed adversaries, has 
 no very special quality. It is rather like Fisher dis- 
 playing a certain rudimentary rhetoric learnt from Latin, 
 with many groups of synonyms and so forth. But as a 
 translator he certainly caught and rendered the rhythm of 
 Hebrew and of the " common " Greek in a most remarkable 
 
 1 rbv 5 affBfvovvra r-rj iriffTti 
 
 2 " But take ye a sick man in belief." 
 
 3 " Infirmum autem in fidem assumite."
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 125 
 
 fashion ; and in both cases (for it is scarcely necessary 
 now to rebut the silly and unscholarly depreciation of 
 the latter dialect as " bad " Greek) he administered a 
 sovereign cordial to English. 
 
 Of Tyndale's colleague, successor, and (as one may The Prayer- 
 call it) literary executor, Coverdale, and of their followers 
 in the work of translating the Bible until the Authorised 
 Version, it will probably be better not to speak till we 
 come to that Version itself, at the beginning of the next 
 chapter. But something should be added here on the 
 almost equally remarkable accomplishment and example 
 given to English prose rhythm by the slightly younger 
 Book of Common Prayer. The version of the Psalms 
 therein included has been preferred by some to that in 
 King James's book ; but this is a fallacy, partly one of 
 affection, from the familiarity of this beautiful composition 
 in all states and conditions of life, and partly one of 
 want of distinction. The Prayer-Book version is better 
 for " singing or saying " its original purpose ; l it is not 
 better to read. But when we think of the Prayer-Book 
 as a model of style and a treasury of rhythm, we usually 
 and rightly think of its Collects, Prayers, and other similar 
 exercises. That the matter of these is to a large extent 
 taken from Missal and Breviary is, of course, a matter 
 equally of course ; but, as I have so frequently pointed 
 out, even literal translations require genius in the trans- 
 lator to carry with them any of the formal beauties of 
 style especially of rhythm and these are sometimes 
 very far from literal translations, or indeed translations at 
 all. Their singular and almost inimitable beauty 2 has 
 been admitted by all competent judges, and by some 
 
 1 Its extraordinary beauty for these purposes is well known. "The 
 
 rivers | of the flood thereof | shall make glad | the city | of God " is one of 
 a dozen examples which simply offer themselves in the Psalms for the day 
 on which I write this note. 
 
 2 I believe the late Bishop Dowden of Edinburgh, who was no mean 
 hand at such things himself, and was one of the most widely-read liturgical 
 scholars in the kingdom, used to say that nobody had ever quite caught the 
 tone except Miss Christina Rossetti, in Time Flies and The Face of the 
 Deep. I certainly had always thought so myself, and indeed may have to 
 some extent put my own words into his mouth.
 
 126 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 entirely impartial ones. There has been a tendency to 
 assign the authorship as far as such a thing can be 
 assigned to one man to Cranmer. Some special points 
 alleged, such as the combination of " Saxon " and Latin 
 words, are, as we have seen, generations older, and were 
 used by almost all serious prose writers of the time. 
 Nor do I, in such original work of the Archbishop's as I 
 have read, see anything very distinctly pointing to this 
 achievement. The Preface of the " Great " Bible of 
 1540 is certainly very good, and an example from it 
 might be given ; but, except in a certain " quietism " of 
 style which is rather suggestive of Hooker than of the 
 Bible, its rhythm does not remind me much of the 
 Collects. Of course the shortness of these documents as 
 wholes invites, and in fact compels, brevity of clause and 
 sentence (Cranmer's own work is rather inclined to long 
 sentences), and, to any good craftsman, must suggest an 
 adroit use of balance. But brevity has the Scylla and the 
 Charybdis of obscurity and of baldness ever waiting for it ; 
 and balance those of monotonous clock-beat and tedious 
 parallelism. The ship is safe through all these in such 
 things as the exquisite symmetry of the Absolution 
 (which might be strengthened in substance, but could 
 hardly be bettered in form) at the very opening, as the 
 quiet dismissal to repose of the Prayer of St. Chrysostom, 1 
 as the incomparable sentences of the Burial Service, or as 
 such triumphs of symphony in miniature as the Collects 
 
 1 This very remarkable piece, which, I believe, was taken straight from 
 the Greek, not only allows itself to be scanned with unusual confidence, but 
 makes it, in a still more unusual manner, possible to observe some method in 
 the music : 
 
 Almighty | God, | who hast given | us grace | at this time j with one | 
 accord | to make | our common | supplications | unto thee, | and dost promise | 
 that when two | or three | are gathered | together ] in thy Name-| thou wilt 
 grant | their requests : | Fulfil now, | O Lord, | the desires | and petitions | 
 of thy servants | as may be most | expedient | for them, | granting us | in 
 this world | knowledge | of thy truth, | and in the world | to come | life | 
 everlasting.
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 127 
 
 for the First Sunday in Advent, for Palm Sunday, and 
 Trinity Sunday ; and as (greatest in subject, not least in 
 power), the Prayer of Consecration in the Eucharist. 
 
 Very few readers or hearers of this last, unless actually 
 informed of the fact, would think or believe that while 
 the first part is, if not entirely original, a cento of new 
 and old, the later part the actual consecration is almost 
 word for word from the Canon Missae, with a few unim- 
 portant omissions, such as that (doctrinally unimportant, 
 but not so aesthetically) of feebly rhetorical amplifica- 
 tions, like in sanctas et venerabiles manus suas after 
 accepit, and praedarum before calicem. The whole is to 
 the ear like a seamless coat to the eye, and though I 
 must, for obvious reasons, decline to quote and scan it 
 here, I believe the actual music of its rhythm must have 
 communicated itself to millions of fit ears, whenever they 
 were allowed to hear it. 
 
 One famous figure of the Reformation, who is also one Latimer. 
 of the most remarkable of English writers at this or any 
 time a writer who, with Bunyan, Defoe, and Cobbett, 
 composes a class, and something like a " first class," 
 all to itself in general English prose style, hardly requires 
 much notice here. Hugh Latimer was a born orator of 
 the vernacular type ; and it is almost impossible to read 
 two sentences of any work of his without reading them 
 (or rather speaking them) aloud. Now, of course, the 
 ancients applied rhythmical tests to oratory itself indeed, 
 they mostly based their studies of rhythm in prose on 
 oratorical examples. But whether it be the case with 
 other modern nations and languages does not in this place 
 matter it certainly is the case with English, that elabor- 
 ately " periodised " oratory is not liked, and therefore not 
 common. Everybody has heard that " Burke was a dinner- 
 bell," and most people know the remark, attributed to 
 
 Fox, that if a speech read well " it must have been a 
 
 bad speech." This may be exaggerated, and we shall 
 find some later instances where spoken prose has remark- 
 able rhythm ; some even where written prose has to be 
 spoken in order to bring the rhythm out. But Latimer's
 
 128 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 is not of this type. It is with the tags of erudition 
 obligatory at the time, and with a few flights of conven- 
 tional rhetoric mainly conversational and narrative, with 
 the breaks, the continuances, the even or accidented flow, 
 necessary to narrative and conversation. These are not 
 the conditions that bring out the phenomena that we 
 are studying ; and though there is everywhere in the 
 universally known passage describing his childhood and 
 his father's farm, in the grim suggestion of the " judge's 
 skin " as a desirable sign and token in England, in a 
 hundred others perfect command of natural flow, it 
 would be rather out of place to apply scansion-tests to it. 
 Profane Until a comparatively short time ago the " profane " 
 
 translations. EH za bethan translations (though they had been greatly 
 tasted by men like Southey and Lamb, a hundred years 
 since, and though at least two of them, North's Plutqrch 
 and Florio's Montaigne, have always been quasi-classics) 
 were mainly regarded as curiosities. The late Mr. Henley, 
 however, made them the object of one of his numerous 
 enthusiasms enthusiasms the " strong contagion " of 
 which, on other and especially younger men, exceeded 
 anything that is on record for the past two generations at 
 least, if not for much longer. The handsome reprints of 
 them which he superintended made some of them at least 
 much better known ; and very high estimates of their 
 position and influence in English prose have sometimes 
 been put forth. These redemptions of past neglect are 
 apt to be a little extravagant, and extravagance in this 
 particular respect has not been wanting. But undoubtedly 
 they are often delectable ; and, as a whole, from the 
 historical point of view they are never negligible. Under- 
 taken as they were by their authors under the double 
 influence of reverence for the classics and a not inconsider- 
 able taste for the moderns, together with an eager desire 
 to expand English literature ; and received as they were by 
 their readers in a similar temper, they could not but exer- 
 cise influence. And that influence in the circumstances, 
 though of a somewhat mixed, could not fail to be of a 
 powerful and in many ways beneficial kind. Its greatest
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 129 
 
 benefit, though at the same time its not least danger, was 
 the flood of new language and phrase that it poured into 
 our lexicon. The fertile and irregular Elizabethan genius, 
 avid of conceit, impatient of drab-coloured and pedestrian 
 style, found, in the large number of new things and 
 thoughts that it had to interpret, an excuse for borrowing 
 and coining word and phrase in a literally extravagant 
 fashion and degree. 
 
 The general characteristics of these translations have 
 been well summed up by Mr. Whibley, 1 but may be 
 abbreviated still further, into a single short sentence, as 
 extreme vernacularity in diction tempered by the sense of 
 exotic matter and thought. It is doubtless true that in 
 many cases (some say most) they did not even trouble 
 themselves to go to Latin, far less Greek, originals, but 
 contented themselves, as North notably did, with French 
 or Latin half-way houses. Their productions are a store- 
 house of the quaintest slang, and exhibit word-coinage 
 and word-importation of a kind which would make a 
 certain class of modern critics scold if they were atrabilious, 
 cover their faces with the skirts of their garments if they 
 were sensitive, and apologise for the criminal author if 
 they were good-naturedly officious. Yet something of 
 the ancient form comes direct, or through the French and 
 Latin ; and of necessity far more of the ancient thought 
 and matter passes into the English, with a subtly varying, 
 though not wholly transforming, influence. Most of 
 them came before Euphuism, and Lyly was himself 
 probably a better scholar than most. But if they did 
 not exercise any direct influence on his manner he 
 certainly represents, to no small extent, the same in- 
 fluences that acted on them. Only the variety of their 
 originals, and the fact that French has never very much 
 affected balance of an obvious kind, saved them from 
 the teasing over-indulgence in that rhetorical trick which 
 is at once one great characteristic, and one serious draw- 
 back, of his style. 
 
 1 In his introductory notice to the examples of them contained in Sir 
 Henry Craik's English Prose, vol. i. pp. 335 and 349. 
 
 K
 
 130 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 Lyiyand Indeed, high as is the importance of Lyly in the 
 
 Euphuism, ,. r-r-i-i. t i 11 -i. j 
 
 its failure in history of English prose style generally, it drops very 
 rhythm. much in that of prose rhythm. From his plays it might 
 
 be possible to pick out some things of merit and interest, 
 
 as here : 
 
 End. O fair Cynthia, | why do others | term thee | unconstant, | 
 whom I have ever | found | immovable? | Injurious | time, | corrupt] 
 manners, | unkind | men, | who, finding | a constancy | not to be 
 matched | in my sweet | mistress, | have christened | her with the 
 
 name | of wavering, | waxing, j and waning ! | Is she inconstant that 
 keepeth a settled course, which since her first creation altereth not 
 
 one minute in her moving ? There is nothing | thought | more 
 admirable | or commendable, | in the sea, | than the ebbing j and 
 flowing ; | and shall the moon, | from whom | the sea | taketh | this 
 
 virtue, | be accounted | fickle | for increasing | and decreasing ? 
 Flowers in their buds are nothing worth till they be blown ; nor 
 blossoms accounted till they be ripe fruit ; and shall we then say 
 they be changeable, for that they grow from seeds to leaves, from 
 leaves to buds, from buds to their perfection ? then, why be not 
 twigs that become trees, children that become men, and mornings 
 that grow to evenings, termed wavering, for that they continue not 
 at one stay ? Ay, but Cynthia being in her fulness decayeth, as not 
 delighting in her greatest beauty, or withering when she should be 
 most honoured. When malice cannot object anything, folly will ; 
 making that a vice which is the greatest virtue. What thing (my 
 mistress excepted) being in the pride of her beauty, and latter minute 
 
 of her age, that waxeth young again ? Tell me, | Eumenides, | what 
 is he | that having | a mistress | of ripe years, | and infinite | virtues, | 
 great honours, | and unspeakable | beauty, | but would wish | that 
 she might | grow tender again ? | getting youth | by years, | and 
 never-decaying | beauty | by time ; | whose fair face | neither the 
 summer's | blaze | can scorch, | nor winter's | blast | chap, | nor the 
 numbering | of years | breed altering | of colours. Such | is my | 
 sweet Cynthia, | whom time cannot touch, | because | she is divine, | 
 nor will offend, I because I she is delicate. I O Cynthia, I if thou
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 131 
 
 shouldest always | continue | at thy fulness, | both gods | and men | 
 
 would conspire | to ravish | thee. | But thou, to abate the pride of 
 our affections, dost detract from thy perfections ; thinking it sufficient 
 if once in a month we enjoy a glimpse of thy majesty ; and then, to 
 increase our griefs, thou dost decrease thy gleams ; coming out of 
 thy royal robes, wherewith thou dazzlest our eyes, down into thy 
 swath clouts, beguiling our eyes ; and then 
 
 The whole here l is very far from contemptible, and 
 the fragments scanned are sometimes of great and subtle 
 beauty, though the effect is still nearly always traceable 
 to balance and antithesis of a less obtrusive and mechanical 
 character than in Euphues itself. In that actual book the 
 everlasting see-saw of antithetic balance almost inevitably 
 spoils the rhythm which it is intended to provide. 
 One is tempted, and perhaps the temptation need not be 
 resisted, to arrange the sentences in parallel sticks? 
 
 If the course of youth had any The unhappiness of man's con- 
 respect for the staff of age, dition. 
 
 Or the living man any regard to Or the untowardness of his 
 the dying mould, crooked nature, 
 
 We would with greater care than Or the wilfulness of his mind, 
 
 when we were young, Or the blindness of his heart, 
 
 Shun those things that should That in youth he surfeiteth with 
 grieve us when we be old : delights, 
 
 And with more severity direct Preventing age, 
 
 the sequel of our life Or if he live, continueth in 
 
 For the fear of present death. dotage, 
 
 But such is either Fighting death. 
 
 This passage, not to be unfair, I have taken almost 
 at random, without seeking for more exaggerated examples, 
 though (as every one with even a tincture of Euphues 
 his various exercitations will admit) it would be easy to 
 find instances much more glaring. With what fatal ease 
 the fantastic " unnatural-history " parallels, which we find 
 in Spanish as far back at least 3 as the Arch-priest of Hita, 
 lend themselves to this arrangement as of a kind of 
 
 1 Part unscanned, that the reader may read it with his scansion. 
 
 8 Which themselves (as again could best be shown by different coloured 
 inks or forms of type) are constructed of parallel sub-clauses, phrases, and 
 even single words and letters. 
 
 3 And much earlier in Latin ; but in any vernacular ?
 
 132 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 chunky parquetry (it is too coarse for mosaic) is also 
 matter of common knowledge ; and it should occur, 
 without much prompting, to any one that there is in 
 it more than the suggestion, not merely of Bacon's 
 sententious style in the later part of the same generation, 
 but of Dr. Johnson's, nearly two hundred years later still. 
 In all there is the same drawback. There is rhythm ; 
 but its perpetual correspondences, more or less clumsily 
 fulfilled, defeat the purpose, fail to pay the debt, of the 
 elusive, undulating, and continually various harmony of 
 prose. 
 
 But it is only fair to give another passage, much 
 better and pretty free from the most teasing peculiarities 
 of the author, whether that the general influence of his 
 original (for in this part he is sometimes almost trans- 
 lating Plutarch) has a good effect on him, or for ome 
 accidental cause : 
 
 There are three things [ which cause | perfection | in man | 
 Nature, | Reason, | Use. Reason | I call | Discipline, | Use | Exer- 
 cise, j if any one | of these branches | want, | certainly | the Tree | 
 of Virtue | must needs | wither. | For Nature without Discipline is 
 of small force, and Discipline without Nature more feeble : if Exercise 
 or Study be void of any of these, it availeth nothing. For as in 
 tilling of the ground and husbandry there is first chosen a fertile soil, 
 then a cunning sower, then good seed ; even so must we compare 
 Nature to the fat earth, the expert husbandman to the schoolmaster, 
 the faculties and sciences to the pure seeds. If this order had not 
 been in our predecessors, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and whomso- 
 ever was renowned in Greece for the glory of wisdom, they had 
 never been eternished l for wise men, neither canonised, as it were, 
 for Saints among those that study sciences. It is therefore | almost 
 
 sign | of God's | singular | favour | towards him | that is 
 with all I these qualities, I without the least I of the which | 
 
 evident 
 endued 
 
 man | is most miserable. | But if there be any one that thinketh Wit 
 not necessary to the obtaining of Wisdom, after he hath gotten the 
 way to Virtue by Industry and Exercise, he is an Heretic, in my 
 opinion, touching the true faith of learning. For if Nature play not 
 her part, in vain is labour ; and, as I said before, if Study be not 
 employed, in vain is Nature. Sloth turneth the edge of wit : Study 
 
 1 This excellent word ought to have been kept, for it supplies an invaluable 
 rhythmical variant on "eternised." I have here, as I may do elsewhere, 
 in part divided without scanning the feet. The purpose is similar to that 
 indicated above.
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 133 
 
 sharpeneth the mind : a thing be it never so easy is hard to the 
 idle ; a thing be it never so hard is easy to the wit well employed. 
 
 And most plainly we see in many things | the efficacy | of industry | 
 and labour. 1 
 
 But, again excepting the plays, where there are short 
 prose passages of no small beauty, it must be repeated 
 that Lyly contributes little directly to the advancement 
 of English prose rhythm. Indirectly, however, virtue is 
 to be counted unto him even here, and in not so very 
 indirect a way. For, after all, whatever be the foibles of 
 Euphuism, it stands for the first deliberate and elaborate 
 attempt at making prose ornamental, and bringing it into 
 definite decorative order. It corresponds, therefore, to 
 some extent with the earlier labours of Wyatt and Surrey 
 and their successors in regard to verse, though the parallel 
 must not be forced too far. It is, on the whole, a failure, 
 though an interesting failure ; but it is also at the worst 
 a symptom and forerunner, at the best a kind of early 
 stage, of the magnificent developments which, almost at 
 the same time, were being reached in a different way by 
 Hooker which were shortly, or before very long, to be 
 reached in the same way, bettered in good points and 
 reformed in bad, by Raleigh and Greville and Donne, by 
 the strange co-operative triumph of the Authorised Version, 
 and by the final achievement of Milton and Taylor and 
 Browne. 
 
 1 It is curious and worth noting that this dignified and excellently 
 rhythmical passage which will be recognised by all educated persons as a 
 commonplace, in the good sense, of ancient thought, and may suggest to some 
 the palmary expression of it by the comic poet Simylus is followed by one 
 of Lyly's wildest debauches of mere snipsnap alliterative antithesis, fed by 
 "unnatural history," stock-classical anecdote, and vernacular phrase. 
 
 In the scansions above there are several things that the observant reader 
 will, it is hoped, also note, such as the final diminuendo of foot-length 
 dochmiac, paeon, amphibrach (5, 4, 3) ; v. inf. App. III. He may try 
 some of the rest for himself, and may also consider the objection, " Is there 
 
 not an attempt at Latin 'numerous' prose here? Does not "industry and | 
 
 labour" remind us of esse vide\atur! I myself am of opinion that, by this 
 time at any rate, the "strong nativity" of English had overborne Latin 
 rhythm both in prose and verse ; but others think, and may think, differ- 
 ently. ( V. sup, p. 9 note, and inf. p. 1 40 note. )
 
 134 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 Hooker. His From what we know of Lyly it is pretty certain that 
 
 achievement. ,. . r i 1^.1. ^i 
 
 any peculiarity of his, whether in thought, matter, or 
 style, whether in poetry or prose, was deliberate and 
 conscious. From what we know of Hooker it is positively 
 certain that, except a partly scholarly and partly pious 
 determination to do his best on a great subject, little 
 thought tending to mere ornamentation, and none at all 
 of personal display, entered into his style-making. Indeed, 
 it is probably by far the best way to take him as a 
 representative of the plain style originally regularised by 
 Ascham, but sublimated to its utmost possible by in- 
 dividual genius and by the warm atmosphere of the time. 
 Study and the most intelligent study of Latin and of 
 Greek must indeed have gone to the formation of his 
 pellucid and almost Attic grace and simplicity ; but that 
 this grace was in any way aimed at as separate* and 
 conscious " beautification " is unthinkable. Yet to what 
 an extraordinary height never yet trodden by any 
 English writer of prose he raised himself, must be per- 
 ceived almost at once, by any one fitted with the necessary 
 organs, when the Ecclesiastical Polity is read. One-sided 
 admirers of the flamboyant have indeed objected to this 
 style as too simple ; and have contrasted with its archi- 
 tectural or even sculpturesque character the almost baroque 
 luxuriance, tangled with tropic bloom of phrase, which 
 they find in Jeremy Taylor. The wiser taste relishes and 
 admires both, but certainly does not give the lesser place 
 to Hooker. Let us take a passage : and I do not think, 
 though many others might easily be selected, a better can 
 be found than that which I took, but did not fully analyse 
 from the present point of view, nearly a quarter of a 
 century ago in writing the History of Elizabethan 
 Literature : 
 
 As therefore | man | doth consist | of different | and distinct | 
 parts, | every part | endued | with manifold | abilities | which all | 
 have their several | ends | and actions | thereunto | referred ; | so 
 there is | in this great | variety I of duties j which belong | to men, j
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 135 
 
 that dependency | and order | by means whereof, | the lower | sus- 
 taining | always | the more excellent, | and the higher | perfecting | 
 the more base, | they are | in their times | and seasons | continued | 
 with most exquisite | correspondence. | Labours | of bodily | arid 
 daily | toil | purchase | freedom | for actions | of religious | joy, | 
 which benefit | these actions j requite | with the gift | of desired | 
 rest | a thing | most natural | and fit | to accompany | the solemn | 
 festival | duties | of honour | which are done | to God. | For if | 
 those principal | works | 01 God, | the memory | whereof | we use | 
 to celebrate | at such times, | be but certain | tastes | and says, 1 | as 
 it were, | of that final | benefit | wherein | our perfect | felicity | and 
 bliss | lieth | folded | up, 2 | seeing | that the presence | of the one | 
 doth direct | our cogitations, | thoughts, | and desires | towards [ the 
 other, | it giveth | surely | a kind | of life, | and addeth | inwardly | 
 no small [ delight | to those | so comfortable | anticipations, | espe- 
 cially | when | the very out | ward 3 countenance | of that | we presently | 
 do | represented, | after a sort, | that also | whereunto | we tend ; | 
 as festival | rest | doth that | celestial | estate | whereof | the very 
 heathens | themselves, j which had not | the means | whereby | to 
 apprehend | much, | did | notwithstanding | imagine | that it must 
 needs | consist | in rest, | and have therefore [ taught | that above | 
 the highest | movable | sphere | there is no thing | which feeleth | 
 alteration, | motion, | or change ; | but all things | immutable, | 
 unsubject | to passion, | blest | with eternal | continuance | in a life | 
 of the highest | perfection, | and of that complete | abundant | 
 
 1 I.e. assays. 
 
 2 The "up" can be included in a dochmiac if any one likes, "lieth 
 
 folded up." 
 
 3 This is one of the pieces (see App. III.) where I think "word-splitting" 
 
 better. But " the very out- ward " is quite possible.
 
 136 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 sufficiency | within | t itself | which no | possibility | of want, | maim, | 
 or defect | can touch. 1 
 
 Rhythm- Here there are divers things, besides the extraordinary 
 
 sweep. inevitableness of the scansion, to be noticed two especially. 
 
 The first which if any one should not notice, it is to be 
 feared that he had better not waste any more time in this 
 study is the adaptation of the periodic structure of 
 classical sentence to a large periodic rhythm ; the abrupter 
 and more intrusive parallelism or balance, as we find it 
 in Lyly and others, being widened, softened, and moulded 
 out into great undulating sweeps of phrase, rising, hovering, 
 descending, with a wing-like motion. The particular flights 
 in this special instance are rather long, but Hooker else- 
 where shows himself perfectly well acquainted with the 
 advantages of associating long with short sentences. 
 Probably he did not do so here because he felt, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, that very short ones would give 
 an abrupt and staccato effect, instead of the soothing 
 sweetness, long drawn out, which suited his subject, 
 and fingering The second device is a complementary one ; but one 
 which would not have occurred as a complement to any one 
 but a man of genius, or a fortunate student possessing 
 exactly what Hooker did not possess, a museum of models 
 before him. It consists in using what may be called the 
 " title-word " of the subject " Rest " as a sort of key- 
 note or dominant of the music a pivot or stepping-stone 
 of the motion. The word itself, even independently of, 
 but much more with, its meaning, is an important and 
 beautiful one, 2 and the critical certainty of its being pro- 
 
 1 There is hardly a passage behind us which scans itself so "straight-off" 
 as this ; and there will not be many such in front of us. 
 
 2 It is therefore scarcely in the least surprising that the Revisers who 
 touched nothing that they did not deface and defile intruded the unnecessary 
 word "sabbath" before it in the famous passage of Heb. iv. 9, "There remaineth 
 therefore a rest to the people of God." Here they do not even deserve the 
 miserable encomium of composing a better "crib" for illiterate clergy than 
 the Authorised ; for there is only one word in the Greek, (ra^/Jcmcr^j, and I 
 never knew that -ayxos meant "rest," while I have always been told that 
 <r6.ppa.TQv did. And King James's men had already cared for the Greekless, 
 abundantly and much more exactly, by putting " a keeping of a sabbath " in 
 the margin.
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 137 
 
 nounced with a strong pause (or " rest " in the other sense) 
 by any good speaker or reader, gives it additional power. 
 
 Hooker, it will be observed, does not bring it in too 
 soon. He does not, in particular, begin with it, as a 
 writer given to the lower and showier rhetoric might have 
 been tempted to do. He does not bring it in very often : 
 lest the delicate effect might be weakened. The first 
 sentence is without it ; the mind's ear is kept expectant 
 of the particular example of " variety, dependency, order," 
 that the author is thinking of. But it comes at the very 
 centre or summit of the second, and satisfies the past 
 expectation, while prompting more. In the third sentence 
 the word again hides itself, " folded up " (as in the actual 
 phrase) with " that final benefit wherein our perfect felicity 
 and bliss lieth," as in a paraphrase or parable. But it 
 emerges again at the last, basing the beginning and 
 supporting the end of the first clause, while ushering in 
 the magnificent definition of Rest itself, which completes 
 and concludes the paragraph. 
 
 In another famous passage, that on the sanctions of 
 Law, Hooker varies his sentence -lengths much more; 
 indeed, the whole context is much longer, and does not 
 attempt the same elaborate but intense harmony. He is 
 arguing here, and driving his argument home, not indulging 
 in relevant but half-dreamy meditation and illustration. 
 But he uses the second device of repetition of the principal 
 word more than ever. Here the word "law" itself how 
 different-sounding from "rest"- is employed daringly, 
 hammered in, and redoubled with an almost rattling peal 
 of argument, as aggressive as Hooker's can ever be. 
 Sixteen or seventeen times in a page does the word recur, 
 and yet there is no monotonous effect ; each hammer-blow 
 drives in a successive and different rivet, and yet the 
 whole is no mere clatter, but a martial music. It is, 
 however, perhaps less characteristic than the following 
 one of the most exquisite " Evening Voluntaries " of 
 English prose : 
 
 That there is somewhat higher than either of these two, no 
 other proof doth need than the very process of man's desire,
 
 138 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 which being natural should be frustrate, if there were not some 
 farther thing wherein it might rest at the length contented, which 
 in the former it cannot do. For man doth not seem to rest satisfied, 
 either with fruition of that wherewith his life is preserved, or 
 with performance of such actions as advance him most deservedly 
 in estimation ; but doth further covet, yea oftentimes manifestly 
 pursue with great sedulity and earnestness, that which cannot 
 stand him in any stead for vital use ; that which exceedeth the 
 reach of sense ; yea somewhat above capacity of reason, some- 
 what divine and heavenly, which with hidden exultation it rather 
 surmiseth than conceiveth ; somewhat it seeketh, and what that 
 is directly it knoweth not, yet very intentive desire thereof doth 
 so incite it, that all other known delights and pleasures are laid 
 aside, they give place to the search of this but only suspected 
 desire. If the soul of man did serve only to give him being in 
 this life, then things appertaining unto this life would content him, 
 as we see they do other creatures ; which creatures enjoying what 
 they live by seek no further, but in this contentation do show a 
 kind of acknowledgement that there is no higher good which doth 
 any way belong unto them. With us it is otherwise. For although 
 the beauties, riches, honours, sciences, virtues, and perfections 
 of all men living, were in the present possession of one ; yet 
 somewhat beyond and above all this there would still be sought 
 and earnestly thirsted for. So that Nature even in this life doth 
 plainly claim and call for a more divine perfection than either or 
 these two that 'have been mentioned. 
 
 Sidney. It would be strange if, in such a period, there were not 
 many other examples of beautiful style and appealing 
 rhythm ; but they are mostly casual, and seldom long 
 upheld. It was reserved for the next century availing 
 itself at once of the rhythmical accomplishment of Hooker 
 and of the extended vocabulary of Lyly and the trans- 
 lators to produce the absolute masterpieces of the kind. 
 But it may be expected that something should be said 
 of Sidney, who has had very great praise from some, 
 and who has even been regarded as a rescuer of English 
 prose style from the polluting extravagances of Euphuism. 
 As a matter of fact, Sir Philip, an admirable master of 
 metre, came rather too soon to be a master of prose 
 rhythm ; and at times he indulged in fashions of writing 
 (I am told, directly derived from Spanish) which were 
 more fatal to a really beautiful cadence than Euphuism 
 itself. Here is a well-known example :
 
 v FIRST MATURITY ASCHAM TO HOOKER 139 
 
 To my dear Lady and Sister, the Countess of Pembroke. 
 
 Here have you now, most dear, and most worthy to be most 
 dear, lady, this idle work of mine ; which, I fear, like the spider's 
 web, will be thought fitter to be swept away than wove to any other 
 purpose. For my part, in very truth, as the cruel fathers among 
 the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster, I 
 could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness 
 this child which I am loth to father. But you | desired me | to do 
 it, | and your desire | to my heart | is an absolute | commandment. 
 | Now | it is done | only for you, | only to you ; | if you keep it | 
 to yourself, | or commend it | to such friends | who will weigh 
 errors | in the balance | of good will, | I hope, | for the father's 
 sake, | it will be pardoned, | perchance | made much of, | though 
 in itself | it have | deformities. | For indeed for severer eyes it is 
 not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self 
 can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, 
 most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast 
 as they were done. In sum, a young head, not so well stayed as 
 I would it were, and shall be when God will, having many fancies 
 begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have 
 grown a monster, and more sorry might I be that they came in than 
 that they gat out. But his chief safety shall be the walking abroad ; 
 and his chief protection the bearing the livery of your name, which, 
 if much good will do not deceive me, is worthy to be a sanctuary 
 for a greater offender. This say I because I know thy virtue so ; 
 and this say I because it may be for ever so, or, to say better, 
 because it will be for ever so. 
 
 Most people, I suppose, will admit without difficulty 
 that this is not quite a success. The poet's hand breaks 
 
 out sometimes. " Now it is done only for you, | only 
 
 to you," though dangerously choriambic in suggestion, is 
 pretty, and need not be excluded from prose, which is 
 more tolerant of repeated identical tetrasyllable feet than 
 of shorter ones. I do not hate parenthesis or epexegesis, 
 but " most dear, and most worthy to be most dear " seems 
 to me a rather vile phrase ; and as for the jingle-jangle 
 of the last sentence, it is worthy of Don Adriano de 
 Armado himself. Of course there are some good things 
 in the text of the Arcadia, but the sentences are, as a rule, 
 heavy and clumsy, ill-constructed in themselves and ill- 
 compacted into paragraphs. The Apology for Poetry is 
 much better ; but it is, as it ought to be, in a plain
 
 140 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP, v 
 
 argumentative style, admitting of little ornament. There 
 are few things of the kind more curious than the com- 
 parison of Sidney and his friend Greville, who was 
 certainly not Sir Philip's superior as a poet, but who, 
 living later, was enabled to catch, even somewhat before- 
 hand, the amazing elevation and inspiration of prose style 
 and prose rhythm that set in with the seventeenth century. 1 
 
 1 The Collects and other portions of the Book of Common Prayer have 
 been naturally selected by Mr. Shelly (v. sup. p. 9 note), and perhaps by 
 others, as examples of that Latinising of English rhythm which I have (ibid. ) 
 rather declined. I should myself be quite ready to leave the matter to an 
 impartial umpire on this very ground. Even where there is apparent corre- 
 spondence in collocation of syllables, it seems to me that, as in other cases 
 where I have pointed the same thing out, these obstinately group themselves 
 in different English y^?/. In fact, the "classical metre" phenomena in verse 
 reproduce themselves in prose, except that the liberty of the latter permits 
 the situation to be saved.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE AUTHORISED VERSION AND THE TRIUMPH OF 
 THE ORNATE STYLE 
 
 The coming of harvest The Authorised Version of the Bible The 
 sixtieth chapter of the book of Isaiah A.V., Septuagint, and 
 Vulgate scanned Discussion of each Earlier English versions 
 for comparison : Coverdale The " Bishops' " Remarks on 
 them Geneva and Douay A New Testament example, the 
 Charity passage of /. Cor. : atrocities of the Revisers The 
 older versions here Results of scrutiny Observation on use 
 of synonyms Individual writers Raleigh Greville Donne 
 The palmiest days Bacon (?) Burton Beauties and faults 
 Milton Disputes about his prose, and their causes Close 
 connection of Milton's style with oratory Some of its faults 
 Partial foot-analysis Taylor : the general high estimate of him 
 Examples Rhythmical characteristics Browne : Coleridge's 
 charge against him Special character of his charm, and special 
 treatment of it required The finale of Urn Burial Interim 
 observation on overture The close of the Garden of Cyrus 
 Short passages from Religio Medici From the Hydriotaphia 
 From the Garden of Cyrus The Letter to a Friend And 
 Christian Morals. Others perforce omitted. 
 
 THE processes and processions of the two harmonies The coming 
 march generally in parallel lines ; but these parallels are of 
 often, like the bars of the instrument of that name, not 
 longitudinally coincident and co-extensive. Just as the 
 period of rhythmical pupillage which has sometimes been 
 very unjustly dismissed as one of mere doggerel, and 
 which extended from Wyatt to Gascoigne, prepared the 
 way for the outburst of pure and finished poetry which 
 followed the Shepherd's Kalendar, so the livelier, longer, 
 more abundant and more various period of prose exercise 
 
 141
 
 1 42 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 which we have surveyed in the last chapter led up, not 
 merely to the single, precocious, and to a certain extent 
 isolated, masterpiece of Hooker, but to an immense 
 development a very little later. 
 
 The Author- It was almost inevitable that this development should 
 
 disclose a certain parting of the ways. As soon as a 
 deliberately ornate style comes into existence, there will 
 be many who cannot reach it, and some, perhaps, who 
 would not if they could. Now rhythm is the chief and 
 the most difficult form or constituent of ornateness ; 
 and it must therefore be among the first to be abandoned, 
 failed in, or not aimed at. We shall have something, 
 nay much, to say of the " plain-stylists " of the earlier 
 seventeenth century, but we must first attack its chief 
 glories perhaps the principal documents (at least until 
 the nineteenth century) of our present quest. And let 
 us " begin with Jove," as was bidden of old. 
 
 The sixtieth One of the highest points l of English prose is probably 
 
 chapter of the rea ched in the Authorised Version of the sixtieth chapter 
 
 book of Isaiah, r 
 
 of Isaiah. So utterly magnificent is the rendering that 
 even those dolefullest of creatures the very Ziim and 
 Ochim and lim of the fauna of our literature the 
 Revisers of 1870-1885, hardly dared to touch it at all. 2 
 To compare it with the same passage in other languages 
 is a liberal education in despising and discarding the idle 
 predominance of " the subject." The subject is the same 
 in all, and the magnificence of the imagery can hardly be 
 obscured by any. Of the Hebrew I cannot unfortunately 
 speak, for at the time when I knew a very little Hebrew 
 I knew nothing about literary criticism ; and now, when I 
 know perhaps a little about literary criticism, I have 
 entirely lost my Hebrew. But I can read it with some 
 
 1 For the analysis of another, the " Love " passage of the Canticles, I may 
 refer to the book cited in Preface. In its quarter of a century of life it has 
 had the good fortune to please good wits, I believe, including even some who 
 dislike the division of words. 
 
 2 With their irremediable and essential folly of pottering and meticulous 
 blot-making (for it is "mendation" not "emendation"), they have, however, 
 pluralised "peoples," where the s is not an improvement, and substituted 
 "nations" for "the Gentiles," thereby, if not hamstringing, certainly not 
 enhancing, the beauty of the rhythm. The two later verses blazed vision 
 even into their blindness, and they left them alone.
 
 vi THE AUTHORISED VERSION 143 
 
 critical competence in Greek and in Latin, in French and 
 in German ; and I can form some idea of what its 
 rhetorical value is in Italian and in Spanish. That any 
 one of the modern languages (even Luther's German) can 
 vie with ours I can hardly imagine any one, who can 
 appreciate both the sound and the meaning of English, 
 maintaining for a moment. With the Septuagint and 
 the Vulgate it is different, for the Greek of the one has 
 not quite lost the glory of the most glorious of all 
 languages, and has in places even acquired a certain 
 additional uncanny witchery from its eastern associations ; 
 while as for the Vulgate Latin " there is no mistake 
 about that" But we can meet and beat them both. 
 Let us take the overture and the crowning passage in the 
 three, also taking (though with all due ceremony of 
 apology) the liberty of dividing and quantifying all. 
 
 Arise, | shine ; | for thy light | is come, | and the glory | of the A.V., Septua- 
 
 ~-_~- ~ _ - ~ ~ & int . an d 
 
 Lord | is risen | upon thee. || For, behold, | the darkness | shall Vulgate 
 - ~ ~ - _ - ~ ~ ~^- scanned. 
 
 cover | the earth, | and gross | darkness | the people ; | but the Lord | 
 
 shall arise | upon thee, | and his glory | shall be seen | upon thee. || 
 And the Gentiles | shall come | to thy light, | and kings | to the 
 brightness | of thy rising. | 
 
 The sun | shall be no more | thy light | by day ; | neither | for 
 brightness | shall the moon | give light unto thee : | but the Lord | 
 shall be to thee | an everlasting light, | and thy God | thy glory. || 
 Thy sun | shall no more | go down ; | neither | shall thy moon | 
 withdraw herself: | for the Lord | shall be | thine everlasting light, | 
 and the days | of thy mourning | shall be ended. | 
 
 yap crov TO <ws, KCU 
 
 (T | dvaTTaA/CV. | 'ISoV | (TKOTOS | KO,Av|l/'t J^JV, 
 l yVO</>OS I 77* fdvr), I 771 8f (T j <^aV1JCTTai I KVptOS, I Kal Tj Soa 
 
 avrov 7rt (re | 6<J>OrjcrfTai. | KOI iropfva-ovrai \ /JacriAets | TO) <^co 
 o-ov, I Kal fdvrj ry Xa^TrporrjTi crov.
 
 144 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 Kai OVK ecrrcu | trot eri \ 6 r/Aios | tts <a)s | rj/JLtpas, | ovSe aVaToAr/ 1 
 
 OrcAryVI^S | <^WTtl (TOV | TTJV VVKTtt, I aAA' e'cTTat (TOt | KV/31OS | <(2s 
 
 atamov I Kai 6 0eos | S6a crov. | Ov yap Sixrerai | 6 ^Atos croi, | /cat 
 17 <rf\r)vr) | (rot OVK | (K\ei\j/cf \ carat yap | croi Kvpios \ <a>s aiwi/tov, 
 /cat 
 
 Surge, | illuminare ! | Jerusalem! | quiavenit | lumen | tuum | et 1 
 gloria | domini | super te | orta est. | Quia ecce | tenebrae | operient | 
 terram | et caligo | populos ; | super te | autem | orietur | Dominus | 
 et gloria | ejus [in te | videbitur. | Et ambulabunt | gentes | in 
 lumine tuo | et reges | in splendore | ortus | tui. | 
 
 Non erit tibi | amplius [ Sol ad | lucendum | per diem, | nee 
 splendor | lunae | illujminabit te : | sed erit tibi | Dominus | in 
 lucem | sempiternam | et Deus | tuus [ in gloriam | tuam. 1 4 Non 
 occidet | ultra | Sol tuus | et luna | tua | non minuetur : | quia erit | 
 tibi | Dominus | in lucem | sempiternam | et complebuntur | dies | 
 luctus | tui. 
 
 Discussion of Here the Seventy undoubtedly cut the worst figure, 
 though they may have the best language : and it might 
 be only fair to give a passage or two from either of the 
 Wisdoms (of Solomon or of Sirach) to show what they 
 could do when they were more at home in matter. 
 They seem to have been dazzled by the imaginative 
 magnificence of the passage. The mere repetition of 
 (j)(ori^ov, though it loses a chance, need not be, and is 
 not, bad in itself; but it certainly is not assisted by the 
 necessary reoccurrence of <&J9, which the Latin also does 
 not escape, but which we luckily do. They have been far 
 too prodigal of short syllables ; and though, of course, 
 others may not agree with my footing or quantifying of 
 dvaTTa\Kev, no arrangement will get rid of the six con- 
 secutive shorts. 2 <TOTO<? and 71/0^09 is not a pretty 
 
 1 As to these and some other apparent false quantities, I am not afraid of 
 any real scholar mistaking me. The quantification had become partly, if not 
 largely, accentual, and elision is optional or absent. 
 
 2 Unless, which is not impossible, oi or tirl was " stressed up" for the time. 
 I have, however, not attempted here, as I have in the Latin, a partly accentual
 
 THE AUTHORISED VERSION 145 
 
 assonance, and the rhymes of fyavrja-erai, and o^^o-erat are 
 even less appropriate. Nor, yet again, is the homceo- 
 teleuton of (fxori crov and Xa/LtTrpor^rt crov at all agreeable, 
 at least to my ears when they remember the close of the 
 Platonic Apology. Still, it is grand (especially the last two 
 verses), but it is very much grander in the Vulgate. The 
 substitution of Surge, illuminare for the double <&mbu is 
 a great gain, for you get the varied lights of the vowels 
 and the varied cadence of the feet. The dissyllabic 
 possessives tuum, tuo, tut, are a clear improvement on the 
 cases of a-v, especially when it comes after the nouns ; and 
 mere homoeoteleuton is avoided, except in the case of 
 sempiternam and tuam, which hardly counts. But the 
 greatest improvement is in the general rhythm, where 
 St. Jerome may have had the advantage in individual 
 genius, and must have had that of the old " Itala " before 
 him, as well as thorough familiarity with a dialect 
 certainly better in relation to classical Latin than that 
 of the Alexandrian Jews (though, as above observed, not 
 to be scoffed at) was to classical Greek. 
 
 Something, nay a good deal, of this improved rhythm 
 has passed into the Authorised Version, of course through 
 its predecessors * as well as directly ; but the further 
 advance is astounding. In the very opening we have the 
 benefit of that glorious vowel i which, in perfection 
 (though the Germans have something of it in their et), 
 belongs only to English. 2 Its clarion sound is thrice re- 
 peated in five words ("thy" has it slightly modified and 
 muffled in note) with indifferent consonants preceding and 
 following in each case, and contrasted in the strongest and 
 most euphonious manner possible with the long <?'s of "Gbry 
 of the L0rd," while the vigour of the contrast shades off 
 
 scansion, because the actual or conventional accents are there to serve. 
 And they will do no small service if called upon. But classical Greek was 
 more tolerant of accumulated shorts than English, witness the proceleusmatic 
 as a foot, and occasional consecutive tribrachs as combinations. 
 
 1 For these see above (pp. 123-126) and below (pp. 149-152), in the 
 latter case the actual passage. 
 
 2 The attempt to make it diphthongal simply betrays false pronunciation 
 at is beautiful, but it is not the same as *'. 
 
 L
 
 146 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 into the duller resonances of " rz'sen upon fhee" I 
 have spoken of the bad effect of CT/COTO? and ryvo<j>os. 
 Tenebrae and caligo are an immense improvement on these, 
 but they cannot compare with the further gain of the 
 retention and amplification in "darkness" and "gross 
 darkness." In turn of phrase it is the same : a dozen 
 examples could be given, but one will suffice the 
 unimaginable betterment of " splendor /#nae il/minabit te " 
 (good as it is in itself) by " for brightness shall the moon 
 give light unto thee." 
 
 But it is in the total rhythm and harmonic ordonnance 
 that the game is most surely ours. That we borrowed 
 both fiddle and rosin to some extent has been admitted ; 
 but we can pay the debt, and keep our own increase, and 
 be rich beyond counting. The opening clause, " Arise, 
 shine ; for thy light is come," is a possible verse ; but it is 
 not an obtrusive one, and any suggestion of it being 
 verse at all is at once quenched by the cadence of the 
 second half. It is the same with the next, and 
 throughout ; that inevitable nisus towards metre which the 
 ancient critics had noticed being invariably counteracted, 
 neutralised, and turned into " the other harmony " by 
 succeeding phrases which achieve the prose suggestion 
 and negative the poetic. As for the second section 
 (vv. 19 and 20) I do not know how many thousand 
 times in my life (the number is not poetical) I have said 
 these verses over to myself with ever-fresh perception of 
 their inexhaustible sweetness and splendour. Nowhere, 
 perhaps, 1 is the enormous advantage which absence of 
 inflection and its identical terminations confers better 
 illustrated. We have escaped the continued -ov and -erat 
 
 1 The book (Isaiah) is, of course, full of such things. Perhaps the next best 
 is "Thine eyes | shall see | the King | in his beauty ; | they shall behold | the 
 land | that is very | far ; off. Almost every important vowel-sound (except 
 
 long a) utilised; hardly one except i repeated, for "shall" is too much in 
 \ 
 
 thesis to equal " land," and the foot arrangement unsurpassable. The mere 
 contrast even of the trochaically ending first half, and the spondaic or double 
 monosyllabic second, is a miracle.
 
 vi THE A UTHORISED VERSION 147 
 
 of the Greek, the wearisome am's and urn's of the Latin. 
 We are free to devote ourselves to that co-ordination of 
 varied rhythm and vowel-music which belongs to prose. 
 The fluctuation of the phrase -movement, the slight 
 touches of alliteration here and there, the soft trochaic 
 endings not too frequently sweetening the bolder iambs 
 or monosyllables, are ambrosial ; and the final phrase of 
 an anapaest and two third paeons gives a dying close l 
 that no verse can outgo that very little verse can equal. 
 
 The actual scansion requires a few more remarks. 
 That of the Greek and that of the Latin are both mere 
 sporting attempts, and subject to what each scholar 
 troweth. I would only interject a caution that Aristo- 
 telian remarks or Quintilianist rules must be largely 
 " salted " both for the Seventy and for St. Jerome. Each 
 version must have been subject to accentual influences, to 
 which in the former case the actual accents are very puzzling 
 guides, while in the latter we have no guides at all. 
 
 But on the approximate correctness of the English, 
 while " open to offers " of improvement, I must on the 
 whole set up my rest. It certainly brings out the beauty 
 of the passage pretty exactly, as it presents itself to my 
 ear ; and what is more, it admits of some not too rash 
 inspection of the means by which these results are 
 obtained. It will be observed that the total rhythm is 
 distinctly iambic, as if the artist 2 (whether consciously or 
 unconsciously matters not one straw) had been driven by 
 the double keynote of sense and sound in the first word 
 to " rising " rhythm. But he attains the necessary prose 
 variety by taking what we may call " the greater iambic 
 compass" iamb itself; anapaest ( = iamb with a pre- 
 liminary short) ; amphibrach (iamb with a short breath of 
 suffix) ; and lastly, paeon, where, in all but the first form of 
 
 1 If they had followed the a.va.ir\i]dj]aovrai of the Greek (one of its best 
 words by the way, as indeed the whole verse is one of its best verses) or the 
 foniplebuntur of the Latin, actum esset. " Fulfilled " is a good word, but it 
 would be fatal here. "Completed" is not a bad one, but it would be an 
 outrage. " Finished " would not break the rhythm, but it would very much 
 ; mpoverish the sound. " Ended " is the " lonely word " that would do to end 
 with, and they got it, no matter (v. inf.) whence. 
 
 2 A composite one ; but, again, no matter for that.
 
 148 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 paeon, which he never uses, the effect of the foot is iambic 
 expanded in one way or another. 1 And thus you find 
 that, throughout the extract, the vast majority of the feet 
 used are iamboid that is to say, they begin with a short 
 syllable and proceed to a long one. But if this were 
 universal it would contravene the great law of prose 
 rhythm, which is Variety ; and so he provides a certain 
 small number of trochees to check the monotony, and 
 some of those precious monosyllabic feet which give 
 English an actual advantage, both in verse and prose, over 
 Latin. And yet further, it may and should be observed 
 that the arrangement and companionship of feet is not 
 only different from that of verse, but impossible in it. 
 Take for instance the frequent association of anapaest and 
 amphibrach. Now, as perhaps a few of the few probable 
 readers of this book may remember, I am not myse*lf a 
 great partisan of the amphibrach in the scansion of English 
 verse ; while others (of no doubt equally good or better 
 judgment) allow and welcome it. Either side may be 
 right. But it is incontestable that you must adopt one 
 scansion or another ; you cannot, in verse, combine both. 
 
 The black \ bands | came oiver 
 
 The Alps : and | their snow 
 
 may be amphibrachic or anapaestic ; but if you try to 
 combine both measures, as in 
 
 The black bands | came o|ver the Alps | and their snow, 
 the result will be the most hideous cacophony and jolt. 2 
 There is no such thing in " of the Lord | is risen," 
 anapaest + amphibrach, or in | " the people : but the 
 Lord," amphibrach + anapaest. 
 
 1 The symbols will exhibit the correspondence more clearly oculis 
 fidelibus: Iamb, ^ . Anapaest, w |w . Amphibrach, ^ |w. Fourth 
 
 paeon, ^^|w ; while second poeon, w ww , is iamb and two shorts, and 
 third, C|yy |w, iamb with short on each side. 
 
 2 Some would, of course, prefer even bacchic or antibacchic rhythm 
 
 w or w . But to my ear these feet in English verse always, and in 
 
 prose generally, slip into the others.
 
 vi THE A UTHORISED VERSION 149 
 
 But, it may be said, this is merely academic ; you Earlier English 
 ought to compare, if you compare at all, with the compTi. 
 previous English versions. With all my heart. It is not Coverdaie. 
 of much use here to take Wyclif, 1 and Tyndale did not 
 translate Isaiah. Coverdale's first version, and the 
 " Bishops'," which represents an improvement on the 
 " Great " (itself to a large extent Coverdale's revised), and 
 which was the ostensible " basis " of the Authorised 
 Version, will suffice, with well-deserved glances right and 
 left at Geneva and Douay. 
 
 The first glance at Coverdaie 2 will show that the mira- 
 culous beauty of the 1 6 1 1 version owes but little to him : 
 
 And therefore get thee up betimes, for thy light cometh, and the 
 glory of the Lord shall rise up upon thee. For lo ! while the dark- 
 ness and clouds covereth the earth and the people, the Lord shall 
 shew thee light, and his glory shall be seen in thee. The Gentiles 
 shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness that springeth 
 forth upon thee. . . . Thy sun shall never go down, and thy moon 
 shall never be taken away ; but the Lord himself shall be thy ever- 
 lasting light, and thy God shall be thy glory. The sun shall never 
 be thy daylight, and the light of the moon shall never shine unto 
 thee ; for the Lord himself shall be thine everlasting light, and thy 
 sorrowful days shall be rewarded thee. 
 
 The " Bishops'," more than thirty years afterwards, and The 
 with more than one or two versions between to help, does 
 not improve much upon this, except at the very close : 
 
 Get thee up betimes and be bright, O Jerusalem ; for thy light 
 cometh, and the glory of the Lord is risen up upon thee. For lo ! 
 while the darkness and cloud covereth the earth and the people, the 
 Lord shall shew thee light, and his glory shall be seen in thee. 
 The Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness 
 that springeth forth upon thee. . . . The sun shall never be thy 
 daylight, and the light of the moon shall never shine upon thee ; 
 but the Lord himself shall be thine everlasting light, and thy God 
 shall be thy glory. Thy sun shall never go down, and thy moon 
 shall not be hid : for the Lord himself shall be thine everlasting 
 light, and thy sorrowful days shall be ended. 
 
 1 The Wyclifite versions were unprinted ; and though occasional re- 
 semblances (on which some lay stress) occur in the Authorised Version, they 
 are probably due either directly to the Vulgate, or to Rheims-Douay. 
 
 2 Ed. Bagster (London, 1847). I may perhaps be allowed to remark that 
 any apparent belittlement of versions (except the Revised) other than the 
 Authorised is merely "comparative" and not at all "rascally."
 
 ISO A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 It will be observed there is really not much difference 
 between these, and that the version, which was published 
 just when poor " Miles quondam Exon." (as he used regret- 
 fully to sign himself in his last decade) was dead or dying, 
 owes a very great deal to that which he himself (with 
 some slight help from Tyndale no doubt, but very im- 
 probably in this place) had brought out thirty-three years 
 before. It is a curious question whether the homelinesses 
 and wants of polish in both, especially in the first, would 
 have struck us much if we had not had the polished 
 perfection of the Authorised Version. But the actual 
 comparison is most curious. The Old Guard of " Every- 
 thing depends upon the meaning " had better get them 
 up betimes, and have their weapons ready, if they want to 
 prove that there is any difference in meaning here. But 
 " oh ! the difference to us " of the expression ! Neither 
 Coverdale nor his half-colleagues, half-supplanters, have 
 thought of that simplest of deletions, the reform of the 
 Remarks on repeated up-upQt\. Compare again the rhythmical insig- 
 nificance of " the darkness and cloud[s] covereth the earth 
 and the people " with the splendour achieved by the very 
 simple rhetorical sleights of parallelism and repetition in 
 " darkness covers the earth, and gross darkness the people." 
 Value, if you can do it, the enormous advantage of " And 
 the Gentiles " as well as " of thy rising " as contrasted with 
 " that springeth forth on thee." Weigh the gain of " no 
 more " and of the excision of those otiose " nevers," and 
 the burnishing up of the parallels in the second part of the 
 extract, and the artistry of the omission of " shall be thy 
 glory," and the substitution of " of thy mourning " for " thy 
 sorrowful " rhythmically. And lastly, note how, though 
 the force of the matter seems to have put at once in 
 
 Coverdale's hand the magnificent phrase " For the Lord 
 himself 1 | shall be | thine everlasting light," with the 
 
 1 It may well be said that the omission of "himself" later was something 
 of a loss though, I think, cause may be shown for it. And the " Bishops," 
 though I do not mean to insinuate that they were "Bishops of wood," 
 deserve " croziers of gold " for having found out " ended," though they 
 could not lead up to it properly.
 
 vi THE AUTHORISED VERSION 151 
 
 power of the great dochmiac shooting it up, and the swell 
 of the paeon l slowing its downward glide though the 
 " Bishops " actually hit (like Geneva and Douay) upon 
 "ended," neither Coverdale nor his banded brethren 
 could finish the phrase accordingly, and left it to King 
 James's men to put the apple of gold in a picture of 
 more than silver. 
 
 But Geneva and Douay have they no part in the Geneva and 
 accomplishment ? Let us see. 
 
 Undoubtedly they have. Both had preceded the 
 Authorised Version in the important substitution of 
 " Arise " for " Get thee up." But neither had thought of 
 " shine," which is almost more important, phonetically 
 and rhythmically ; Geneva having " be bright " and 
 Douay " be illuminated," which latter is a rather disastrous 
 result of following the " authentical " Vulgate. Geneva 
 has " for thy light is come," but Douay spoils " for " into 
 " because." " The glory of our Lord," which the one set 
 of refugees gave, is not so good as " the glory of the 
 Lord," which the other kept. The great " light " which 
 the ultra-Protestants supplied to King James's men is the 
 opposition or amplification of "darkness" and "gross 
 darkness " with the distribution over " earth " and 
 " people." The ultra- (or infra-) Catholics kept this 
 distribution, but their servile ascription to the Vulgate 
 obliged them to " mist " (for caligo\ which is quite 
 definitely inferior to " gross darkness " for " stylistic " and 
 rhythmical purposes. Both have " brightness of thy 
 rising " instead of the clumsier earlier versions ; but 
 Geneva does not improve it by " rising up " in the " sun 
 and moon " passage. Both fail to reach the rhythmical per- 
 fection attained by the Authorised Version, Geneva having 
 " the brightness of the moon shine upon thee " and " day- 
 light in thee." Douay has the wrong word in " sorrow," 
 though the right in "ended," while the Genevans had 
 
 1 Anti-word-splitters can have another dochmiac if they like. It will be 
 good, but not, I think, so good. We want a pause on the light-scattering 
 
 "last-" after the rush up of "thine ever-," or if anybody prefers a long 
 " thine," the two anapaests of " shall be thine " and " everlast-."
 
 152 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 already " found the chrysolite " in " the days of thy 
 mourning shall be ended." It is therefore quite fair to 
 say that the Authorised has very numerous and very 
 particular indebtednesses to these, in one case very 
 questionable friends, in the other unquestioned enemies. 
 But it is also fair to add that, if it borrowed good things 
 wherever it found them, it bettered them, made them 
 from promising parts into a perfect whole, and so also 
 made them its own. 
 
 A New Testa- Let us, for another example, take what is perhaps the 
 finest passage, rhythmically, of the New Testament, as 
 " Arise, shine " is not far from being the finest of the Old. 1 
 The mess which those unfortunate Revisers made of this 
 
 passage of 
 i Cor. xiii. : 
 atrocities of 
 
 the Revisers, is notorious. Being utterly ignorant of English literature 
 they altered " glass " to " mirror," because, I suppose, 
 they were clever enough to know that " glass " was 'not 
 used for mirrors in the Apostle's days, and not clever 
 enough to have heard of Gascoigne's " Steel Glass " in 
 the days of the " Authorised " translators themselves. By 
 recurring to " love," instead of " charity " 2 (an error, even 
 from the strictest " crib " point of view, for it leaves the 
 English reader uncertain whether ayaTrr) or epws is meant), 
 they have at one blow cut the whole rhythm of the 
 passage to pieces, and substituted ugly jolting thuds for 
 undulating spring-work. Because they thought a cymbal 
 did not " tinkle " but did " clang," they spoilt the sound of 
 a whole phrase, and very doubtfully improved its sense, by 
 altering to " clanging " (they had not even the sense to 
 try " clashing," and I wonder why they did not use 
 " bang "). Because of the absurd objection to synonyms 
 which has been, and will be, pilloried, they spoilt the 
 euphony by making both the " prophecies " and the 
 " knowledge " be " done away." They had not even the 
 courage to be literal, where it would have been again 
 in place, by rendering " through a mirror," and they 
 
 1 I should like to have tried some horn Job ; but space cries " No ! " 
 
 2 The excuse commonly made for them that the word " charity " has 
 been "degraded" is ridiculous. The exchange recognises, and therefore 
 confirms, the " degradation." For " loving-kindness " there might have been 
 a faint excuse ; for " love," none.
 
 vi THE AUTHORISED VERSION 153 
 
 deliberately underwent the curse of Mr. Pendennis's 
 schoolmaster by rendering Be " and " instead of " but " in 
 the final clause. 
 
 The translators of the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, The older 
 and seventeenth centuries being all good Englishmen, 
 and faithful speakers of English, avoided most of these 
 horrors though Tyndale, the " Great " Bible, the 
 " Bishops'," and, of course, Geneva, probably out of mere 
 Protestant " cussedness," spoilt the passage by " love." 
 It was all the more to the credit of 161 1, that, following 
 the Vulgate, Wyclif, and Rheims, and adopting a term 
 which had a perfectly well recognised ecclesiastical 
 meaning, they went back to " charity," and so got a 
 matchless word, the very sound -equal of the Greek 
 ayaTrrj, and capable of exercising musical dominance 
 through the whole. The opening verse is curiously close 
 throughout, with "If" in Wyclif and Rheims (the Vulgate 
 having st) for " Though." Every older version I have com- 
 pared has "tinkling." But the Authorised Version exhibits 
 afresh the solace of its excellent boldness by substituting 
 " to be burned " for " so that I be burned," which in 
 various forms all the others have, and which, though 
 really the same in meaning, is more literal from the 
 Greek. The gain in expression will strike every one, save 
 a Reviser who has not yet gone to his own place. The 
 comparison of the versions of ev alvijfiari, which the 
 Vulgate keeps unchanged (in enigmate\ is most striking. 
 No English translator seems to have dared " in an 
 enigma," and the Revisers have only dared " in a riddle " in 
 the margin, though " through a mirror as in riddles " would 
 have been better than their actual blunder. They kept 
 the " darkly," though they threw away the " glass," and 
 though " darkly " is certainly not a literal version of the 
 Greek. Wyclif had, curiously enough, written " by a 
 mirror in darkness." But Tyndale has " in a glass, even 
 in a dark speaking " ; the " Great," ditto ; Geneva, 
 practically the same, with " and " for " even " ; and the 
 " Bishops' " repeats Tyndale and the " Great " ; while 
 Rheims itself, for once forsaking the Vulgate, gives " by
 
 154 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 a glass in a dark sort" I fancy this was one of the 
 instances when our men said to themselves, Fas ab hoste, 
 and triumphantly bettered their borrowing by the adverb. 
 " In a glass darkly " has been one of the literary catch- 
 words of the English language ever since, and I am 
 afraid that Dante would have branded it on the Revisers' 
 souls with very unpleasant additions, circumstances, and 
 location, though we may " charitably," if not " lovingly," 
 hope that this last would have been recorded in the second 
 Cantica, not the first. 
 
 Results of But, because of these admitted borrowings, is it there- 
 scrutiny. f ore f a j r J.Q di sm iss the Authorised Version itself as a 
 mere mosaic, or to revive, to its discredit, the endless 
 chatter about " plagiarism " that is so familiar in the 
 mouths of the " tydifs, tercelets, and oules " of criticism ? 
 Most certainly not ; and indeed the very use of the word 
 " mosaic " gives the user helplessly into the hand of 
 his enemies, and the Book's defenders. Give any but a 
 real artist a handful of enamel cubes, and see if he can 
 make a picture out of them ! But one can carry the war 
 farther, and with greater devastation, than this. 
 
 In the first place, there are, after all, only a certain 
 number of English equivalents in phrase for a given 
 number of Hebrew, Greek, or Latin words ; and it is the 
 selection of these possibilities which is the first thing, 
 the sense that a precursor has selected aright being only 
 inferior, if inferior at all, to his own genius in selection. 
 
 But in the second and far more important place, it 
 is the combination of these selections, the additions made 
 to them, and the result achieved, which must decide the 
 matter. I have before suggested the idea of printing 
 passages in different-coloured inks, and the process would 
 here indicate the borrowings, as they are called. It 
 would then be seen at a glance, as it can now be seen by 
 moderately careful reading, that the Translators have 
 added not a little, as in the wonderful opening " Arise, 
 shine " onwards ; and that the combination of their actual 
 followings is more wonderful still. The successive earlier 
 versions are no doubt almost invariably improvements
 
 vi THE AUTHORISED VERSION 155 
 
 upon each other in combined rhythm. The advances 
 made by the Geneva people over their forerunners are 
 great ; those by Douay-Rheims on Geneva not small, 
 though counterbalanced by some fallings back ; but the 
 advance of the Authorised Version, as a whole, almost 
 distances these two last. 
 
 Of the numerous means by which these miraculous Observation 
 results are attained it would be out of place to speak here 
 at any great length. But there is one which, for reasons, 
 cannot be passed over ; it is the free employment of 
 synonyms for the same original word in different places. 
 I remember my own almost incredulous surprise when I 
 first saw fault found with this practice, by one of the 
 good people who look upon an English Bible as merely 
 a " crib " for ignorant laity and insufficiently educated 
 clergy. But I can add another memory before mentioned 
 the surprise of a foreign scholar (who not only knew 
 English literature well, but spoke and wrote the language 
 as I wish I could speak or write French or German) 
 when I myself claimed, as a special virtue of our tongue, 
 its abundance of not always exactly synonymous 
 synonyms. He seemed to think that " one thought, one 
 word " was the counsel of perfection in language ; while 
 my ideal was as many slightly varied thoughts as possible 
 for a word, and as many distinctly varied words as 
 possible for a thought. " Philologotheosophically " (as 
 Sir Thomas Urquhart might say) there is no doubt much 
 to be said on both sides, though I hold to my opinion. 
 But, even thus, from our present point of view the advan- 
 tage of synonyms and the wisdom of employing them 
 must surely be altogether beyond question. 1 Unless you 
 want absolute epanorthosis or repetition, which, though 
 occasionally effective, is very rarely desirable, it will 
 almost always happen that the English companions of 
 the same Hebrew or Greek word in one place will require 
 a different sound in the English substitute from that 
 which they demand or suffer in another. I am sure it is 
 not rash to say that a very large part of the excellence 
 
 1 The invaluable Mason (v. App. II.) saw it already.
 
 156 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 of the Authorised Version in style and rhythm is due to 
 the use of synonyms or quasi-synonyms ; and I think 
 one would be equally safe in saying that, with a rigid 
 rendering of " same word by same word," rhythmical 
 perfection is simply impossible. 
 
 The above remarks were written, almost to a letter, in 
 the shape in which it is hoped that they will appear, before 
 the newspaper correspondences and discussions 1 which 
 the anniversary of the Authorised Version called forth, 
 and therefore still more before the publication of any new 
 books on the subject. I had already, twenty years 
 earlier, 2 made some strictures, as severe as I could then 
 decently make them, on the shortcomings of the Re- 
 vised Version, and had more recently, still without any 
 view to the anniversary, but with much to the plan of 
 this book, made a fresh and independent study of* the 
 sources and parallels discussed above. I found in the 
 newspaper defenders of the Version, of course, much 
 support for my own views, and, in particular, I was 
 very glad to find a translator of proved quality like 
 Bishop Welldon taking exactly the same view of the 
 synonym-question which I had already put in the para- 
 graph above. But I found, on the other side, whether 
 among those who defended the Revised Version itself, or 
 those who wanted still further revision, 3 hardly anything 
 
 1 I myself wrote on the subject in the Glasgow Herald ; but most of the 
 text above was already written when the editor asked me for the article. 
 There is perhaps one point, a little outside our special subject, on which I 
 should add a note to this paragraph. It is sometimes said, "This is all very 
 well ; but how about the advance in scholarship, and the consequent 
 deficiency of the Authorised Version in accuracy?" I could ask, whether 
 any translation is ever "accurate"? whether true scholarship does not 
 always require recourse to the original ? But this is perhaps too wide. I 
 shall confine myself to saying that no one has ever shown me a passage 
 where any correction, in text or in translation, affects an important question 
 of faith. Even the celebrated apiraynbv business (Philipp. ii. 6) does not 
 
 I touch that. Further, it is the duty of a properly educated clergy to explain 
 . such matters. Nor need any one object to as much addition or correction in 
 marginal or foot-notes as may be thought necessary. 
 
 2 In a History of Elizabethan Literature. The first edition of this (1887) 
 appeared only two years after the completion of the Revisers' work. 
 
 3 These have since presented themselves in a company which, to borrow 
 from Captain Macheath, " I own surprised me." I shall only express a faint 
 hope that this book may help to show the impossibility of " patching " prose
 
 vi THE AUTHORISED VERSION 157 
 
 that required answer. I think it not unfair to say that 
 they were all either well-known fanatics of the new- 
 fangled ; or persons whose known grudge against, or 
 unfaithfulness to, the Church of England naturally 
 exhaled in carpings at this her greatest work, and the 
 greatest literary work (except the Latin hymns) of any 
 Church in the world ; or merely peddling pedants ; or a 
 kind of bastard representatives of the old ultra-Protestant 
 view that the Bible is in itself, as a written or printed 
 book, a kind of automatic sacrament, and had therefore 
 better be presented in the most literal fashion possible ; 
 or lastly, and strange to say, in some cases confessedly, 
 men deaf to the difference of the harmonic values. 
 That the noblest stuff is worthy of the noblest fashion 
 seems to have occurred to few ; that it is impossible to 
 have a nobler fashion than this, hardly to any ; that the 
 demand for a new Bible every century, to suit the 
 supposed " needs of the people," is a daring indictment 
 against the education of that people, scarcely to one. It 
 is true that the specious and half-informed ignorance 
 which has now, for nearly half a century, been diffused 
 among the lower classes by board-schools, and, through 
 the contamination of grammar and public schools, among 
 the middle and upper, probably has had this effect. But 
 to meet it by freshly journalised versions from generation 
 to generation is to meet dropsy by giving drink. 
 
 But foin de ces miseres-la ! So long as a single copy 
 of the version of 1 6 1 1 survives, so long will there be 
 accessible the best words of the best time of English, in 
 the best order, on the best subjects, so long will the 
 fount be open from which a dozen generations of great 
 English writers, in the most varying times and fashions, 
 of the most diverse temperaments libertines and virtuous 
 persons, freethinkers and devout, poets and prosemen, 
 laymen and divines have drawn inspiration and pattern ; 
 by which three centuries of readers and hearers have had 
 
 such as the Authorised Version. The proposal, indeed, reminds me of 
 nothing so much as of Bentley's or Pemberton's proposals for an improved 
 Milton. But the next sentence was not meant to apply to this set of persons.
 
 1 58 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 kept before them the prowess and the powers of the 
 English tongue. 1 
 
 individual It must, however, have struck people who, with some 
 
 literary knowledge, have looked over the list of the 
 English Forty-Seven, 2 that the excellence of their work is 
 certainly not due to the presence among them of many, 
 or even of any, very distinguished men of letters as such. 
 Bishop Lancelot Andrewes has indeed a bright and 
 reverend name, but it is hardly due to any great accom- 
 plishment of style on his part. And there is no other on 
 the list (not even " Mr. Savile," otherwise Sir Henry) 
 who even approaches him in this respect. The literary 
 tact shown must have been due to an extraordinary 
 / diffusion of it among the men of the time. Per contra, 
 this diffusion must have concentrated and essentialised 
 itself in others ; and we know that, as a matter of fact, it 
 did. Although the strict " Elizabethan " period was past, 
 and although the premature death of Spenser, and of 
 almost all of the first great group of dramatists, had 
 removed some masters who might well have lived into 
 Caroline days, Shakespeare (himself no long-lived man) 
 had ten years to live when the Version was begun, and 
 five when it appeared ; Bacon (why has no one contended 
 that Andrewes and the rest were merely " Rosicrucian 
 masks " for him ?) was in his glory ; and though " Eliza- 
 bethan " poetry was to show hardly the least falling-off 
 during the actual reign of James, and even during the 
 less unhappy part of his successor's, Elizabethan prose 
 was taking vast and wonderful developments. Raleigh, 
 
 1 A word or two should perhaps be given to a demurrer, sometimes raised 
 even by persons of worship. " You grumble at the Revised Version : do you 
 know that similar grumbles were, at the time, made on the Authorised ? " 
 Yes ; I know it very well, and have always known it. It would be almost 
 enough to answer, "What then ? you cannot clear B by saying that the same 
 accusation was formerly brought against A." But there is much more to be 
 said. The time was a marvellous period of creation ; it was not such a 
 marvellous period of criticism. And the sole real question is, "Can we 
 prove our charges ? " I have given some specimens of proof above : I could 
 add hundreds. 
 
 2 A parallel with the Japanese heroes of the same number, but of another 
 story, would have been a good addition to Mr. Verdant Green's famous 
 examination paper.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 159 
 
 Greville, Donne had been merely or mostly poets earlier ; 
 they now began to write prose almost more beautiful than 
 their verse ; while, during the very period of gestation of 
 the Version, two of the Three Strong Ones of purely 
 seventeenth-century prose, Browne (1606) and Milton 
 (1608), were born, and Taylor (1613) was to be but two 
 years belated. 
 
 In fragments, if hardly in long passages, of the earlier Raleigh, 
 trio the summits are already reached ; nay, the style 
 floats at condor-height " beyond the arrows, shouts, and 
 views of men " above, as it would seem, any point that 
 can be reached by mere climbing and manoeuvring. The 
 altitude of such phrasing as that of the three following 
 passages, well known as it ought to be in all cases, is 
 hardly to be reached by any " scansion." Yet by scansion 
 we may, as it were, trigonometrise it estimate what we 
 cannot reach by touch. 
 
 eloquent, | just, | and mighty | Death ! | whom none | could 
 advise, | thou | hast persuaded ; | what none | hath dared, | thou | 
 hast done ; | and whom all | the world | has flattered, | thou only | 
 hast cast out | of the world | and despised. | Thou | hast drawn | 
 together | all the far-stretched | greatness, | all the pride, [ cruelty, | 
 and ambition | of man, | and covered it | all over | with these [ two | 
 narrow | words, | Hie | Jacet. 1 )! 
 
 It is well worth notice how here there is actually the 
 strong and almost meticulously arranged balance of 
 Euphuistic antithesis in clause ; but how the Euphuistic 
 sing-song and snip-snap is entirely drowned in the marvel- 
 lous rhythmical flow of the passage, which never trenches 
 upon verse (even the consecutive anapaests do not, to my 
 ear, produce anything like a metrical effect) ; how the 
 abundant monosyllabic feet arrest and solemnise the 
 cadence, while the anapaests themselves, and the not rare 
 
 1 Jactt, short in classical Latin, is long in mediaeval, and for English 
 purposes.
 
 160 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 paeons, prevent any dragging or mumbling. There may 
 also be found in it that progression of feet in length or 
 retrogression in shortness, and that combination of different 
 trisyllables amphibrach, bacchic (or antibacchic), and 
 anapaest which I have elsewhere noticed. 1 
 
 Here is another and much longer passage, somewhat 
 less of a prose anthem, more continuous, and, as it were, 
 pedestrian (though the feet be rather of angels than of 
 men), but almost equally beautiful, and showing, if not 
 a higher flight, at any rate even greater strength and 
 holding power in the wing : 
 
 The four | complexions | resemble | the four | elements ; j and 
 the seven | ages | of man, | the seven | planets. | Whereof | our 
 infancy [ is compared | to the Moon ; | in which | we seem only | to 
 live | and grow | as plants. 
 
 The second age, | to Mercury ; | wherein | we are taught | and 
 instructed. | 
 
 Our third age, | to Venus ; | the days | of Love, | Desire, | and 
 Vanity. | 
 
 The fourth, | to the Sun ; | the strong, | flourishing, | and beauti- 
 ful | age | of man's | life. 
 
 The fifth, | to Mars ; | in which | we seek | honour | and victory ; | 
 and in which [ our thoughts | travel | to ambitious | ends. 
 
 The sixth age | is ascribed | to Jupiter ; | in which | we begin | to 
 take account | of our times, | judge | of ourselves, | and grow | 
 
 to the perfection | of our under [standing. 
 
 The last | and seventh, | to Saturn ; | wherein | our days | are 
 
 sad | and overcast, and in which | we find [ by dear | and lamentable | 
 experience, | and by the loss | which can never | be repaired, [ that, of 
 all | our vain | passions | and affections | past, | the sorrow | only | abid- 
 eth. | Our attendants | are sicknesses | and variable | infirmities ; | and 
 by how much | the more we are | accompanied | with plenty, | by 
 
 so much | the more greedily | is our end | desired. | Whom when 
 Time | hath made | unsociable | to others, | we become | a burden | to 
 ourselves : | being | of no other | use | than to hold | the riches | 
 
 we have j from our successors. | In this time | it is | when we, | for 
 the most part | (and never before), | prepare | for our Eternal | 
 
 l As one cannot be too cautious in fending off carps, let it be observed 
 that the question whether Raleigh had "affable familiar ghosts" to help him 
 in the History matters here not one straw. If it is not Raleigh's it is some- 
 body else's, and that is enough. " Words, not the man, we sing," or rather 
 measure.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 161 
 
 Habitation, | which | we pass on unto | with many sighs, | groans, | and 
 
 sad thoughts ; | and in the end | (by the workmanship | of Death) | 
 finish the sorrowful [ business | of a wretched | life. Towards 
 which we always | travel, | both sleeping | and waking. | Neither | 
 
 have those beloved | companions | of honour | and riches | any 
 power | at all | to hold us | any one day | by the glorious | promise | 
 
 of entertainments : | but | by what crooked | path | soever | we 
 walk, | the same | leadeth on | directly | to the House | of Death, 
 whose doors | lie open | at all hours, | and to all persons. | 
 
 Here, it will be observed, rhythm opens itself out 
 more, affects larger sweeps, and for that purpose extends, 
 proportionately, the compass of its feet. There are many 
 paeons, and I think, beyond all question, some dochmiacs, 
 where I have marked them. This great foot often has 
 the quivering straightness and onset of a lance in rest 
 at the charge. Note a good " procession " here, " the 
 strong, | flourishing, | and beautiful " (2, 3, 4). 
 
 Now try Greville : GreviUe. 
 
 For, | Madam, | as nourishment | which feeds | and maintains | 
 our life | is yet | the perfect | pledge | of our | mortality ; | so 
 are j these light -moved [ passions | true | and assured | notes | of 
 little natures | placed | in what great | estates | soever, j Besides | 
 by this practice | of obedience | there grow | many more | com- 
 modities. | Since | first | there is no loss | in duty ; | so as you 
 must | for the least | win | of yourself | by it, | and either | make it 
 easy l \ for you to be | unfortunate, | or at least | find | an easy door | 
 and honourable [ passage | out of her 1 | intricate | lines [ and circles. 
 Again, | if it be true | which the philosophers hold, | that virtues | and 
 vices, | disagreeing | in all things | else, | yet agree | in this, | that 
 where | there is one | tnposse, \ in esse \ there are all, | then cannot | 
 any excellent | faculty | of the mind | be alone, | but it must 
 needs | have wisdom, | patience, | piety, [ and all other | enemies | 
 
 of chance | to accompany it, | as against | and amongst | all storms | 
 a calmed | and calming | mens \ adepta. 
 
 This, it will be observed, is more like Hooker than the 
 Raleigh passages are ; indeed, Lord Brooke is of an older 
 
 1 In these two words the Grevillean that is to say, ultra-Elizabethan 
 "obscurity" may be thought to come in. But there really is no difficulty. 
 " Easy to be unfortunate "=" easy [not distressed] in your evil fortune" (cf- 
 the old jingle, "in your trouble to be troubled," etc.); while "her" is an 
 oblique reference to Fortuna Maligna herself, personified from ' ' unfortunate. " 
 
 M
 
 1 62 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 type even than Raleigh, and a much older than Donne. 
 At the same time it anticipates Browne in a certain 
 tendency, not merely to quote Latin, but to give Latinised 
 x--^or archaised colourings and mouldings to words. It is, 
 however, in its leisurely solemnity, extremely beautiful ; 
 and the rise of the whole, with the final sweep (as of a 
 wave breaking softly on the shore it has reached) of " a 
 calmed and calming metis adepta" is hard to surpass or 
 parallel. There is no very great abundance of bulky feet, 
 and hardly any rapidity. 1 
 
 Donne. And now for Donne ; in a passage than which I hardly 
 
 know anything more exquisitely rhythmed in the whole 
 range of English from ^Elfric to Pater : 
 
 If some king | of the earth | have so large | an extent | of 
 dominion | in north and south | as that he hath | winter and summer | 
 together | in his dominions ; | so large | an extent | east and west | 
 as that he hath | day and night | together j in his dominions, | much 
 more | hath God | mercy | and justice | together. | He | brought 
 light | out of darkness, | not | out of a lesser | light ; | He can 
 bring | thy summer | out of winter | though | thou have no | spring ; j 
 though in the ways | of fortune, | or understanding, | or conscience, | 
 thou have been | benighted | till now, | wintered | and frozen, | 
 clouded j and eclipsed, | damped | and benumbed, | smothered | and 
 stupefied | till now, | now God | comes to thee, | not as in the 
 dawning | of the day, | not as in the bud | of the spring, | but as 
 the sun | at noon | to illustrate | all | shadows, | as the sheaves | in 
 harvest | to fill | all | penuries. | All | occasions | invite His | 
 mercies, | and all times | are His | seasons. 2 
 
 Here there could be no change without disaster, except 
 in the possible substitution of some other word for the 
 
 1 The beauty of the amphibrachic, i.e. trochaic, ending should also be 
 noticed. 
 
 2 The keeping out of metrical effect here is all the more remarkable inasmuch 
 as there are frequent aggregations of similar feet. The reader will perhaps
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 163 
 
 thrice-repeated " dominion[s]," which to our ears (though 
 apparently neither to French nor to English ones of the 
 seventeenth century) make a disagreeable jingle without 
 emphasis to excuse it. " Now," as repeated, is in a very 
 different position, and makes one of the appeals of the 
 piece. The Shakespearian magnificence of the diction, such 
 as the throng of kindred but never tautological phrase in 
 " wintered and frozen," etc., and the absolute perfection 
 of rhythmical never metrical movement, could not be 
 better wedded. It has, I have said, never been surpassed. 
 I sometimes doubt whether it has ever been equalled. 
 
 These three passages, with that from Hooker given The palmiest 
 towards the close of the last chapter, are something more ays ' 
 than foretastes of the famous " organ - tone " which 
 dominates the more elaborate prose of the period 1600- 
 1 660 ; which was represented, for a good many years 
 after the later date, by Milton, Browne, and Glanvill ; 
 and the last echo of which, though the concert of it had 
 long ceased, died off, just after the Stuart dynasty itself 
 had come to an end, with Thomas Burnet in 1715. To 
 multiply examples of it is exceedingly tempting, while to 
 one who has any knowledge of the subject and any love 
 of it, to cut them down is both painful and difficult. It 
 is, as usual, inevitable that the actual selection should 
 seem too abundant to some readers, and too scanty to 
 others ; but, as always, il faut prendre un parti. 
 
 Very different opinions have been held as to the style Bacon (?). 
 of Bacon. Nobody disputes the opulence of his thought, 
 or, in many passages at least, the close-packed pregnancy 
 of his meaning. But it may not unreasonably be made a 
 question whether this very abundance of matter to be 
 stowed has not to some extent affected the fashion of the 
 stowage, and even the trim outline of the vessel. I did 
 
 note the skill with which corresponding words are varied in value " shadows " 
 and " penuries " and the members of the " throng " above referred to. The 
 double iambs can be disjoined if any one likes, and the molossi " If some 
 king," " He can bring " made cretics.
 
 164 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 not wholly agree with my friend the late Professor Minto's 
 estimate of " large-browed Verulam's " style, but I think 
 he was perfectly right in perceiving a good deal of John 
 Lyly in it. Now we saw that Lyly, for all his deliberate 
 effort at ornateness, frequently sacrificed continuous and 
 fluid rhythm to spurts and jets of suddenly recollected or 
 laboriously prepared conceit, and, above all, paid too much 
 attention to mere antithesis. Bacon is not led astray by 
 fancy similes, but he is by more solid erudition, which he 
 must needs impart by strings of concatenated variations on 
 the same thought, and, above all, by the effort to pack two 
 or more meanings into one word. The famous essay on 
 " Studies " is like a mass of compressed meat or vegetables, 
 sliced out into corresponding pieces of balanced clause. It 
 does not flow like water from a spring : it tumbles out 
 like shreds and scraps out of a bag. If you boiled ft up 
 and watered it out with a proper menstruum of auxiliary 
 and illustrative phrase, it might be quite an agreeable 
 thing : as it is, the prodesse has got a great deal the 
 better of the delectare. In the equally famous " Letter to 
 Lord Burleigh" you get blocks of systematised opposites 
 " frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities " ; 
 " blind experiments, auricular traditions, and impostures " ; 
 " industrious observations, conclusions, and profitable 
 inventions and discoveries " which remind one of Lord 
 Berners and his Preface, and are even more hindering 
 pebbles in the just flow of the discourse. Of course, 
 every now and then (it could not be otherwise with such 
 a writer at such a time) a great phrase may shoot itself 
 up and open itself out in the empyrean of words, like a 
 rocket shedding stars in a dark night. But there are not 
 very many of these, and they are hardly of the quality of 
 those that the reader has seen in the last few pages. 
 Even Minto himself allowed that Bacon "does. not seem 
 to have had Hooker's ear for the music of long periods." 
 
 On the whole, then, I should further agree with my 
 friend of yore that Bacon really figures in the tree of the 
 plain style, not in that of the ornate ; and we may perhaps 
 return to him a little when dealing with his friends and,
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 165 
 
 in a way, pupils, Jonson and Hobbes. Meanwhile, before 
 coming to the First Three, let us turn to another who is 
 something of a hybrid, if not even of a puzzle, the author 
 of the Anatomy of Melancholy. 
 
 All who have read Burton (and how are they to be Burton, 
 half commiserated and half envied who have not !) will be 
 ready to admit perhaps even to object that large tracts 
 of the Anatomy can hardly be said to have any continuous 
 rhythm at all. The peculiar breathless fashion in which 
 the author heaps quotation upon original writing, and 
 dovetails translation into quotation, and piles up lists of 
 semi-synonyms on casually occurring words and the like, 
 may seem to admit no such thing. There is some truth 
 in this, especially at first sight. Yet it may be counter- 
 objected that separate clauses of these paragraph- (they 
 can hardly be called sentence-) heaps are frequently, if 
 not usually, harmonious enough. And when he chooses 
 (which is far more often than desultory readers may 
 think) no man is a better master, if not of the most 
 ambitious or floriated, still of a very comely and satisfying 
 sentence-architecture. It will not be easy to find, earlier, 
 a better piece of smooth and spirited narrative, seasoned 
 with ironic touches, and arranged so as to read almost 
 as though it were told by word of mouth, than the 
 apologue of the scholar's good luck in " Moronia pia> or 
 Moronia felix, I know not whether." 
 
 But, to your farther content, I'll tell you a tale. In Moronia pia, 
 or Moronia felix, I know not whether, nor how long since, nor in 
 what cathedral church, a fat prebend fell void. The carcase scarce 
 cold, many suitors were up in an instant. The first had rich friends, 
 a good purse ; and he was resolved to outbid any man before he 
 would lose it ; every man supposed he should carry it. The second 
 was my Lord Bishop's chaplain (in whose gift it was) ; and he thought 
 it his due to have it. The third was nobly born ; and he meant to 
 get it by his great parents, patrons, and allies. The fourth stood 
 upon his worth ; he had newly found out strange mysteries in 
 chemistry, and other rare inventions, which he would detect to the 
 public good. The fifth was a painful preacher ; and he was com- 
 mended by the whole parish where he dwelt ; he had all their hands 
 to his certificate. The sixth was the prebendary's son lately 
 deceased ; his father died in debt (for it, as they say), left a wife and 
 many poor children. The seventh stood upon fair promises, which
 
 1 66 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP- 
 
 to him and his noble friends had been formerly made for the next 
 place in his lordship's gift. The eighth pretended great losses, and 
 what he had suffered for the church, what pains he had taken at 
 home and abroad ; and besides he brought noble men's letters. The 
 ninth had married a kinswoman, and he sent his wife to sue for him. 
 The tenth was a foreign doctor, a late convert, and wanted means. 
 The eleventh would exchange for another ; he did not like the former's 
 site, could not agree with his neighbours and fellows upon any terms ; 
 he would be gone. The twelfth and last was a suitor in conceit, a 
 right honest, civil, sober man, an excellent scholar, and such a one as 
 lived private in the university ; but he had neither means nor money 
 to compass it ; besides he hated all such courses ; he could not 
 speak for himself, neither had he any friends to solicit his cause, and 
 therefore made no suit, could not expect, neither did he hope for, or 
 look after it. The good bishop, amongst a jury of competitors, thus 
 perplexed, and not yet resolved what to do, or on whom to bestow 
 it, at the last, of his own accord, mere motion, and bountiful nature, 
 gave it freely to the university student, altogether unknown to him 
 but by fame ; and, to be brief, the academical scholar had the 
 prebend sent him for a present. The news was no sooner published 
 abroad, but all good students rejoiced, and were much cheered up 
 with it, though some would not believe it ; others, as men amazed, 
 said it was a miracle ; but one amongst the rest thanked God for it, 
 and said, " Nunc juvat tandem studiosum esse, et Deo integro corde 
 servtre." You have heard my tale ; but, alas ! it is but a tale, a 
 mere fiction ; 'twas never so, never like to be ; and so let it rest. 
 
 Beauties and Nor is he destitute of the subtler graces. But, in 
 giving an example of them, we may also give one of a 
 fault which undoubtedly does beset the greater writers of 
 the time ; which is flagrant in Milton and Clarendon ; 
 and which, perhaps more than anything else, brought 
 about the almost organised revolt of Plainness at the 
 Restoration. This fault is not exactly what it has been 
 called, even by so great a critic as Coleridge, even by so 
 accurate a writer as Minto, a looseness in " grammar " or 
 in " syntax." Strictly speaking, English has reduced its 
 grammar to the lowest terms, and its syntax is largely, 
 if not wholly, " according to the meaning." It is a neglect 
 of the higher taxis or arrangement of sentence and para- 
 graph, especially in the direction of continuing sentences 
 where they ought to leave off. Take the example 
 referred to : 
 
 I may not deny but that there is some profitable meditation, con- 
 templation, and kind of solitariness, to be embraced, which the
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 167 
 
 fathers so highly commended Hierom, Chrysostom, Cyprian, Austin, 
 in whole tracts, which Petrarch, Erasmus, Stella, and others, so 
 much magnify in their books a paradise, an heaven on earth, if it 
 be used aright, good for the body, and better for the soul ; as many 
 of those old monks used it, to divine contemplations ; as Simulus a 
 courtier in Adrian's time, Diocletian the emperor, retired themselves, 
 etc., in that sense, Vatia solus scit viverej Vatia lives alone ; which 
 the Romans were wont to say, when they commended a country life ; 
 or to the bettering of their knowledge, as Democritus, Cleanthes, and 
 those excellent philosophers, have ever done, to sequester themselves 
 from the tumultuous world ; or, as in Pliny's villa Laurentana, Tully's 
 Tusculan, Jovius' study, that they might better -vacare studiis et Deo, 
 serve God and follow their studies. Methinks, therefore, our too 
 zealous innovators were not so well advised in that general subversion 
 of abbeys and religious houses, promiscuously to fling down all. 
 They might have taken away those gross abuses crept in amongst 
 them, rectified such inconveniencies, and not so far to have raved and 
 raged against those fair buildings, and everlasting monuments of our 
 forefathers' devotion, consecrated to pious uses. Some monasteries 
 and collegiate cells might have been well spared, and their revenues 
 otherwise employed ; here and there one, in good towns or cities at 
 least, for men and women of all sorts and conditions to live in, to 
 sequester themselves from the cares and tumults of the world, that 
 were not desirous or fit to marry, or otherwise willing to be troubled 
 with common affairs, and know not well where to bestow themselves, 
 to live apart in, for more conveniency, good education, better 
 company sake ; to follow their studies (I say) to the perfection of 
 arts and sciences, common good, and, as some truly devoted monks 
 of old had done, freely and truly to serve God : for these men are 
 neither solitary, nor idle, as the poet made answer to the husbandman 
 in ysop, that objected idleness to him, he was never so idle as in 
 his company ; or that Scipio Africanus in Tully, numquam minus 
 solus, quam quum solus ; numquam minus otiosus, quam quum essst 
 otiosus ; never less solitary, than when he was alone, never more 
 busy, than when he seemed to be most idle. 
 
 Here the first passage (you can hardly call it a 
 sentence) is an example of the " heaps " above referred 
 to, though it is rather less tangled than some, and in 
 particular has fewer quotations in foreign tongues. The 
 middle passage from " Methinks " as far as " tumults of the 
 world " is not merely good, it is delicious. The rhythm 
 more than suits, it positively heightens, the sense in 
 " those fair buildings and everlasting monuments of our 
 forefathers' devotion, consecrated to pious uses." But 
 when he arrived at " world " Burton unluckily found that
 
 1 68 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 he had got more to say, and without troubling himself on 
 the point whether a mere tack-on would not spoil the 
 fair round cadence of his phrase, he continues to say it 
 reckless of the, in English, abrupt and obscure relativity 
 of " that," careless of the fact that you have got to 
 wander back three lines to find the subject of " know," 
 and perfectly ready to make a fresh tack of hardly less 
 violent afterthought, and yet another, and yet another 
 still, at " to follow," at " for," and at " or that." It is no 
 sufficient answer that, as was allowed above, most of 
 these jointings are harmonious enough, and well enough 
 proportioned, in themselves. The culpa, and something 
 rather more than the minima culpa, is the entire neglect 
 to achieve that " music of long periods " which was 
 recently spoken of. 
 
 
 
 Of the three writers who, on the whole, stand at the 
 head of the seventeenth-century division of their fellows 
 in prose, if not at the head of all English prose-writers, 
 Browne (born 1605) was a slightly older man than Milton 
 (1608), and nearly a decade older than Taylor (1613). 
 But the differences, even in years, are not such as to insist 
 upon chronological order in this respect, and those in 
 other respects do strongly suggest violation of it. The 
 order, not merely in perfection of prose, but, as it seems 
 to me, in kind of it ; and the order even of logical if not 
 of sheer historic time taking the ascending line is 
 Milton, Taylor, Browne, and in this I propose to consider 
 them. 
 
 Milton. Milton is not only the oldest-fashioned of the three, 
 but he is also by far the most unequal. His inequality, 
 which is notorious and undeniable, is indeed so great that 
 some have gone to the point of altogether denying him 
 first-rate merit as a prose writer. My late friend, and 
 sometime chief, the Rev. John Gates, 1 Headmaster of 
 
 1 Mr. Gates was an intimate friend of Mark Pattison's ; and if anybody 
 can imagine Pattisonian flour made up into dough with milk instead of gall, 
 its yeast unsoured by any religious convulsion, and soft- instead of hard- 
 baked, the result would not be very unlike the genial personage under whom 
 I spent six not unmerry years Ici-bas, dans I'ile, long ago.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 169 
 
 Elizabeth College, Guernsey a scholar and master of 
 English, as of the classics, whom his professional occupa- 
 tions, and perhaps (I may say it without offence or dis- 
 loyalty to his memory) a certain not unscholarly indolence 
 of temperament, kept from making the mark in literature 
 which he might have made, once wrote me an expostu- 
 lation, long and at least as serious as his humorous 
 temperament would allow, on the estimate which I had 
 made of Milton's prose in my History of Elizabethan 
 Literature. And it is quite certain, not only that Milton 
 is seldom at his best, but that, when you take him at not 
 his best, he is often a mass of faults, while he sometimes 
 allows them entrance (as he never does in his verse) at 
 that best itself. 
 
 The causes of Milton's shortcomings as a prose writer Disputes about 
 are pretty numerous ; and out of them and their examples their" 
 very nearly the whole indictment against the prose of the 
 earlier seventeenth century could be drawn up, except the 
 counts as to excessive ornament, which would have to be 
 filled in from Taylor. They were indeed partly what it 
 is the fashion to call " temperamental " the commendable 
 earnestness and the most discommendable ill-temper of 
 the man, unchecked by humour, unrestrained by that 
 unfeigned reverence for the Muse which redeems even 
 such gratuitous flings as the famous speech of St. Peter 
 in Lycidas, leading him constantly to substitute an angry 
 splutter of abuse for a finished invective. Passing from 
 the moral to the mental sphere, they were, as in both his 
 great compeers, and in most of the men of the time, 
 associated with, or directly brought about by, his great 
 learning and the extraordinary fulness of his mind, which 
 led him to cram his sentences with quotation, argument, 
 parenthesis, and every figured or unfigured trick of eking 
 and bolstering out sentence and paragraph. But the 
 greatest snare of all was the same which has been noticed 
 in Burton the fatal habit of jointing on relative and </ 
 epexegetic clauses. That much of this, if not the whole 
 of it, comes from the habit of writing to some extent, and 
 thinking even when not writing, in Latin, is extremely
 
 i?o A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 probable if not positively certain. But, as we shall see, 
 it sometimes goes near to spoil the finest passages of 
 all, and constantly impairs the staple of his style and 
 rhythm. I do not know that I can give a better instance 
 of this than that which I selected a quarter of a century 
 ago in one of the previous handlings of this subject 
 referred to in the Preface. 1 
 
 Let us take, however, three of the most famous 
 passages of all the " Search for Dead Truth " in the 
 Areopagitica, the account of his education in romance from 
 the Apology, and the parallel of himself in poetry and prose 
 from the Reasons of Church Government. The first is 
 practically faultless : 
 
 Truth | indeed | came once | into the world | with her divine | 
 master, | and was a per] feet shape | most glorious | to look on : | but 
 when | he ascended, | and his apostles | after him | were laid | asleep, 
 then straight | arose | a wicked | race | of deceivers, | who, | as that 
 story goes | of the Egyptian | Typhon | with his ( conspirators, | how 
 they dealt | with the good | Osiris, | took | the virgin | Truth, 2 | hewed | 
 her lovely | form 2 | into a thousand | pieces, | and scattered them | to 
 the four winds. From that time | ever | since, | the sad | friends | of 
 Truth, | such as durst | appear, | imitating | the careful j search | 
 that Isis | made | for the mangled | body | of Osiris, | went up | and 
 down gathering up | limb | by limb 2 | still | as they could find them. | 
 We have not | yet found | them all, | lords and commons, | nor 
 ever | shall do, | till her Master's | second | coming; | he shall bring | 
 together | every joint | and member, | and shall mould them | into 
 an immortal | feature | of loveliness | and perfection. | Suffer not | 
 these licensing | prohibitions [ to stand | at every | place of | oppor- 
 tunity | forbidding | and disturbing | them | that continue | seeking, | 
 that continue [to do | our obsequies | to the torn | body | of our 
 martyred | saint. 
 
 We boast | our light ; | but if | we look not | wisely [ on the sun 
 
 1 " But if his rear and flanks be not impaled, if his backdoor be not 
 secured by the rigid licenser, but that a bold book may now and then come 
 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 get 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 
 thus also -would be better instructed, better exercised and disciplined." Had 
 this sentence terminated at "seduced" all had been well; but the after- 
 thought ruins it. 
 
 2 These groups give occasion for a warning which will apply throughout. 
 They may, if any one likes, be respectively combined into two di-iambs and 
 a cretic or molossus, as best pleases the ear.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 171 
 
 itself, j it smites us | into darkness. | Who | can discern | those 
 planets | that are oft | combust, | and those stars | of brightest | 
 magnitude | that rise | and set | with the sun, | until the op|posite 
 motion | of their orbs | bring them | to such j a place | in the 
 firmament, | where they may be seen | evening | or morning ? 
 The light | which we have gained | was given us, | not | to be 
 ever | staring on, | but by it | to discover onward things | more 
 remote | from our knowledge, j It is not the unfrocking | of a 
 priest, | the unmitring | of a bishop, | and the removing | him from 
 off | the presbyterian | shoulders, | that will make us | a happy | 
 nation : | no ; | if other things | as great | in the church, | and in 
 the rule | of life | both e conomical | and political, | be not looked 
 into | and reformed, | we have looked | so long j upon the blaze | 
 that Zuinglius | and Calvin | have beaconed | up to us, | that we are 
 stark | blind. 
 
 On this at least the lofty encomium of the Master of 
 Peterhouse is not extravagant. That Milton's is " the most 
 extraordinary literary prose, and the most wonderful 
 poet's prose, embodied in English literature," is hardly a 
 hyperbole here. 
 
 This particular passage, it will be observed, goes on, 
 for at least some sentences, almost or quite as well as it 
 has begun ; and the first half of the second paragraph is 
 admirable. The case is not quite the same with the 
 next piece : 
 
 Next (for hear me out now, readers), that I may tell ye whither 
 my younger feet wandered ; I betook me among those lofty fables 
 and romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knight- 
 hood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in 
 renown over all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of every 
 knight, that he should defend to the expense of his best blood, or 
 of his life, if it so befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin or 
 matron ; from whence even then I learned what a noble virtue 
 chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so many worthies, by 
 such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn. And if I found in 
 the story afterward, any of them, by word or deed, breaking that 
 oath, I judged it the same fault of the poet, as that which is attri- 
 buted to Homer, to have written indecent things of the gods. Only 
 this my mind gave me, that every free and gentle spirit, without that 
 oath, ought to be born a knight, nor needed to expect the gilt spur, 
 or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder to stir him up both by 
 his counsel and his arms, to secure and protect the weakness of any 
 attempted chastity. So that even these books, which to many 
 others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I cannot 
 think how, unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many
 
 172 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 incitements, as you have heard, to the love and steadfast observation 
 of that virtue which abhors the society of bordelloes. 
 
 Thus, from the laureat fraternity of poets, riper years and the 
 ceaseless round of study and reading led me to the shady spaces of 
 philosophy ; but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal 
 Xenophon : where, if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and 
 love, I mean that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only 
 virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy (the 
 rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion, which a certain 
 sorceress, the abuser of love's name, carries about) ; and how the 
 first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul, producing 
 those happy twins of her divine generation, knowledge and virtue. 
 
 Here, in the last of the two paragraphs, you get the 
 Miltonic " falling-off." The " romance " paragraph is 
 faultless ; the first part of the " philosophy " one, down 
 to " chastity and love " bears it company ; then from 
 " I mean " to " about " the writer loses step, blunders about 
 for several lines like a player at blindman's buff, and 
 with difficulty steadies himself for the run in at the close. 
 
 The third, except in a few touches, is less beautiful, 
 but it is interesting as showing that Milton was quite 
 capable, when he chose, of gearing most complicated 
 sentences together without losing thread of construction 
 or concert of rhythm. The fact is that at this time (for 
 it was the earliest written of the three) he had not " got 
 ruffled by fighting," though he hardly had a subject 
 admitting of the display of his greatest art. 
 
 Lastly, I should not choose this manner of writing, wherein 
 knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature 
 to another task, I have the use, as I may account, but of my left 
 hand. And though I shall be foolish in saying more to this purpose, 
 yet, since it will be such a folly, as wisest men go about to commit, 
 having only confessed and so committed, I may trust with more 
 reason, because with more folly, to have courteous pardon. For 
 although a poet, soaring in the high reason of his fancies, with his 
 garland and singing robes about him, might, without apology, speak 
 more of himself than I mean to do ; yet for me, sitting here below 
 in the cool element of prose, a mortal thing among many readers of 
 no empyreal conceit, to venture and divulge unusual things of myself, 
 I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to me. I 
 must say, therefore, that after I had for my first years, by the 
 ceaseless diligence and care of my father (whom God recompense !), 
 been exercised to the tongues, and some sciences, as my age 
 would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, both at home and
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 173 
 
 at the schools, it was found that whether aught was imposed me 
 by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own 
 choice in English, or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly 
 by this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to 
 live. But much latelier in the private academies of Italy, whither 
 I was favoured to resort, perceiving that some trifles which I had 
 in memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout (for the 
 manner is, that every one must give some proof of his wit and 
 reading there), met with acceptance above what was looked for ; 
 and other things, which I had shifted in scarcity of books and 
 conveniences to patch up amongst them, were received with 
 written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on 
 men of this side the Alps ; I began thus far to assent both to 
 them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an 
 inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour 
 and intense study (which I take to be my portion in this life), 
 joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave 
 something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let 
 it die. 
 
 It can scarcely be necessary to dwell much on the Close con- 
 merits of Milton's exercitations in what he calls with MiiSs^tyi 
 an irony which the usual grudging fairy at his birth had with oratory, 
 rendered him incapable of appreciating " the cool element 
 of prose." Those who cannot taste them must either 
 be congenitally incapable of doing so, or else, like the 
 excellent critic and scholar whom I have mentioned 
 above, must be so shocked and disgusted by the faults which 
 accompany them as to be temporarily disqualified. The 
 largior aether the peculiar vastness and spaciousness 
 of the verse is here hardly limited at all in its more 
 extensive and paragraphic deliverances, and actually 
 widened as regards the smaller the sentences, clauses, 
 and prose-lines. The kind is definitely oratorical to 
 appreciate it fully you must, as again in the case of the 
 verse, " read it aloud to yourself." Nor is it superfluous 
 to observe that in such reading, and still more in actual 
 oral delivery, many of the minor difficulties of construction 
 disappear under any satisfactory kind of elocution. The 
 selection of word and phrase has all the cunning of the 
 poet ; the further ordonnance of clause and cadence enlists 
 as well the vehemence, the deinotes, of the orator ; and 
 the whole at its best floats and sweeps itself off in such
 
 174 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 volume as that of the magnificent description of the 
 Armada : 
 
 That we may still | remember | in our solemn | thanksgivings 
 | how, | for us, | the northern | ocean, | even | to our frozen | Thule, | 
 was scattered | with the proud shipwrecks | of the Spanish | Armada ; l 
 
 as the whole tissue of the " Search after Truth," and as 
 the almost awestruck celebration of the " lofty fables and 
 romances." 
 
 Some of its Yet the faults themselves, from our special as from 
 
 faults. other points of view, can only be denied or blinked by an 
 
 equally uncritical partisanship or state of intellectual 
 bribery. First and foremost, and (as has been pointed 
 out) not less destructive of rhythm in sound than of 
 coherency in sense, is the unlucky practice of tagging and 
 tailing on. Just before the great Truth passage (foK an 
 additional instance) there is another, inferior enough, it 
 must be confessed, in tone and temper, but made worse 
 by a fault of this kind : 
 
 There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the incredible 
 loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us to, more than 
 if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens, and ports, and 
 creeks ; it hinders and retards the importation of our richest 
 merchandise, truth : nay, it was first established and put in practice 
 by anti-christian malice and mystery on set purpose to extinguish, 
 if it were possible, the light of reformation, and to settle falsehood ; 
 little differing from that policy wherewith the Turk upholds his 
 Alcoran, by the prohibiting of printing. It is not denied, but gladly 
 confessed, we are to send our thanks and vows to Heaven, louder 
 than most of nations, for that great measure of truth which we enjoy, 
 especially in those main points between us and the pope, with his 
 appurtenances the prelates : but he who thinks we are to pitch our 
 tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation, that 
 the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show us, till we come 
 to beatific vision ; that man by this very opinion declares, that he is 
 yet far short of truth. 
 
 * 
 
 Here " the Turk and his Alcoran " are very little 
 wanted are, in fact, a quite evident afterthought of the 
 writer's. And as an afterthought he leaves them, without 
 
 1 This dwindling of dochmiac, pseon, and amphibrach has been noticed 
 before, and is, indeed, one of the most definitely noticeable schemes of ending.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 175 
 
 troubling himself either to bring out, as he easily might, 
 by the slightest alteration and addition, that the Turkish 
 policy is the censorship policy carried to " Thorough," 
 or, at no greater cost, to mould his actual addition into 
 any rhythm consistent and coherent with the preceding 
 clauses. It is, in fact, a sort of aside : a deliberate 
 excrescence in sound as in thought. I should not myself 
 object, on our present score (though many people would), 
 to yet another passage * a little farther on, though the 
 argument seems to me singularly silly and unpractical. For 
 though the first sentence is complicated, it runs unbroken 
 in sense and cadence ; and a fit reader (let the others 
 perish !) will get to the end of it without stumbling-block 
 to his mind's feet or discord to his mind's ear. But in 
 the second, mark how the sentence faints and squanders 
 itself out in sense and rhythm alike, merely to bring 
 in those here most superfluous, if intrinsically distinguished, 
 persons, Proteus and Micaiah. 
 
 A survey of the selected examples will, I think, show Partial foot- 
 that Milton uses a very composite arrangement of shorter anal y sis - 
 and longer feet, which produces a definitely sustained 
 level, or very flat curve, of general rhythm in the clause 
 and sentence. There is much less of rise and fall in him 
 than in Hooker ; he shoots up at once, and, as is familiarly 
 said, " stays there," unless he is brought down by one of 
 his unlucky disarrangements of over-lap. I do not seem 
 to find in him the large number of monosyllabic feet 
 
 1 " When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines 
 of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth 
 his reasons as it were a battle ranged, scattered and defeated all objections in 
 his way, calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind 
 and sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument ; 
 for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow 
 bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour 
 enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of truth. 
 For who knows not that truth is strong, next to the Almighty ; she needs no 
 policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious ; those are the 
 shifts and the defences that error uses against her power : give her but room, 
 and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old 
 Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and bound, but 
 then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps 
 tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab, until she 
 be adjured into her own likeness."
 
 176 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 which distinguishes some of the best English prose ; 
 though, of course, he often starts with one to launch him 
 up with its necessary consequent of pause, as in the 
 " Truth " of the passage so often referred to. Milton 
 must inevitably have been fond of Plato, and there are 
 considerable resemblances between the styles of the two 
 men. And if this seem to any one (it would to me 
 have seemed at one time) a reflection on the equal 
 excellence of the Greek, let us remember that ancient 
 critics by no means regarded their Plato in that light, 
 but spoke of him l as a mixture of faults and merits, a 
 libertine wanderer from the chaste to the meretricious 
 and so forth exactly as some are wont to characterise 
 our great seventeenth-century prose-men. 
 
 Taylor -. the There have been few differences of opinion as to the 
 
 esdmate y of lgh ^S^ 1 , if not highest, place occupied by Jeremy Taylof as 
 him. a virtuoso in English prose harmony ; though the absolute 
 
 merits of his style, considered apart from mere sound, and 
 the necessary minimum of sense-connection therewith, have 
 by no means been matters of such general agreement. 
 The masculine appreciation of South himself, as we shall 
 see, no mean master of rhythm revolted early at the 
 repetitions of " So have I seen " and the over-poetic 
 v diction of " fringes of the north star." And while recent, 
 or comparatively recent, fancy for extreme ornateness has 
 again raised estimates of Taylor, there are those who 
 can hardly follow Coleridge and De Quincey in regarding 
 him, not merely as a great word-master, but as a thinker 
 to match. We, however, are only concerned with the 
 above restricted pacta conventa which, however, still leave 
 a little ground for argument, or at least analysis, as to the 
 exact character of Taylor's harmony, and the means 
 whereby it may be thought to have been attained. Two 
 passages, practically three, of some length, shall .be given 
 and scanned ; nor is it perhaps superfluous to remark 
 that Taylor, like Hooker, "scans himself" (in more than 
 the French sense of the reflexive) with singular in- 
 evitableness. 
 
 1 Both Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Longinus speak thus.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 177 
 
 " Prayer 1 | is the peace | of our spirit, | the stillness | of our Examples, 
 thoughts, | the evenness | of recollection, | the seat | of meditation, | 
 the rest | of our cares | and the calm | of our tempest. | Prayer | 
 is the issue | of a quiet | mind, | of untroubled | thoughts ; it is the | 
 daughter | of charity | and the sister | of meekness ; | and he | that 
 prays | to God | with an angry | that is a troubled | and dis- 
 composed | spirit, | is like him | that retires | into a battle | to 
 meditate | and sets up | his closet | in the outquarters | of an army | 
 and chooses | a frontier | garrison | to be wise in. | Anger | is 
 a perfect | alienation j of the mind | from prayer, [ and therefore | 
 is contrary | to that attention | which presents | our prayers | in a 
 right | line | to God. | For so j have I seen | a lark | rising | 
 from his bed | of grass, | soaring | upwards | and singing | as he 
 rises j and hopes | to get | to Heaven | and climb | above | the 
 clouds ; | but the poor bird | was beaten back | with the loud | 
 sighings | of an eastern | wind | and his motion | made irregular | 
 and inconstant, | descending | more | at every breath | of the 
 tempest | than it could j recover | by the vibration | and frequent [ 
 weighing | of his wings ; | till the little | creature | was forced | to 
 sit down | and pant | and stay | till the storm | was over ; | and 
 then | it made | a prosperous | flight | and did rise | and sing | as 
 if it had learned | music | and motion | from an angel | as he passed | 
 sometimes | through the air | about | his ministries | here below. | 
 So | is the prayer | of a good | man ; | when his affairs | have 
 required | business, | and his business | was matter | of discipline, | 
 and his discipline j was to pass | upon a sinning | person, | or had | 
 a design | of charity, | his duty | met | with infirmities | of a man | 
 and anger | was its instrument, | and the instrument | became 
 
 1 Some people prefer " Prayer " in this sense as a monosyllable. I do not ; 
 but they can take it or make it so. 
 
 N
 
 178 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 stronger | than the prime | agent | and raised | a tempest | and 
 overruled | the man ; | and then | his prayer | was broken | and his 
 thoughts | troubled. 
 
 For so | an impure | vapour | begotten | of the slime | of the 
 earth | by the fevers | and adulterous I heats | of an intemperate l \ 
 summer | sun, | striving | by the ladder | of a mountain | to climb | 
 to heaven | and rolling | into various | figures | by an uneasy, | 
 unfixed | revolution, | and stopped | at the middle | region | of the 
 air, | being thrown | from his pride | and attempt | of passing | 
 towards the seat | of the stars | turns into | an unwholesome | 
 
 flame | and, like | the breath | of hell, | is confined | into a prison | 
 ~ - ~ ~ ~ - ~ ~ - ~ - ~ *- 
 
 of darkness | and a cloud, | till it breaks | into diseases, | plagues | 
 
 and mildews, | stinks | and blastings. | So | is the prayer | of 
 an unchaste | person. | It strives | to climb | the battlements | of 
 heaven, | but because | it is a flame | of sulphur | salt | and bitumen, | 
 and was kindled | inthedishon(ou)rable 2 | regions | below, | derived | 
 from Hell | and contrary | to God, | it cannot | pass forth | to the 
 element | of love ; | but ends | in barrenness | and murmurs, | 
 fantastic | expectations | and trifling | imaginative | confidences ; | 
 and they | at last | end | in sorrows | and despair. 
 
 We are | as water ; | weak | and of no | consistence, | always | 
 descending, | abiding | in no certain place, | unless | we are de- 
 tained | with violence ; | and every | little | breath of | wind | makes 
 us rough | and tempestuous | and troubles | our faces ; | every | 
 trifling | accident | discomposes us ; | and as the face | of the 
 waters | wafting | in a storm | so wrinkles itself | that it makes | 
 upon its forehead | furrows | deep | and hollow | like a grave, | so 
 
 1 A dochmiac by grace-slur " intemp'rate. " 
 
 2 Slurred again to dochmiac "the dishon'rable."
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 179 
 
 do | our great | and little | cares | and trifles | first make | the 
 wrinkles | of old age, | and then | they dig | a grave for us ; | and 
 there is | in nature | nothing | so contemptible, | but it may meet 
 us | in such | circumstances | that it may be | too hard for us | in 
 our weaknesses ; | and the sting | of a bee j is a weapon | sharp 
 enough | to pierce | the finger | of a child | or the lip | of a man ; | 
 and those creatures | which nature | hath left | without weapons | yet 
 are they armed | sufficiently | to vex | those parts | of man | which 
 are left | defenceless | and obnoxious | to a sunbeam, | to the rough- 
 ness | of a sour grape, | to the unevenness l \ of a gravel | stone | 
 to the dust | of a wheel, | or the unwholesome | breath | of a 
 star | looking | awry | upon a sinner. | 
 
 Of the beauty of all this there can assuredly be little Rhythmical 
 dispute ; and it is only fair to draw special attention to characteristics - 
 the way in which the Taylorian anacolutha (which do 
 exist) and the Taylorian sentence-length (in which he 
 almost vies with Clarendon) are nearly always so cunningly 
 adjusted as neither to give the jolts and jars in sound, 
 nor to produce the tangle and obscurity of sense, which 
 are too frequent in Clarendon himself, in Milton, and in 
 others. One reason a little, but only a very little, 
 extraneous to our strictest province is that Taylor 
 affects illustration and description very much more than 
 argument or narration, and that, as Mr. Ruskin (the 
 parallel has been used before and may be again) has 
 finally shown, illustration and description of a sufficiently 
 panoramic kind are capable, like panorama itself, of almost 
 indefinite prolongation without confusion. But it would 
 be exceedingly unfair not to count to him for virtue 
 his avoidance of the breaks of rhythm into which, even 
 
 1 Slurred easily into a dochmiac, according to the pronunciations of the 
 time, either as "to th' unevenness," "to the uneve'ness," or "to the 
 une'enness," all of which were, at the time, tolerable and likely. Later, as 
 we shall see, wslurred, but slightly quantified, six- or perhaps even seven- 
 syllabled groups are met with ; but I doubt if Taylor would have pronounced 
 these as such.
 
 i8o A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 in such matter, most of his great contemporaries would 
 certainly have fallen. 
 
 It will further be observed (and it is worth while to 
 turn back specially to the Hooker passages to see it) that, 
 as a necessary consequence of this long-breathedness (for 
 \ong-windedness has an ill-name), his rhythm is very 
 much more various, more polycentred, than Hooker's. 
 Instead of one, not indeed monotonous but somewhat 
 regular, soar and stoop in each sentence, there is, in the 
 groups of clauses which may be taken as the equivalents 
 of an ordinary sentence, a perpetual unflurried flutter a 
 soft whirr and rustling of gentle rise and gentler fall like 
 that of the golden and silver wings rising and floating 
 and falling in Christina Rossetti's poem. 
 
 It follows that the rhythmical kola in Jeremy exhibit 
 the most extreme and artful variation, and that he *uses 
 the utmost liberty of foot-extension or shortening. I do 
 not think that I have gone wrong, or exposed my system 
 to a charge of inconsistency, by allowing slurred dochmiacs 
 of six or even seven possible syllables. 1 For it must be 
 remembered that Taylor's prose is nothing if not spoken 
 prose, and the liberty of slur or even (saving his Right 
 Reverence) " patter " in speech is not only great at all 
 times, but, if carefully and not too lavishly used, one of 
 the most cherished and effective devices of the orator. 2 
 Other noticeable things in him are the frequency, boldness, 
 and success with which he uses sequence of the same 
 feet, while avoiding at the same time any offensively 
 metrical effect. I do not say that there is no blank verse 
 in him. It is practically impossible unless a writer 
 goes through his work deliberately and artificially breaks 
 them up to avoid in English such things as 
 
 1 We shall see that they recur in the less varied, but equally oratorical, 
 prose of the Augustans. 
 
 2 Other nations, of course, use it much more than we do. I remember, 
 the first time that I heard M. Renan speak, wondering whether I knew any 
 French at all so apparently impossible was it to follow his runs of huddled 
 slur-syllables with a crash of emphasis on the last. One got used to it before 
 long ; and indeed Frenchmen have since told me that Renan was exception- 
 ally given to the trick. But English speakers often take the same liberty, 
 though to a less extent.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 181 
 
 Unless we are detained with violence, 
 or 
 
 It strives to climb the battlements of Heaven. 1 
 
 But there are very much fewer than there are in 
 Ruskin, and those which are found are even more cun- 
 ningly bewitched into silence, muffled and disguised so 
 that they pass even a vigilant sentinel-ear. 
 
 This freedom from confusion of the harmonies may 
 have been partly due both in Taylor's case and in that, 
 to which we shall come shortly, of Browne to the fact 
 that the inclination of both for verse was, for men of their 
 time, surprisingly small. Both have left a little, but very 
 little, and of a quality which, though in neither case 
 contemptible, is in neither worthy of special remark. 
 How thoroughly Jeremy was a prose-man, despite his love 
 for poetic diction and his extraordinary plastic power 
 over words, could not be better shown than in the above- 
 quoted phrase, " And it rose | and sung as if it had 
 learned | music | and motion | from an angel | as he 
 passed | through the air | about | his ministries | here 
 
 below." The form is as musical as the substance ; but it 
 is utterly prose-music it is much* if there is a sort of 
 underhum of Ionic a minore? which, as I have endeavoured 
 to show elsewhere, 3 is doubtfully an English metre at all, 
 and which itself can only be made out by rather outrageous 
 and unnatural handling in verse, but which is a very 
 charm and spell in prose, 4 
 
 Yet the greatest of these three if not in all ways, yet 
 certainly in those which we are more specially treading 
 
 1 Observe, too, the happy boldness with which he allows himself runs of 
 iambics, " And like | the breath | of hell," defeating the blank-verse effect 
 by the succession of metrically incompatible feet. 
 
 2 "And it rose and | sung as if it | had learned music" or "-sic and 
 
 motion | from an angel | as he passed through." Pasons, as usual, optional. 
 
 3 E.g. Historical Manual of English Prosody, pp. 285, 286. 
 
 4 Those who like to venture upon the perilous and aleatory task of 
 assigning special foot-combinations as sure rhythm-getters, will find in the 
 above scanned passages some tempting matter. I point and pass.
 
 1 82 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Browne : is Browne. His greatness is indeed rather in the sentence 
 Coleridge's than in the paragraph, though he has paragraphs of 
 
 charge against 
 
 him. unsurpassed architecture ; and he may seem sometimes 
 
 to rely, more exclusively than he should, on sheer balance 
 for his effects. He has less virtuosity than Taylor ; and 
 I should not make on him the note that I made above as 
 to " pattern " combinations. On one of the counts of 
 Coleridge's charge against him disorderly syntax he is 
 in fact much more guiltless than either Taylor or Milton ; 
 it is almost impossible to find in him the cumbrous and 
 jolting anacolutha which constantly mar both the sense 
 and the sound of the one, and which are rather disguised 
 and carried off than actually prevented by the smoother- 
 flowing current of the other. Even as regards corruption 
 of vocabulary (another Coleridgean accusation) I doubt 
 whether I myself, a good many years ago, 1 did not rrlake 
 unwise concessions in admitting exceptions to Browne on 
 the score of Latinism and of catachresis of words. I had 
 not then studied the strictly rhythmical side of prose as I 
 have since. I shall not, even now, say that Browne's 
 peculiarities in this respect are always justifiable on this 
 score, or indeed on any ; but I have made sure in a great 
 many cases, and I believe I might, with a sufficient ex- 
 penditure of time, make sure in the majority, that when 
 he substitutes " clarity " for " clearness," when he pours 
 upon the vulgar head the perhaps to it doubtfully precious 
 balms of " abbreviature " and " exantlation " ; even when 
 he has such traps for the unwary as " equable " in the 
 sense of " equitable," and " gratitude " in that of " a 
 grateful person," he is not only manipulating the xena 
 the " strange " words which strike the sense in 
 permissible and laudable fashion, but is actually and 
 deliberately adding to the sonority and harmony of his 
 phrase. 
 
 Special charac- It will almost or quite follow from the two points just 
 terofhis indicated Browne's special attention to the sentence 
 
 charm, 
 
 rather than to the paragraph, though not omitting or 
 neglecting this, and his further attention to the particular 
 
 1 In my History of Elizabethan Literature (First Edition, 1887).
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 183 
 
 though not exactly " lonely " word that his rhythmical 
 attraction, as well as other parts or qualities of his style, 
 is singularly pervading. The Tyrian purple of Milton's 
 best passages suits the banners of a very king of prose ; 
 but these banners issue forth irregularly and in a terribly 
 undisciplined fashion. Taylor mixes and applies his 
 colours far more deliberately ; but he exercises consider- 
 able economy, not indeed in the mixing but in the 
 application. Browne's style, on the other hand, is shot 
 with a peculiar iridescence throughout, though he appor- 
 tions the degree of its brightness to some extent accord- 
 ing to the subject, giving less of it in the business-like 
 miscellany of the Pseudodoxia, and the central miniature 
 cyclopaedia of curiosities in the Garden of Cyrus, 1 than in 
 the beginning and close of this latter, in most of the 
 Religio, and in the whole of Hydriotaphia. In Christian 
 Morals and the Letter to a Friend we have the secrets 
 of loom and dye-vat curiously exposed midway the 
 materials are all there, but the actual processes themselves 
 are in different stages of perfection, " forwarded " but not 
 " finished." 
 
 It follows from these considerations that Browne and special 
 requires slightly different treatment from most if not from Q r f e ^ t tmer 
 all other figures in this book. The world-famous passage required, 
 in Urn Burial, " Now since these dead bones," is known 
 in its first half-dozen lines probably to thousands who do 
 not know the context at all ; and the paragraph of which 
 it forms part, perhaps to hundreds who do not know much 
 or anything more of Browne. But, as a matter of fact, 
 the entire chapter in which this occurs is an unbroken 
 and, at most, spaced and rested symphony ; and, at the 
 risk of disgusting the reader, I shall attempt the feat 
 (some may say the outrage) of scanning the entire 
 
 1 Yet in this there are some especial magnificences, as thus: "And 
 therefore Providence hath arched and paved the great house of the world, 
 with colours of mediocrity, that is, blue and green, above and below the sight, 
 moderately | terminating | the acies | of the eye " ; or the splendid section 
 beginning, " Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible," and 
 
 ending, "The sun | itself | is but the dark j simulacrum, \ and light | but Y 
 the shadow, I of God."
 
 184 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 rhapsody by division, and in some parts by actual 
 quantification. It will give us more to go upon, in the 
 final attempt to reach some systematic conclusions, than 
 many shorter ones could. But I shall also hope to add 
 at least one paragraph-piece, and a large number of 
 isolated sentences and phrases, to illustrate the magni- 
 ficence of the whole. The results may be but as the 
 results of " arming " deep-sea leads ; but those are often 
 valuable, and so may be these. 
 
 The finale of Now j since \ these dead : bones \ have already \ out-lasted \ the 
 Urn Burial. - ^ _ ^ ^-~=~~~- - ~ - ~ 
 
 living ones | of Methuselah, | and in a yard | under ground, | and 
 
 thin | walls | of clay, | out-worn | all the strong | and specious | 
 buildings | above it ; | and quietly | rested | under the drums | and 
 tramplings | of three | conquests ; | what Prince | can promise | 
 such | diuturnity | unto his reliques, | or might not | gladly | say, 
 Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim. 
 
 Time, | which antiquates | Antiquities | and hath an art | to make 
 
 dust | of all things, | hath yet spared | these minor | monuments. | 
 
 In vain | we hope | to be known | by open | and visible | con- 
 servatories, [ when to be unknown | was the means j of their | con- 
 tinuation | and obscurity | their | protection : | If they died | by 
 violent | hands, | and were thrust | into their urns, | these bones | 
 become | considerable, | and some old | philosophers | would honour 
 them, | whose souls | they conceived | most pure, | which were thus | 
 snatched | from their bodies ; | and to retain | a stranger | propen- 
 sion | unto them ; | whereas | they weariedly | left | a languishing | 
 corpse, | and with faint | desires | of re -union. | If they fell | by 
 long | and aged | decay, | yet wrapt up | in the bundle | of time, | 
 they fall into | indistinction, | and make | but one blot | with infants. 
 If | we begin | to die | when we live, | and long life | be but | a 
 prolongation | of death ; | our life | is a sad | composition ; | we 
 live | with death, | and die not | in a moment. | How many pulses 
 made up | the life | of Methuselah, | were work | for Archimedes : 
 common | counters | sum up j the life | of Moses | his man. Our 
 days | become | considerable | like petty | sums | by minute | ac- 
 cumulations ; | where numerous | fractions | make up | but small | 
 round numbers ; | and our days | of a span long | make not | one 
 little | finger. 
 
 If the nearness | of our last | necessity, | brought a nearer | con- 
 formity | into it, | there were | a happiness | in hoary hairs, | and
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 
 
 185 
 
 no | calamity | in half senses. But the long | habit | of living | 
 indisposeth us | for dying ; | when avarice j makes us | the sport | of 
 death ; | when even | David | grew politicly | cruel ; | and Solomon | 
 could hardly | be said | to be the wisest | of men. | But many | are 
 
 too early 
 stretcheth 
 
 old, | and 
 our days, 
 
 before 
 misery 
 
 the date | of age. 
 makes I Alcmena's 
 
 Adversity 
 nights, and 
 
 being | is 
 or never | 
 
 time | hath no wings | unto it. | But the most | tedious 
 
 that | which can unwish itself, | content | to be nothing, 
 
 to have been, | which was beyond | the malcontent | of Job, | who 
 
 cursed not | the day | of his life, | but his | nativity : | content | to 
 
 have so far | been, | as to have | a title | to future | being ; 
 
 although | he had lived | here | but in an hidden | state | of life, 
 
 and as it were | an abortion. | 
 
 What Song | the Syrens | sang, | or what name | Achilles | 
 assumed | when he hid himself | among women, | though puzzling | 
 questions, | are not | beyond all | conjecture. | What time | the 
 persons | of these | ossuaries j entered j the famous | nations | of the 
 dead, | and slept | with princes | and counsellors, | might admit | a 
 wide | solution. | But who were the | proprietaries | of these bones, | 
 or what bodies | these ashes | made up, | were a question | above | 
 antiquarism. | Not | to be resolved j by man | nor easily | perhaps | 
 by spirits, | except | we consult | the provincial | Guardians | or 
 tutelary | Observators. | Had they made | as good | provision | for 
 their names | as they have done | for their reliques, | they had not | 
 so grossly | erred | in the art of | perpetuation. | But to subsist | in 
 
 bones, | and be but | pyramidally | extant, is a fallacy | in duration. 
 Vain ashes, | which in j the oblivion | of names, | persons, | times, 
 and sexes, | have found | unto themselves, | a fruitless | continua- 
 
 tion, | and only | arise | unto late | posterity, 
 mortal | vanities ; | antidotes | against pride, 
 
 as emblems | of 
 vain -glory, | and 
 
 madding | vices. | Pagan | vain-glories | which thought | the world | 
 
 might last | for ever, | had encouragement | for ambition, 
 finding | no Atropos | unto | the immortality | of their names, 
 
 never | damped with | the necessity 
 tions | had the advantage | of ours, 
 
 and, 
 
 of oblivion. | Even old | ambi- 
 in the attempts | of their vain- 
 
 glories, | who acting | early, | and before | the probable | meridian | 
 of time, | have by this time | found | great accomplishment | of their 
 designs, | whereby | the ancient | heroes | have already | out-lasted | 
 their monuments, | and mechanical | preservations. | But in this 
 latter | scene [ of time, | we cannot | expect | such mummies | unto
 
 1 86 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 our | memories, | when ambition | may fear | the prophecy | of 
 Elias, | and Charles | the Fifth | can never | hope | to live | within 
 two | Methuselahs | of Hector. 
 
 And therefore | restless | inquietude | for the di|uturnity | of our 
 memories | unto present | considerations, | seems a vanity | almost 
 out of date, | and | superannuated | piece | of folly. | We cannot 
 hope | to live | so long | in our names, | as some | have done | in 
 their persons, | one face | of Janus holds | no proportion | unto the 
 other. | 'Tis too late | to be ambitious. | The great | mutations | of 
 the world | are acted, | or time | may be | too short | for our 
 designs. | To extend | our memories | by monuments, whose 
 death | we daily | pray for, | and whose duration | we cannot hope, 
 without injury | to our | expectations, | in the advent | of the last 
 day, | were a contradiction | to our beliefs. | We | whose genera- 
 tions | are ordained | in this setting | part | of time, | are | pro- 
 videntially | taken off | from such | imaginations ; | and being | 
 necessitated | to eye | the remaining I particle | of futurity, | are 
 naturally | constituted | unto thoughts | of the next | world, | and 
 cannot j excusably j decline | the consideration | of that | duration, | 
 which maketh | Pyramids | pillars | of snow, | and all | that's past | 
 a moment. 
 
 Circles | and right | lines | limit | and close | all bodies, | and 
 the mortal | right-lined | circle | must conclude | and shut up | all. | 
 There is no | antidote [ against | the opium | of time, | which tem- 
 porally | considereth | all things ; | our fathers | find | their graves | 
 in our short | memories, | and sadly | tell us | how we | may be 
 buried | in our survivors. | Grave-stones | tell truth | scarce forty | 
 years. | Generations | pass | while some | trees stand, | and old | 
 families | last not | three oaks. | To be read | by bare | inscrip- 
 tions | like many | in Gruter, | to hope | for Eternity | by | enigma- 
 tical | epithets | or first | letters | of our names, | to be studied | by 
 antiquaries, | who we were, | and have | new names | given us | like 
 many | of the mummies, j are cold | consolations | unto the students | 
 
 of perjpetuity | even | by everlasting | languages. 1 
 
 To be content | that times | to come | should only | know | there 
 was such a man, | not caring | whether | they knew more of him, 
 was a frigid | ambition | in Cardan : | disparaging | his horoscopal 
 inclination | and judgment | of himself, | who cares | to subsist | like 
 
 1 In this short paragraph what De Quincey would call the systole and 
 diastole of rhythm may be studied almost as well as anywhere.
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNA TE STYLE 
 
 187 
 
 Hippocrates' | patients, | or Achilles' 
 naked | nominations, | without deserts 
 
 horses | in Homer, | under 
 and noble | acts, | which are 
 
 the balsam | of our memories, | the Entelechia | and soul | of our 
 subsistences. | To be nameless | in worthy | deeds [. exceeds | an 
 infamous | history. | The Canaanitish | woman | lives | more happily | 
 without | a name, | than Herodias | with one. | And who j had not 
 rather | have been | the good thief, | than Pilate ? 
 
 But the iniquity | of oblivion | blindly | scattereth | her poppy, | 
 and deals | with the memory | of men | without | distinction | to 
 merit of | perpetuity. [ Who | can but pity | the founder | of the 
 Pyramids ? | Herostratus | lives | that burnt | the Temple | of 
 Diana, | he is almost lost | that built it ; | Time | hath spared | the 
 epitaph | of Adrian's | horse, | confounded | that | of himself. | In 
 vain | we compute | our felicities | by the advantage | of our good 
 names, | since bad | have equal | durations ; | and Thersites | is 
 like | to live | as long as | Agamemnon. [ Who knows | whether | 
 the best | of men | be known ? | or whether | there be not | more 
 remarkable | persons | forgot, | than any j that stand | remembered | 
 in the known | account | of time ? | Without | the favour of | the 
 everlasting | register, | the first man | had been | as unknown | as 
 
 the last, | and Methuselah's | long life | had been | his only | chronicle. 
 Oblivion | is not | to be hired : | The greater | part | must be 
 content | to be | as though | they had not been, | to be found | in 
 the register | of God, | not | in the record | of man. | Twenty-seven | 
 names | make up | the first story j before the flood, | and the re- 
 corded names | ever since | contain not | one living | century. 
 The number | of the dead | long | exceedeth | all | that shall live. 
 The night | of time | far surpasseth | the day, | and who | knows 
 when | was the Equinox ? | Every | hour | adds | unto that 
 current | Arithmetic | which scarce | stands | one moment. | And 
 since death | must be | the Lucina | of life, | and even Pagans | 
 could doubt, | whether thus | to live, | were to die. Since our 
 longest | sun | sets | at right | descensions, | and makes | but winter 
 arches, | and therefore | it cannot | be long | before | we lie down 
 in darkness, | and have | our light | in ashes. Since [ the brother 
 of death | daily | haunts us | with dying | memento's, and time 
 that grows old | in it self, | bids us | hope | no long duration : 
 diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation. 1 
 
 1 It is seldom that Browne allows himself this ugly homaoteleuton.
 
 1 88 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Darkness | and light | divide | the course | of time, 1 and oblivion 
 shares | with memory, | a great part | even | of our living | beings ; 
 we slightly | remembered | our felicities, | and the smartest | strokes 
 of affliction | leave but short | smart | upon us. | Sense | endur- 
 eth | no | extremities, | and sorrows | destroy us j or themselves. 
 To weep | into stones | are fables. | Afflictions | induce | callosities, 
 miseries | are slippery, | or fall | like snow. | upon us, | which 
 notwithstanding | is no unhappy | stupidity. | To be ignorant | of 
 evils | to come, | and forgetful | of evils | past, | is a merciful | 
 provision | in nature, | whereby | we digest | the mixture | of our 
 few | and evil | days, j and our delivered | senses | not | relapsing | 
 into cutting | remembrances, | our sorrows | are not kept | raw | by 
 the edge | of repetitions, j A great part | of Antiquity | contented 
 their hopes | of subsistency | with a trans [migration | of their souls. 
 A good way | to continue | their memories, | while having | the 
 advantage | of plural | successions, | they could not | but act | some- 
 thing | remarkable | in such | variety | of beings, | and enjoying 
 the fame | of their passed | selves, | make | accumulation | of glory 
 unto their last | durations. | Others, | rather | than be lost! in 
 the uncomfortable | night | of nothing, | were content | to recede 
 into the common | being, | and make | one particle | of the public 
 soul | of all things, | which was no more | than to return | into their 
 unknown | and divine | Original | again. | Egyptian | ingenuity [ 
 was more | unsatisfied, | contriving j their bodies | in sweet | con- 
 sistencies, | to attend j the return | of their souls. | But all | was 
 vanity | feeding the winde, | and folly. | The ^Egyptian | mummies, | 
 which Cambyses | or time | hath spared, | avarice | now | consum- 
 eth. | Mummy is become | merchandise, | Mizraim | cures | wounds, | 
 
 and Pharaoh 
 In vain do 
 
 is sold | for balsams, 
 individuals I hope for 
 
 Immortality, | or any | patent | 
 
 from oblivion, | in preservations | below | the Moon : | Men | have 
 been deceived | even | in their flatteries | above | the Sun, | and 
 studied | conceits | to perpetuate | their names | in heaven. | The 
 various | cosmography | of that part | hath already | varied | the 
 names | of contrived | constellations ; | Nimrod | is lost | in Orion, | 
 and Osris | in the Dog-star. | While we look | for incorruption 
 the heavens, | we find | they are but | like the Earth ; | durable 
 their main | bodies, | alterable | in their parts ; | whereof | beside 
 Comets | and new Stars, | perspectives | begin | to tell tales. | And 
 the spots | that wander | about the Sun, | with Phaeton's | favour, | 
 would make clear | conviction. | 
 
 There is nothing | strictly | immortal, | but immortality ; | what- 
 ever | hath no beginning, | may be confident | of no end | which 
 is the peculiar | of that necessary | essence | that cannot | destroy 
 itself ; | and the highest | strain of | omnipotency, | to be | so 
 powerfully | constituted | as not | to suffer | even | from the power | 
 
 1 A blank verse, again rare.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 189 
 
 of itself. | All others | have a dependent | being, | and within | the 
 reach | of destruction ; | but the sufficiency | of Christian | immor- 
 tality | frustrates | all earthly | glory, | and the quality | of either 
 state | after death | makes a folly | of posthumous | memory. | God, 
 who can only j destroy | our souls, | and hath assured our resur- 
 rection, | either | of our bodies | or names, | hath directly promised | 
 no | duration. | Wherein | there is so much | of chance, | that 
 the boldest | expectants | have found | unhappy | frustration ; | and 
 to hold | long | subsistence, | seems but | a scape | in oblivion. | 
 
 But man | is a noble | animal, | splendid | in ashes, | and pompous | 
 in the grave, | solemnizing | nativities | and deaths f with equal | 
 lustre, | nor omitting | ceremonies | of bravery | in the infamy | of 
 
 his nature. 
 
 Life | is a pure | flame, | and we lived by | an invisible | Sun 
 within us. | A small | fire | sufficeth | for life, | great flames 
 seemed | too little | after death, | while men j vainly | affected 
 precious | pyres, | and to burn | like | Sardanapalus. But the 
 wisdom | of funeral | laws | found | the folly | of prodigal | blazes, 
 and reduced | undoing | fires | unto the rule | of sober | obsequies, 
 wherein | few | could be so mean | as not | to provide | wood, 
 pitch, | a mourner, | and an urn. 
 
 Five | languages | secured not | the epitaph | of Gordianus. The 
 man of God | lives longer | without | a tomb | than any | by one, 
 invisibly | interred | by Angels, | and adjudged | to obscurity, 
 though not | without | some marks | directing | human | discovery. 
 Enoch | and Elias, | without | either tomb | or burial | in an anoma- 
 lous | state | of being, | are trie great | examples | of perpetuity, | in 
 their long | and living | memory, | in strict | account | being still | on 
 this side | death, | and having | a late part | yet | to act | upon this 
 stage | of earth. | If in | the decretory | term | of the world I we 
 shall not | all die | but be changed, | according | to received | trans- 
 lation : | the last day [ will make | but few graves ; | at least | quick 
 resurrections | will anticipate | lasting | sepultures. | Some Graves 
 will be opened | before | they be quite | closed, | and Lazarus | be 
 no wonder. When many | that feared | to die, shall groan | that 
 they can die | but once, | the dismal | state | is the second | and 
 
 living | death, 
 men shall wish 
 
 when life | puts despair | on the damned ; when 
 the coverings I of mountains, I not I of monuments, I 
 
 and annihilations | shall be courted. | 
 
 While some | have studied | monuments, | others 
 ously | declined them : | and some | have been so vainly 
 
 have studi- 
 boisterous, 
 
 that they durst not | acknowledge their graves ; | wherein | Alaricus 
 seems | most subtle, | who had a river | turned | to hide | his 
 bones | at the bottom. Even Sylla, [ that thought himself | safe 
 in his urn, | could not prevent | revenging | tongues, | and stones 
 thrown | at his monument. | Happy | are they | whom privacy
 
 1 90 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 makes innocent, | who deal so | with men | in this world, | that 
 they | are not afraid | to meet them | in the next, | who | when 
 they die, j make no | commotion | among the dead, | and are not | 
 touched with | that poetical | taunt | of Isaiah. 
 
 Pyramids, | Arches, | Obelisks, | were but | the irregularities | of 
 vain-glory, | and wild | enormities | of ancient | magnanimity. | But 
 the most | magnanimous [ resolution | rests | in the Christian | Re- 
 ligion, | which trampleth | upon pride, | and sits | on the neck | of 
 ambition, | humbly | pursuing | that infallible | perpetuity, | unto 
 which | all others | must diminish | their diameters, | and be 
 poorly | seen | in angles | of contingency. 
 
 Pious | spirits | who passed | their days | in raptures | of futur- 
 ity, | made little more | of this world, | than the world | that was 
 before it, | while they lay | obscure | in the Chaos | of preordination, | 
 and night | of their fore-beings. | And if any | have been so 
 happy | as truly | to understand | Christian | annihilation, | extasis, | 
 exolution, | liquefaction, | transformation, | the kiss of the Spouse,] 
 gustation of God, | and ingression | into the divine | shadow, | they| 
 have already | had an handsome | anticipation | of heaven ; | the 
 glory | of the world | is surely | over, | and the earth | in ashes] 
 unto them. 
 
 To subsist j in lasting | Monuments, | to live | in their produc- 
 tions, | to exist | in their names | and predicament | of chimeras,] 
 was large | satisfaction | unto old | expectations, | and made | one 
 part | of their Elysiums. | But all | this | is nothing | in the Meta- 
 physics | of true belief. | To live | indeed | is to be again | our- 
 selves, | which | being not only | an hope | but an evidence | in 
 noble | believers ; | 'tis all one | to lie | in St. Innocents | churchyard, | 
 as in the Sands | of ^gypt ; | Ready | to be anything, | in the 
 ecstasy | of being ever, | and as content | with | six | foot l | as the 
 Moles | of Adrianus. 
 
 1 Or a molossus at pleasure.
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 191 
 
 The possibility of comment on this long passage is interim ob- 
 servation 
 
 overture. 
 
 almost illimitable. But one observation is too important servatlon on 
 
 not to be made at once. I first attempted the scansion 
 of the opening sentence many years ago, and have some- 
 times effected a few alterations at intervals since. I am 
 not now sure whether it is better to take the opening five 
 words together as a heavily weighted dochmiac (or at 
 least a spondee + molossus), or to let them be mono- 
 syllabic feet-thuds, as of earth dropping on the coffin-lid 
 or the urn. But this will not affect what I am going 
 to say. I had never even noticed, until I was actually 
 writing this comment, and therefore I need hardly assure 
 the reader that I had never, even half unconsciously, led 
 up to the discovery, that in the above scansion no two 
 identical feet l ever follow each other, not so much as on a 
 single occasion. Now we have observed, from the first, 
 that variety of foot arrangement, without definite equiva- 
 lence, appears to be as much the secret of prose rhythm as 
 uniformity of value, with equivalence or without it, appears 
 to be that of poetic metre. Here is perhaps the very 
 finest phrase of English prose itself one of the finest 
 by something like a common agreement. And here, 
 arrived at and verified with an entire absence of design, 
 is the presence of that variety, pushed to what might 
 have seemed antecedently an almost impossible point. 
 Of course, this may be merely a coincidence ; but it is 
 surely rather a remarkable one. 2 
 
 The almost or quite equally famous close of the The close of 
 Garden of Cyrus merits equally careful study : \k& Garden of 
 
 But the quincunx of heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the 
 five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking 
 thoughts into the phantasms of sleep, which often continueth pre- 
 
 1 These remarks concern \hzfirst paragraph, " Now say " : but there are 
 not very many such sequences elsewhere. Monosyllables do not count. 
 
 2 In the less exalted and " full - dressed " passages similar feet do, of 
 course, occur in couples or even groups, but variety and gradation are much 
 more prominent. The reader will not, I hope, have missed the suggestion 
 of those jz.*-syllable feet, which are often noticed elsewhere as possibilities, 
 though they can be technically avoided by admitting the constant apostropha- 
 tion (especially in the definite article) of the time, or by dividing words on my 
 own older, and not yet quite abandoned, principle.
 
 192 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 cogitations ; making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome 
 groves. Besides, Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the oneiro- 
 critical masters have left such frigid interpretations from plants, that 
 there is little encouragement to dream of paradise itself. Nor will 
 the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep ; 
 wherein the dulness of that sense shakes hands with delectable 
 odours ; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any 
 delight raise up the ghost of a rose. 
 
 Night, which Pagan theology could make the daughter of Chaos, 
 affords no advantage to the description of order ; although no lower 
 than that mass can we derive its genealogy. All things began in 
 order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again ; according 
 to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of 
 heaven. 
 
 Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I 
 find no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep 
 our eyes open longer were but to act our antipodes. The huntsmen 
 are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in 
 Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from 
 everlasting sleep ? or have slumbering thoughts at that time, when 
 sleep itself must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again. 
 
 This, on the whole, is in a minor key, and uses more 
 muffled instruments. The quaintness of the master has 
 a little (only a little) got the better of his magnificence. 
 But the extraordinary subtlety and variety of it, and the 
 unerring adjustment of the different rhythms to the 
 different senses, are almost equally apparent. Note, for 
 instance, the shift of cadence in the closes of the three 
 paragraphs : the sarcastic liveliness of " the ghost of a 
 rose " ; the splendour (here, at least, at almost its full 
 height) of " according | to the ordainer of order | and 
 mystical mathematics of the city | of heaven " ; the 
 solemnity of the cluster of a sounds, and the arrangement 
 of monosyllable, anapaest, and iamb, in " all | shall awake 
 again." 
 
 These minor adjustments of Browne's, which it would 
 have taken a long chapter to exhibit fully in the longer 
 passage, may be further exampled here in several. Note 
 the almost literal " dropping off" of the paeon, amphibrach, 
 
 and iamb, " in these drowsy | approaches j of sleep." 
 Note the identical movement, doubtless inspired by the 
 
 same motive, of " But the quincunx I of heaven | runs
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 193 
 
 low." | Note the arch of the period, " But who can be 
 drowsy | at that hour | which freed us from everlasting 
 
 sleep," and the " bearing up " of the second sentence by 
 strong dochmiac combinations, so that the second half 
 can easily gear itself on. It is one of the faults in style 
 of most writers of this period, from Milton downwards, 
 that they neglect this precaution, and worse than neglect 
 it conducting a phrase to an almost dying close, and V 
 then, as it were, rudely kicking it up again with an un- 
 expected appendix. Browne does not do this, but by a 
 prodigal and almost prodigious variety achieves all his 
 effects, minor and major. How far he calculated it, one 
 cannot say ; but it is at least noteworthy that it is much 
 less obvious in the work which he did not himself publish 
 than in that which he did. And it was insufficient atten- 
 tion to this peculiarity which, when Johnson came to study 
 him, injured, as we shall see, the result of the Johnsonian 
 following. 
 
 But let us attempt the promised sylva of shorter short passages 
 quotations, illustrating this and other peculiarities. They 
 shall be arranged chronologically, and in the order in 
 which they occur in the different works : 
 
 I confess | there is cause | of passion | between us ; J j by his 
 sentence [ I stand | ex | communicated ; | Heretic \ is the best j lan- 
 guage | he | affords me ; | yet can no ear | witness | I | ever | returned 
 him | the name | of Antichrist, \ Man of Sin, \ or | Whore of Babylon. 
 
 Here the first three kola, being parallel, end similarly 
 in three amphibrachs : 
 
 between us 
 
 -icated 
 
 affords me 
 
 But the last, which is the antithesis-consequent to all 
 three, lengthens itself out, runs quite differently, and 
 closes with a dochmiac of mild expostulatory meditation, 
 1 Browne and the Pope.
 
 194 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 separable, as these dochmiacs often are, into single 
 syllables, as if the writer were greatly shocked and dis- 
 turbed at having to pronounce the offensive term. 
 
 Here is one rather longer ; not perhaps very elaborate 
 in appearance, but one which, when it is duly examined, 
 will be found singularly accomplished : 
 
 We need not | labour | with so many | arguments | to confute | 
 Judicial | Astrology ; | for if | there be | a truth therein | it does 
 not | injure | Divinity. | If | to be born | under Mercury | disposeth 
 us | to be witty, | under Jupiter | to be wealthy, | I do not owe | a 
 knee | unto these | but unto | that merciful \ Hand \ that hath 
 ordered \ my indifferent \ and uncertain \ nativity \ unto such \ 
 benevolous \ aspects. \ Those | that hold | that all things | are 
 governed | by Fortune | had not erred, | had they not | persisted | 
 there. 1 The Romans | that erected | a temple | to Fortune | acknow- 
 
 ledged | therein, | though 
 Divinity ; I for, I in a wise 
 
 in a blinder way, | something | of 
 supputation, I all things I begin I and 
 
 end | in the Almighty. | There is a nearer \ way \ to Heaven \ than 
 Homer's \ chain : \ an easy \ Logic \ may conjoin \ Heaven \ and 
 Earth \ in one Argument, \ and with less \ than a Sorites \ resolve \ 
 all things \ into God. 
 
 It would be difficult to find, anywhere, more simply 
 beautiful examples of rhythm than the two italicised 
 passages. 
 
 Here again is a quainter but hardly a finer sample : 
 
 There was more | than one Hell | in Magjdalene 2 | when there 
 were | seven | Devils : | for every | Devil | is an Hell | unto him- 
 self ; 3 | he holds | enough | of torture | in his own | ubi, \ and needs 
 not | the misery | of circumference j to afflict him. | And thus | 
 a distracted | conscience | here, | is a shadow | or introduction 1 unto 
 Hell | hereafter. | 
 
 In close connection with this occurs another altitude 
 of prose harmony : 
 
 And to be true | and speak, | my soul, j when I survey | the 
 occurrences | of my life, | and call | into account | the Finger | of 
 
 1 One of Browne's double (or enveloped} meanings. " Persisted there " 
 involves not merely "maintained this position," but "refused to go beyond." 
 
 2 I think the word-division in this rhythm is necessary, as it is in the 
 metre of Rossetti's 
 
 Ce |cily, Ger|trude, Mag|dalen[e], 
 
 to bring out the marvellous beauty of the name by the help of the pause. 
 Whether Browne intended the final e to be valued or not matters little. 
 
 3 Why, this is Hell : nor am I out of it."
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 195 
 
 God, | I can conceive j nothing j but an abyss | or mass | of mercies 
 either | in general | to mankind | or | in particular | to myself. 
 And | whether out of the prejudice | of my affection | or an in- 
 verting | and partial | conceit | of his mercies | I know not, | but | 
 those | which others | term | crosses, | afflictions, | judgments, | mis- 
 fortunes, | to me, | who inquire | further | into them | than their 
 visible | effects, | they both appear j and in event | have ever | proved | 
 those secret | and dissembled | favours | of His | affection. | 
 
 The famous passage about his life being a " miracle of 
 thirty years " might be added to these from the Religio : 
 but we must not draw too much from one only of such 
 copious founts. 1 
 
 A few of the " golden couplets disclosed " in those From the 
 nests of such things, the Urn-Burial and the Garden of ' H y driota P hia - 
 Cyrus, may be selected, even after the selections above. 
 Nothing, indeed, could be a much better sample of the 
 music of Browne than the opening of the Hydriotaphia> 
 or rather of its " Dedicatory Letter " : 
 
 When the funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men 
 took a lasting adieu of their interred friends, little expecting the 
 curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and, having 
 no old experience of the duration of their reliques, held no opinion of 
 such after-considerations. 
 
 But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be 
 buried ? who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be 
 scattered ? The reliques of many lie like the ruins of Pompeys, in 
 all parts of the earth ; and when they arrive at your hands, these 
 may seem to have wandered far, who in a direct and meridian travel, 
 have but few miles of known earth between yourself and the pole. 
 
 This opening is of the highest " curiosity " : 
 
 When the fujneral pyre | was out 
 And the last | valedicjtion over 
 
 has in itself an almost excessively metrical correspond- 
 ence it at once invites completion : 
 
 1 One amaritude of the most excellent may be given, because it is of the 
 kind which at once and utterly, in the writing for the one, in the reading for the 
 many, dis-herds and separates the sheep from the goats : " The vulgarity | 
 of those judgments | that wrap | the Church | of God | in Strabo's | cloak | " 
 (i. Ivi. overture). For irony of phrase and thought and rhythm combined, 
 that seems to me unsurpassed : especially when I think of some popular 
 writers of our day brought to the bar of Sir Thomas for "vulgarity of 
 judgment."
 
 196 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Then the mourn |er he turned | about 
 And his head | he did sad|ly cover ; J 
 
 but only if you look at it in a poetical way, and hear it 
 with a metrical ear. As prose, the iambic ending of one 
 
 clause (" was out ") and the trochaic (" over ") of the other 
 defeat the suggestion, which is further smothered by the 
 entirely non- correspondent rhythm of the succeeding 
 words, " men took a lasting adieu," etc. 
 
 For a short example, showing the sudden pyrotechnic 
 effect (in dealing elsewhere with Browne 2 I have ventured 
 to question the banality or banausia sometimes connected 
 with this word), we can hardly find a better than 
 
 but the open \ magnificence \ of 
 of clay. 
 
 Nor only | these concealed | pieces, 
 antiquity, \ ran much | in the artifice 
 
 Or the often quoted 
 
 Liquors | not | to be computed | by years | of annual | magistrates, | 
 but by great | conjunctions, | and the fatal | periods | of kingdoms. 
 
 Or the quaint fancy, centring on a double alliteration : 
 
 All urns | contained not | single | ashes ; | without | confused | 
 burnings | they | affectionately | compounded | their bones ; | passion- 
 ately | endeavouring | to continue | their living | unions. 
 
 Or that other more splendid passage, illuminated as it 
 were almost from the outset by the light, and dominated 
 by the crash, of " terra damnata" with the strange and 
 purposely muffled contrast of " aged cinders." 
 
 From the But the " Garden " will not be left behind the " Yard," 
 Ganfcw of ^oug^ we cu u no ^ so many herbs and flowers from it. 
 
 " Gardens | were before gardeners and but some 
 - U 
 hours after | the earth " is an early and effective 
 
 example of an extremely simple combination dissyllabic 
 and trisyllabic feet only, yet giving a prose -rhythm 
 absolutely incapable of being confused with verse-metre. 
 More complex, and remarkable because of the fact 
 
 1 "This author is so ignorant that he imagines the ancients to have gone 
 to funerals with uncovered heads" (Zoilus infuturo). 
 
 2 Cambridge History of English Literature, vii. 242 note.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 197 
 
 that rather elaborate rhythmical form is given to a mere 
 statement without any special preciousness of thought or 
 choiceness of phraseology, is 
 
 In the | memorable | garden | of Alcinous, | anciently | con- 
 ceived l I an original | fancy I from Paradise, 2 | mention | there is | 
 - . O - ~ ~ - ~ *= ~ ~ _ - - _ ~ 
 of well | contrived | order; | for so | hath Didymus | and Eustachius | 
 
 expounded | the emphati cal 2 | word. 
 
 In the following the Johnsonian germs are clear : 
 
 He shall | not fall | on trite | or trivial | disquisitions. | And 
 these | we invent | and propose | unto acuter | enquirers, | nauseating | 
 crambe \ verities | and questions | over- 1 queried. | Flat | and 
 flexi i ble | truths | are beat out | by every | hammer ; | but Vulcan | 
 and his whole j forge | sweat | to work out | Achilles | his armour. 
 
 Two passages, at least, from the curious Letter to a The Letter to 
 Friend should be included in this exhibition. It would a Fnend - 
 appear that there was a strong personal feeling at the 
 back of Browne's professional interest in this case of a 
 consumptive patient who died at thirty ; and it has 
 chequered his singular melancholy never funereal in a 
 commonplace or ugly fashion, but always near to the 
 dirige with a placebo of quaintness, as if to keep off an 
 actual breakdown. But how little he has forgotten not 
 his swashing blow but his sleight of hand may be seen 
 from the end-notes of this four-barred phrase : 
 
 He that is staidly inclined were unwise to pass his days in | 
 
 Portugal 
 
 Cholical persons will find little comfort in Austria or | Vienna 
 He that is weak-legged must not be in love with | Rome 
 Nor an infirm head with Venice | or Paris. 
 
 1 I think Browne very likely intended the "eds" to be valued in these 
 words. 
 
 2 Paeon and iambic, or dochmiac and monosyllabic foot, are at discretion 
 here.
 
 198 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Or, to take a pronounced humour-stroke, not out of 
 keeping with the House of Melancholy : 
 
 But hairs | make fallible | predictions : | and many | temples | 
 early gray | have outlived | the Psalmist's | period. 
 
 And Christian Christian Morals has had harder things said of it than 
 any other of Browne's books : and it may be admitted to 
 stand to the rest somewhat in the relation of Samson 
 Agonistes to the rest of Milton's verse, with the additional 
 disadvantage of never having been revised by its author. 
 Its singular confusion (or from another point of view, 
 parallelism) with the Letter to a Friend as if the writer 
 had never quite made up his mind whether both were to 
 stand, or only one, and if both, how the contents were to 
 be finally distributed is quite decisive as to both * being 
 half-done work. And there are not a few passages in the 
 Morals where the phrase and cadence seem to invite, if 
 not to insist upon, further filing and chiselling, further 
 symphonising and counterpointing. Yet hardly the 
 Hydriotaphia, or the Garden of Cyrus, contains more 
 magnificent descants in little, though the sententious 
 arrangement prevents any such opus majus or maximum as 
 that quoted above. Observe the dexterity of this : 
 
 As charity | covers, | so Modesty | preventeth, | a multitude | of 
 sins ; | withholding | from noonday | vices | and brazen -browed | 
 iniquities, | from sinning | on the house-top, | and painting | our 
 follies | with the rays | of the sun, 
 
 where it may be observed that if both verbs in the first 
 clause had had the -s, or both the -th, the rhythm would 
 have been not a little inquinated, as Browne himself 
 might have said. 
 
 On the other hand, I think he would, in final revision, 
 have reduced the alliteration and given more concin- 
 nity to the cadence in 
 
 1 More than one hypothesis as to Browne's intentions may not be un- 
 reasonable as that the Letter might, at one time, have been intended 
 to be a sort of minor episode or enclave in the Morals ; at another to have 
 opened, as it does, with the narrative part of the particular case, and then 
 have exalted and enlarged itself into the general treatise or even something 
 fuller. The two are, in a way, Browne's Holy Dying and his Holy Living.
 
 vi THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORNATE STYLE 199 
 
 Culpable beginnings have found commendable conclusions ; and 
 infamous courses pious retractations, 
 
 where also the two clauses end too much alike. 
 
 He can sometimes (as in Sect. vii. of Part ii.) commit 
 the fault of adjusting a tail of clauses badly. 
 
 If the Almighty will not spare us according to His merciful 
 capitulation at Sodom, if His goodness please not to pass over a 
 great deal of Bad for a small pittance of Good, or to look upon us in 
 the lump ; there is slender hope for mercy or sound presumption of 
 fulfilling half His will | either in persons or nations : || they who excel 
 in some virtues being so often defective in others ; ]|| few men driving 
 at the extent and amplitude of goodness, but computing themselves by 
 their best parts, and others by their worst, are content to rest in 
 those virtues which others commonly want. 
 
 Here I think Browne's critical " flapper " would have 
 struck at " will " when at his best and wariest ; might in 
 an easier mood have refrained till " nations " ; but would, 
 if present and vigilant at any regular revision, have 
 redoubled his blows to secure a full stop at " others." As 
 for the rest of the sentence, it is a mere appendage, almost 
 as bad as Milton's worst. 
 
 On the other hand, in spite of some of the most 
 sesquipedalian words, of the most artificially and over- 
 artificially contorted antitheses, in spite of a hint of 
 grotesque about the quaintness, how much of the splendour 
 of Browne's idiosyncrasy is here : 
 
 Let the characters | of good | things | stand | indelibly | in thy 
 mind | and thy thoughts | be active | on them. Trust not | too 
 much unto | suggestions from | reminiscential | amulets, | or artificial 
 memorandums. | Let | the mortifying | Janus | of Co|varrubias 
 be in thy daily | thoughts, | not only | on thy hand | and signets. 
 Rely not | alone | upon silent | and dumb | remembrances. | Be- 
 hold not | Death's-heads | till thou dost not | see them, | nor look 
 upon | mortifying | objects | till thou overjlook'st them. | Forget 
 not | how assuefaction | unto anything | minorates | the passion 
 from it ; [ how constant | objects | loose | their hints | and steal 
 an inadvertisement l \ upon us. | There is no | excuse | to ' forget 
 what everything | prompts | unto us. To thoughtful | observators 
 the whole | word | is | a phylactery, [ and everything | we see 
 an item j of the wisdom, | power, | or goodness | of God. | 
 
 1 A "sixer," I think.
 
 200 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CH. vi 
 
 And how far more splendid still, how absolutely of 
 the first order, are two short phrases to be found within a 
 page of each other : 
 
 Acquaint thy self with | the Choragium | of the stars, 
 and 
 
 Behold thyself | by inward | optics | and the Crystalline | of thy 
 soul. 
 
 And indeed, if any one would acquaint himself with 
 the choragium of the stars of English prose if he would, 
 from a different point of analogy, look through the 
 Crystalline of its soul it is to this seventeenth-century 
 division that he must turn. I could add examples from 
 Others other and lesser stars of this galaxy, but still such as 
 omitted s ^ e< ^ tne starr y comfort. Glanvill, not merely in the 
 famous sentence which, " like morn from Memnon," drew 
 from Edgar Poe the harmony of Ligeia ; Thomas 
 Burnet, in his tones as of a softened Apocalypse, may 
 seem to demand admission ; while much earlier, my friend 
 and predecessor, the late David Masson, would have 
 remonstrated with me for not including Drummond of 
 Hawthornden in the Cypress Grove ; and others would 
 press for the anonymous " Essay on Death," improperly 
 ascribed to Bacon. But the tale is yet long, and it is 
 of a character specially dangerous to lengthen.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 
 
 The charm of seventeenth-century ornateness Glanvill But such 
 ornateness not for all work The forging of the plant for 
 this Ben Jonson High value of the Discoveries Hobbes 
 His eminence and its contrasted character The " Race " and 
 " Love " passages of Human Nature Clarendon. 
 
 AT the close of the last chapter the opinion was pro- The charm of 
 
 visionally expressed that the period of seventeenth- century 60 ' 
 
 century ornate style (extending over rather more than ornateness. 
 
 two generations in the conventional sense of that word) 
 
 was the crown and flower of English prose in regard to 
 
 beauty and originality of rhythmical form. 1 It is too 
 
 early yet (if indeed it will not always be so) to decide 
 
 finally what the special characteristics of that beauty were ; 
 
 we must see the rest of the development, and especially 
 
 that of the only really competing period 1820 to 1890 
 
 before fixing on, or rather suggesting, these even to 
 
 the extent permissible in literary enquiry. But enough 
 
 document should have been given, and perhaps more 
 
 than enough comment, whereon to base some general 
 
 remarks. 
 
 If the fact of the charm be denied, there is no use in Glanvill. 
 counter-affirmation. The ear which is insensible thereto 
 would not have its dead nerves vivified though one of the 
 other dead came to testify to the matter. Take illud 
 Glanvillianum itself : " Man doth not yield himself to the 
 
 1 "The shout of a king is among them" as Balaam, the son of Beor, 
 that early and unfortunate but characteristic type of a "literary man," ob- 
 served of the children of Israel or " Jacobel," if any one prefers it.
 
 202 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the 
 weakness of his feeble will." The sentiment is great and 
 Heaven knows ! appealing ; the aura or penumbra of 
 expression (which some good souls would fain identify 
 with the meaning itself, lest they allow too much to form) 
 is better. But how much of this, and how much more, 
 impossible to bind to the meaning at all except by 
 sheer voluntary association, is due purely to vowel and 
 consonant music, and to rhythmical arrangement ! l 
 
 Nowhere perhaps better, though it may be (and 
 fortunately) in a hundred other places as well, can we see 
 the greatest difference between prose and verse rhythm ; 
 between, that is to say, rhythm diverse and rhythm uniform. 
 The charms of the latter are not likely to be denied or 
 minimised here ; nor are those of the third and fourth 
 rhythms, that of music and that of spoken rhetoric, which 
 attach and part themselves so cunningly, and in some 
 cases it would seem so deludingly, to and from the others. 
 We know how one kind of rhythm, falling in with strong 
 temporary assistance of mood, will for a time exalt and 
 sustain sheer gibberish like the words of Lilliburlero, 
 bombastic drivel like those of the Marseillaise. We 
 know how, to come to nobler and cleaner matter, the 
 more uniform rhythm of poetry supplies one hardly 
 dares to say how much of the magic of Shelley and of 
 Shakespeare. This other, or prose, witchcraft I suppose 
 appeals to fewer than the spells of the older muse. The 
 variation of the clause-ends (already indicated more than 
 
 once as a source of sublimity) " angels," " utterly," and 
 then the clenching " will " the way in which this last 
 pulls up and fortifies the luscious and almost choriambic 
 
 1 This arrangement is a peculiarly audacious justification of the old 
 assertion that "no kind of rhythm is denied to prose." The latter half 
 
 "save only | through the weakness | of his feeble | will," is by itself almost 
 insolently metrical. But the echo of the entirely different opening, "Man | 
 
 doth not yield | himself | to the angels | nor unto | Death | utterly," reclaims 
 and redeems it for prose, though even here the subtle third paeon (with its 
 
 ionic suggestion) " to the angels " intimates the tune of the end.
 
 vii THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 203 
 
 or ionic paeons, lest the movement should be too effeminate, 
 the solemn intruded note "unto | death | utterly" all 
 these things are wonderful. 
 
 The investigation and degustation of them may be, I But such or- 
 have said, a delight to the few ; but the beauty of the jKfwork 1 
 whole, if less voluptuously appreciated, may be, it is hoped, 
 a joy to many these delights and joys being almost 
 endlessly repeated and varied in the greater and lesser 
 writers of the period. But without entering into the 
 various arguments which may be urged against ornate 
 style of the kind, such as the difficulty of maintaining it 
 at its best, and the liability to positive ugliness and 
 disorder in inefficient hands, there is one consideration 
 which may be properly, and indeed must in propriety, be 
 taken here. It is obvious that extremely, delicately, and 
 complicatedly rhythmed prose of this kind is by no 
 means extensively or universally fit for what has been 
 called " the instrument of the average purpose." It is 
 not merely that the ordinary reader is, as the old and 
 often-quoted anecdote about Gautier and Girardin has it, 
 " made uncomfortable by the style," but that that style is 
 intrinsically unsuitable for direct and methodical ex- 
 position ; doubtfully and only occasionally suitable for 
 plain narration ; critically impossible as a vehicle of 
 conversation, scientific instruction, practical argument, 
 and the whole range or ranges of what is succinctly called 
 " business." The very users of it confess this in various 
 ways. We want, as Beatrice says, " another for working 
 days." 
 
 Accordingly we should expect to find, and we do find, The forging of 
 
 that, side by side with the more many -centred and ai 
 elaborate rhythms, plainer prose appears throughout this 
 period itself. And especially if we remember the course 
 of the " other harmony " during the same time, and the 
 ultimate (temporary-ultimate, of course) triumph of the 
 uniform stopped couplet, we shall not be surprised to find 
 something similar occurring here. 
 
 It has indeed been already shown that, in the first de- 
 liberate prose-writing that of Fisher and his followers
 
 204 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 the simple antithetic or parallel balance-swing is the limit 
 of rhythmical tendency ; that polycentred harmonies do 
 not appear ; that this is even more perceptible in Ascham 
 and even in Lyly, though tricks of phrase and concerts of 
 thought variegate and half muffle it here ; and that even 
 the wonderful harmonies of Hooker are not, as a rule, 
 very elaborate. Further, some of the very writers who 
 have been noticed in the last two chapters, like Lyly, 
 might be, and have been, claimed rather for this. Putting 
 aside the usual pregnancy of his thought and the occa- 
 sional brilliancy of his phrase, Bacon is not a writer very 
 ornate or Composite, hardly even Corinthian, in rhythm. 
 Neither is Burton. In Bacon's pupils and admirers, 
 Jonson and Hobbes, in Clarendon (who, however, draws 
 on himself some of the censures invited by the symphonic 
 writers, though he does not give us much of their solace), 
 and in others, we find the making of the line which leads 
 straight up to the great plain style of the later seventeenth, 
 the whole of the eighteenth, and the earliest nineteenth 
 centuries. They will need briefer treatment, as they give 
 less poignant and less multifold pleasure, than their 
 fellows. But they are not to be despised ; and, like 
 those fellows, it may be doubted whether they have been 
 surpassed, in their own way, while their followers had 
 practically the field to themselves in the next. 
 
 Ben Jonson. We are at some, though not at very serious, dis- 
 advantage, as regards Ben Jonson's prose, in that we 
 possess no single finished prose work of considerable size, 
 undoubted finish, and deliberate literary pretension. 
 The prefaces and prose parts of the Plays cannot be held 
 as such ; the Drummond conversations are short-hand 
 and second-hand fragments ; the English Grammar could 
 hardly give much of the kind we want, and does give 
 less than it might ; the " Discourse of Poesy," which, in 
 this as in other ways, ought to have been specially 
 precious, does not apparently exist, nor can we even 
 (without throwing any doubt on Drummond's good faith) 
 be certain that it ever did exist, except as a project. 
 
 There remains the curious work variously entitled
 
 viz THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 205 
 
 Explorata, Discoveries, and Timber ; and some of us are High value 
 not dissatisfied with it as building material. Every one 
 must be grateful for the trouble which Professor Schelling 
 in America took, partially, a good many years ago, and 
 M. Castellain in France more recently on a more ex- 
 tensive scale, in the way of identifying Ben's classical 
 and other authorities and sources. But it is not illiberal 
 or outrecuidant to say that every one who knew these 
 originals must have recognised them long before even 
 Professor Schelling wrote ; and that the verdict of whole- 
 sale plagiarism which others have delivered, on the strength 
 of further collation, must be broken by any competent 
 court of critical appeal. If this is beyond our province, 
 the Discoveries, had they been a direct unmanipulated 
 translation, avowed or unavowed, of a single book, would 
 still belong to it eminently. 
 
 For whatever be the origin of their thought, 1 the 
 vehicle of their expression is pure English, and English 
 of a type remarkable in itself, to a great extent novel, 
 and extremely germinal. Elizabethan translations had 
 been, as we have seen, numerous and interesting, but as a 
 rule couched in styles with which those of their originals 
 had very little to do, except in distant and roundabout 
 ways. Classical form had exercised great influence on 
 Ascham and Cheke ; little on North or even Holland. 
 But Ben succeeded while manifesting an originality 
 beside which that of more apparently spontaneous writers 
 is merely childish in assimilating with due transference 
 of key, the sententious quality of the silver Latins, who 
 were his special cult, in at the same time maintaining 
 English quality, and in adapting both to a plain style 
 such as had never yet been achieved. He preserves his 
 kind cannot but preserve the balance of Ascham and 
 Lyly as his chief rhetorical instrument, but he raises the 
 
 1 And it may be just pardonable, in view of some recent utterances, to 
 remind readers that the most interesting things in the book, the remarks on 
 Shakespeare, and Spenser, and Bacon, and others, can have no indebtedness 
 to Horace or to Heinsius, to Scaliger or to Seneca ; while the selection, co- 
 adaptation, and application of the borrowed phrases to express Ben's views 
 constitute a work more really original than most utterances that are guiltless 
 of literature.
 
 206 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 comparatively commonplace style of the former to a far 
 higher power, and entirely discards the fantastic vocabu- 
 lary, and the frippery generally, of the latter. For the 
 most part, too, he avoids the extreme Latinising in which 
 his younger contemporaries and immediate successors 
 indulged a word like " umbratical," which he was almost 
 forced to retain in his paraphrase of Petronius, is an 
 exception and not a common exception. Sometimes he 
 is almost vernacular in this respect, like his prede- 
 cessors above mentioned, but with a more polished and 
 modern touch, as in this : 
 
 What a deal of cold business doth a man spend the better part of 
 life in ! in scattering compliment, tendering visits, gathering and 
 venting news, following feasts and plays, making a little winter love 
 in a dark corner. 
 
 
 
 The precise rhythm, here and elsewhere, is more 
 cunning perhaps l than may appear at first hearing ; but it 
 is evidently not in the least that symphony of " cornet, 
 flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of 
 music " to which we have been listening in the last chapter. 
 Nor when Ben raises his tone will he attempt this : 
 
 If in some things I dissent from others whose wit, ministry, and 
 diligence and judgment I look up at and admire, let me not there- 
 fore hear presently of ingratitude and rashness. For I thank those 
 that have taught me, and will ever : but yet dare not think the scope 
 of their labour and enquiry was to envy their posterity what they 
 also could add and find out. 
 
 Again, no absence of rhythm and no inferior quality of 
 it ; but one in no sense trenching on the poetical, and not 
 even attempting the higher and more ambitious flights 
 of the orator. A business-like style, entirely free from 
 the disqualifications of its opposite, if destitute of that 
 opposite's charms a style (in no belittling sense) of all 
 work, sometimes almost conversational in a modern way, 
 and often so according to the way of the time the 
 practice of the dramatist showing itself. 
 
 In such a style we do not expect even the swallow 
 
 1 Note the long and comparatively unaccented arrangement of the over- 
 ture ; and the parallel sticks following and lengthening out as they do.
 
 vii THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 207 
 
 flights in gentle soar and stoop, in sweep of longer or shorter 
 length or circle, that we find in Hooker ; still less the vast 
 symphonic fugues of Browne or Milton or Taylor ; least 
 of all the minor devices such, for instance, as that 
 arrangement of parallel but differently ended clauses so 
 often noted. Antithesis, balance, parallel these are, as 
 has been said, the main instruments. Even when the 
 sentences are long, they are cumulative rather than 
 periodic. 
 
 The way in which the plainer style is, as Scots has it, 
 " thirled " inevitably bound to and obliged to deal with 
 this balanced arrangement is excellently illustrated in 
 the curious and characteristic section Beneficial One 
 could deny some of its propositions pretty plumply as to 
 their meaning ; but from whomsoever Ben took the matter, 
 there is no question as to the idiosyncrasy of the form 
 both as regards his own character and as regards the 
 actual style. One thinks of the admirable Greek word 
 for " kick " (KaKTifyiv) as the scornful, ungracious clauses 
 with their short staccato motion rank surlily over against 
 each other. And everywhere in the great show-passages 
 as to Shakespeare and Bacon, which he certainly did not 
 take from Quintilian or Seneca ; in the (if you like it) 
 adaptations from Heinsius on Tragedy and Poetry, in the 
 thoughts on Education everywhere there is the same 
 rhythm, never in the least confused or blunted, clumsy or 
 
 1 Nothing | is a courtesy, | unless | it be meant | as such : j and that 
 friendly | and lovingly. | We owe | no thanks | to rivers | that they | carry | 
 our boats ; | or winds that they | be favouring | and fill | our sails ; | or 
 meats | that they | be nourishing. [ For these things | are | what they are | 
 necessarily. | Horses | carry us, | trees | shade us, | but they | know it 
 not. It is true | some man | may receive | a courtesy | and not know it ; | 
 but never | any man | received it | from him | that knew it not. | Many | 
 men | have been cured | of diseases | by accidents, | but they | were not | 
 remedies .... It is the mind | and not | the event | that distinguished | 
 the courtesy | from wrong.
 
 208 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 blemished ; very seldom (not quite never) yielding to the 
 master temptation of the time, an inartistic epexegesis. 
 Hobbes. Jonson's eminence in the other divisions of poetry and 
 drama, and his almost unsurpassed literary influence, eke 
 out the somewhat scanty documents, or in the French 
 heraldic sense "proofs," of his position in prose. Those 
 of Bacon's other great disciple, Hobbes, need no such 
 eking. More charming, more magnificent, more succulent 
 and satisfying and delightful writers of our prose there 
 certainly are : I doubt whether in his own way, or even 
 in any way, there is a greater. In his principles, indeed, 
 as well as in practice, Hobbes might seem likely to yield 
 us very little. His subjects, even putting aside his rugged 
 and reveche l classical translations, and his vain and 
 amateurish mathematical wanderings, are confined to 
 departments of literature, especially the philosophical and 
 the political, which, though they have shown themselves 
 capable of the best styles, have much more commonly 
 turned out to be patient of the worst. His theory of 
 the " counter " or " token " word a mere symbol, good 
 for so much strictly defined, and measured, and numbered 
 sense might' seem certainly to neglect, and even to no 
 small extent positively to discourage, ornamentation of 
 the counters, arrangement of them in cunning patterns 
 unnecessary to the meaning, and the like. But no man 
 can wholly avoid the influence of his hour ; and no hour 
 can help developing whatever kindred idiosyncrasy may 
 exist in the man it finds. The result is that Hobbes is 
 not merely one of the clearest and most cogent of 
 English writers, but that he has also a strange and (v. note 
 above) as it were cross-grained magnificence about him 
 austere and gladiatorial, but undoubted and that this 
 magnificence calls to its aid a rhythm which is a kind of 
 opposition member of the family of the rhythms of 
 Browne and Milton themselves, while it is almost equally 
 suggestive of Hobbes's older contemporaries (for these 
 
 1 It is curious that while there is (or was in our better days) so much of 
 this quality in the English temperament, we should have no word for it 
 except a compound, "cross-grained," and a vulgarism, "contnzzry."
 
 vii THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 209 
 
 others were his younger in age, though not in writing) 
 such as Donne and even Raleigh. 
 
 His style is thus even more than usually connected His eminence 
 with his thought as well as with his character ; but there ^^ jj. 
 went another element to its making. Hobbes was notori- acter. 
 ously a very late writer, or at least publisher ; nothing of 
 his appeared till he was nearly forty. But there is reason 
 for thinking that, up to that time at least, if (as he must) 
 he had written, he had written chiefly in Latin, and he 
 almost always issued his work like Bacon, but in an 
 almost greater degree in the older language as well as 
 in English. To write Latin currently was of course a 
 main part of a liberal education in the seventeenth 
 century, especially for persons who dealt with the graver 
 subjects ; but not even to Milton does it seem to have 
 come so much by nature as to Hobbes. And his Latin 
 style, still more than Milton's, owes little or nothing to 
 the more elegant Latin letters. Hobbes had an even 
 greater contempt for the schoolmen than any one (at 
 least any one speaking with knowledge) has had since ; 
 but, though he extended his scorn to their terminology, 
 he consciously or unconsciously adopted much of the 
 aridity of their style. Something of this dryness remains 
 in the English, but it is atoned for, and even to some 
 extent removed, by the vigorous sap of native English 
 phrase, which seems also to have been part of his rugged 
 but vivid nature. Observe the clear and sheer trenchancy 
 of this picture in negative of the State of War : 
 
 Whatsoever | therefore | is consequent | to a state | of war-time, | 
 where every man | is enemy | to every man, | the same 
 quent | to the time | wherein | men live 
 
 strength I and their own 
 
 without other 
 
 security 
 
 inventions I shall furnish 
 
 In such I condition I there is no I place I for 
 
 than their own 
 them | withal. 
 
 industry, | because | the fruit thereof | is uncertain ; | and conse- 
 quently | no culture | of the earth ; | no | navigation | nor use of | 
 the commodities | that may be I imported I by sea ; j no | com- 
 modious | building ; | no instruments | of moving | and removing } 
 such things | as require | much force ; | no knowledge | of the face | of 
 the earth ; | no account | of time ; | no arts ; | no letters ; | no 
 society ; | and | which is worst | of all | continual | fear | and the 
 danger | of violent | death ; | and the life | of man | solitary, [ 
 poor, | nasty, | brutish, | and i short. 
 
 P
 
 210 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Observe, I say, how the crabbed and almost savage 
 temper of this so true to the facts, so fatal to the fancies 
 age-long cultivated in the poets and to be recooked into 
 poisonous messes by the philosophes of the next century 
 is associated with nothing in the least savage as far as 
 cultivation of style and even of rhythm goes. The 
 "mode" of course is austere and nowise florid castigated 
 and trained down to the least of flesh and the most of muscle, 
 with no bloom of tint or soft curving outline. But the 
 ear is by no means neglected, still less outraged ; almost 
 the only point where logical precision rather injures the 
 effect is the repetition of the same word " consequent " 
 instead of using a synonym in the second place. For the 
 rest, all the clauses and sentences are perfectly well- 
 balanced : the iron ram-head sways itself to and frorri its 
 blow with an excellent cadence. Nay, more, in the 
 fascicle of parallel deprivations which constitutes the 
 second sentence, there is a singular variety, which may be 
 unconscious, but cannot be accidental, of length and 
 quality of composition, longer and shorter kola being 
 perfectly symphonised ; while when we come to the end 
 
 there is a positively artful counter -ordonnance of "arts 
 letters | society " | rising from monosyllable through 
 trochee to paeon, and of " solitary ') poor nasty | brutish 
 
 and | short," sloping and sinking from paeon through 
 trochees (" poor " is a virtual trochee and " brutish " an 
 actual one, while " and " merely completes the equivalent 
 
 dactyl) to the single thud of " short." 
 
 This same knowledge of the secret which does so 
 much both for poets and prose writers, the secret of 
 letting out and pulling in clauses like the slides of a 
 trombone or the " draws " of a telescope, is exampled, to the 
 eye as well as to the ear, in one of the two capital places 
 of that marvellous miniature masterpiece, Human Nature : 
 
 The comparison of the life of man to a race, though it hold not 
 in every part, yet it holdeth so well for this our purpose, that we 
 may thereby both see and remember almost all the passions
 
 vii THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 211 
 
 before mentioned. But this race we must suppose to have no The "Race 1 
 
 other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost, and in it : and " Lov ' 
 
 passages of 
 To endeavour, is appetite. Human 
 
 To be remiss, is sensuality. Nature, 
 
 To consider them behind, is glory. 
 
 To consider them before, is humility. 
 
 To lose ground with looking back, vain glory. 
 
 To be holden, hatred. 
 
 To turn back, repentance. 
 
 To be in breath, hope. 
 
 To be weary, despair. 
 
 To endeavour to overtake the next, emulation. 
 
 To supplant or overthrow, envy. 
 
 To resolve to break through a stop foreseen, courage. 
 
 To break through a sudden stop, anger. 
 
 To break through with ease, magnanimity. 
 
 To lose ground by little hindrances, pusillanimity. 
 
 To fall on the sudden, is disposition to weep. 
 
 To see another fall, is disposition to laugh. 
 
 To see one out-gone whom we would not, is pity. 
 
 To see one out-go whom we would not, is indignation. 
 
 To hold fast by another, is to love. 
 
 To carry him on that so holdeth, is charity. 
 
 To hurt one's-self for haste is shame. 
 
 Continually to be out-gone, is misery. 
 
 Continually to out-go the next before, \s felicity. 
 
 And to forsake the course, is to die. 
 
 It is only necessary to look at this to see the fact ; it is 
 only necessary to read it aloud to see that if the arrange- 
 ment of long and short clauses is merely casual, then 
 Lucretius had a great deal more to say for his atomic 
 theory and its possibilities than is generally thought, 
 while even then we shall have to ask whence came the 
 exiguum clinamen which has devised so definite a mass. 
 But on the whole the triumph of Hobbes's style is in 
 that other strange passage of the same masterpiece, the 
 account of Love, which contrasts still more strongly 
 with the definition thereof just given : 
 
 Of love, by which is to be understood the joy man taketh in the 
 fruition of any present good, hath been spoken already in the first 
 section, chapter seven, under which is contained the love men bear 
 to one another or pleasure they take in one another's company : 
 and by which nature men are said to be sociable. But there is 
 another kind of love which the Greeks call "Epws, and is that which 
 we mean when we say that a man is in love : forasmuch as this
 
 212 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 passion cannot be without diversity of sex, it cannot be denied but 
 that it participateth of that indefinite love mentioned in the former 
 section. But there is a great difference betwixt the desire of a man 
 indefinite and the same desire limited ad hunc : and this is that love 
 which is the great theme of poets : but, notwithstanding their praises, 
 it must be defined by the word need : for it is a conception a man 
 hath of his need of that one person desired. The cause of this 
 passion is not always nor for the most part beauty, or other quality 
 in the beloved, unless there be withal hope in the person that loveth : 
 which may be gathered from this, that in great difference of persons 
 the greater have often fallen in love with the meaner, but not 
 contrary. And from hence it is that for the most part they have 
 much better fortune in love whose hopes are built on something in 
 their person than those that trust to their expressions and service ; 
 and they that care less than they that care more : which not per- 
 ceiving, many men cast away their services as one arrow after another, 
 till, in the end, together with their hopes, they lose their wits. 
 
 We know little or nothing of Hobbes's youth, and it 
 might seem, not merely from his works generally, but from 
 most of the anecdotes about him, that he never could 
 have been young. But that he must, at some time or 
 other, have been what " we mean when we say that a man 
 is in love" is quite evident from the last two sentences 
 of this supremely remarkable passage. Most probably 
 no " shepherd's hour " ever sounded for him at Malmesbury 
 or at Magdalen Hall, at Chatsworth or at Paris. Whether 
 this be so or not, however, the piece is unquestionably set 
 to a singular under-rhythm, utterly suitable to its subject. 
 The first sentence l has the clear perspicuity which has 
 been said to be Hobbes's main characteristic, with a rhythm 
 accordant plain but not in the least like the dowdy 
 insignificance which, for instance, Locke would have given 
 it. It is exposition pure and simple. The second z is 
 exposition likewise, but the subject becomes more agitat- 
 ing, the writer feels the agitation, 3 and the rhythm rises 
 
 1 "Of love, etc." 2 "But there is, etc." 
 
 3 '0 6j]p 5' f/Sewt SetXwj QofieiTo y&p KvO^pav, as Theocritus (er some one 
 else, for it does not matter) has said in a poem of which Landor and, as I under- 
 stand, the greatest living Greek scholar of Germany, have spoken disrespect- 
 fully, but which can afford to pay no attention to their disrespect. For 
 what Landor said critically never much mattered : it depended on his 
 mood at the time. And whether the Germans are still as sadly to seek in 
 the language as they once were, teste an authority still respected, I should not 
 presume to decide ; but I can certainly say that this German was sadly to 
 seek in knowledge of poetry when he followed " Mr. Boy thorn."
 
 vii THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 213 
 
 and falls a little, as it were fluttering. It strives to 
 steady itself in scientific fashion with the next, 1 and so 
 far succeeds as to produce in the fourth 2 and fifth 3 
 things very remarkable indeed. 
 
 These last sentences, and the whole passage, must, of 
 course, be read with the mind's voice, if not also the 
 body's, to perceive their beauty ; but, if this be done, I 
 venture to think that a charm of the very rarest will be 
 found in them. The style is of extreme simplicity : 
 " they that care less than they that care more " could not 
 be simpler but it is noteworthy that this, familiar and 
 almost conversational in phraseology, and terse in bulk 
 and shape, is put between two much longer and more 
 undulating clauses ; that in the last, though nowhere else, 
 there is a slight figure ; and that the half-resigned despair 
 the " terror of Cythera " having been mastered, but 
 the sense of her baleful power remaining, it closes and 
 crowns the passage with the uncommented doom loss of 
 wits. Again, to hark back a little, read this once more : 
 
 In great | difference | of persons | the greater | have often fall(en) | 
 in love | with the meaner, | but not | contrary. 
 
 Every time of reading at least I have found it so for 
 some half century the penetrating but not clangorous 
 dirge-sound will be heard more clearly ; as also in 
 
 For the most part | they | have much better | fortune [ in love | 
 whose hopes | are built | on something | in their person | than 
 those | that trust | to their expressions | and service. 
 
 Although, as will be seen, the rhythm is of the purest and 
 severest prose type, little but balance being used to 
 produce it ; although you cannot get the least scrap of 
 metrical suggestion out of it ; although the diction is 
 strictly selected to match ; yet Thomas Hobbes, philoso- 
 pher of Malmesbury, materialist, positivist, atheist, mis- 
 anthrope, pedant, what you will, has here beaten out a 
 
 1 " But there is a great " (a repetition in itself rather faulty). 
 
 2 "The cause." 3 " And from hence. "
 
 214 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 form which, for the expression of unboisterous hopeless- 
 ness, comes not far short, if short at all, of King's " Tell 
 me no more," and Cowper's Castaway, the two poems 
 which have so strangely chosen the same form to express 
 different modes of despair, in the other harmony. 
 Clarendon. The faults of Clarendon's style, from the more general 
 point of view, are almost universally known even to 
 casual students of the subject, and form one of the 
 commonplaces of composition-books and literary histories. 
 It is not only that his sentences are often of such pre- 
 posterous length that, if you read them as they are 
 printed, and abstain from giving yourself a full stop in 
 breath, except where a full stop is present on the 
 page, you will have at the end to give yourself a 
 much longer one in order to replenish your all f but 
 beggared stock. For this, as has been more than once 
 observed, does not really matter to rhythm ; and it is 
 equally the case with Mr. Ruskin. It perhaps bodes more 
 mischief from that point of view, that this length is, to a 
 large extent and in more ways than one, the result of 
 sheer carelessness. The slightest alteration usually, not 
 seldom none at all, save a simple reform of the punctu- 
 ation, would meet the case. But often also it would not ; 
 and Clarendon has allowed himself to be drawn into 
 complicated, and certainly not admirable, anacolutha of 
 construction. Even this would not be fatal to rhythm, as 
 we have seen in Milton's case ; nor is it always so 
 with Clarendon himself. But his object was not the 
 elaborate prose of Milton or Taylor or Browne. Clarendon 
 was evidently a born House-of-Commons-man, and the 
 ease of his oratory is well attested. In so far, moreover, 
 as he took any patterns, the French memoir- and char- 
 acter-writers must have been of them ; and these, in 
 Clarendon's time, were already aiming at, and t6 a great 
 extent attaining, that simplicity of phrase which is certainly 
 not characteristic of French prose generally in the fifteenth 
 and the sixteenth centuries. 
 
 The result is that, as in Hobbes' case as indeed 
 everywhere you must not demand from Clarendon ce qu'il
 
 vii THE CONCURRENCE OF THE PLAIN 215 
 
 ria pas but only ce qu'il a. In his case, and despite the 
 long sentences (which are alternated with quite short 
 ones), " what he has " is a certain combination of dignity 
 and ease, which will be found to be not common elsewhere 
 in his time, and hardly to exist before him. But we should 
 notice in Clarendon, as in his contemporaries, Walton and 
 Howell, to whom we are coming, as in Owen Felltham 
 and other forerunners of the plain style ; as we shall 
 notice still more in the generation (born in or about 1630) 
 who followed them, that we are losing something, though 
 it may be difficult to define that something in terms 
 which will be generally admitted. It is not rhythm as 
 such, for although we may come to the loss even of 
 that prose without rhythm is scarcely prose at all. But 
 it is rhythm which reduces itself to its lowest terms, 
 rhythm which does not indeed hamper or impair the 
 meaning by positive ugliness of sound, which even 
 supplies it with a convenient vehicle of fairly harmonious 
 expression, but which neither adds to it, as the greatest 
 masters of the ornate style do, indefinite and splendid 
 bonuses of sheer musical delight, nor even sets it, as they 
 and others less great attempt to do, and often succeed in 
 doing, to a less lavish and abounding but still additional 
 accomplishment of prose melody. Balance and anti- 
 thesis positively assist comprehension (though with the 
 danger, which we shall see fully illustrated later, of 
 sometimes giving to nonsense an air of comprehensibility), 
 so balance and antithesis are admitted. But we discern 
 few other devices of art. 
 
 That this is sometimes unfortunate can hardly be 
 denied. It looks as if Clarendon had tried to work him- 
 self into a higher strain in treating the character of King 
 Charles. He was evidently himself much moved, and he 
 has achieved moving expression. But there are two 
 unlucky breakdowns in the passage, both of which are 
 due, not merely to anti-climax of thought, but to a still 
 greater anti-climax of expression and arrangement : 
 
 And, after all this, when a man might reasonably believe that less 
 than a universal defection of three nations could not have reduced a
 
 216 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CH. vn 
 
 great king to so ugly a fate, it is most certain that in that very hour 
 when he was thus wickedly murdered in the sight of the sun, he had 
 as great a share in the hearts and affections of his subjects in general 
 was as much beloved, esteemed, and longed for by the people in 
 general of the three nations, as any of his predecessors had ever 
 been. To conclude, he was the worthiest gentleman, the best master, 
 the best friend, the best husband, the best father, and the best 
 Christian that the age in which he lived produced. And if he were 
 not the best king, if he were without some parts and qualities which 
 have made some kings great and happy, no other prince was ever so 
 unhappy, who was possessed of half his virtues and endowments, 
 and so much without any kind of vice. 
 
 Here there is much that is quite good practically of 
 the best but the two italicised clauses, which should 
 have wound up and completed the harmony with burst 
 of trumpet or dying fall of lyre, are quite wretched things, 
 blunted gossip-phrase, without selection, appropriateness, 
 or cadence of any sort. There is no such glaring blot in 
 the pendant character of Cromwell, but it also does not 
 aspire above a very ordinary quality of rhythm. 
 
 Of some other writers just mentioned, Howell requires 
 no notice here because his very principle and canon was 
 a pedestrian familiarity ; but more should perhaps be said, 
 if only in a note, of Walton, on the formal qualities of 
 whose style doctors have differed, though hardly any one 
 who can be called a doctor has denied its charm. 1 
 
 1 The plainer parts of the Complete Angler are incomparably sweet and 
 pleasant narrative-conversation. In the more ambitious, Izaak succumbs to 
 verse, not indeed constantly decasyllabic, but sometimes that, and sometimes 
 the favourite octosyllabic of his earlier years. The diction, also, is rather 
 too definitely poetic : 
 
 " Look, under that broad beech-tree I sat down, | when I was last this way 
 a-fishing, and the birds in the adjoining grove seemed to have a friendly con- 
 tention with an echo, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree, near 
 to the brow of that primrose hill ; there I sat viewing | the silver streams 
 glide silently | towards their centre, the tempestuous sea ; | yet sometimes 
 opposed | by rugged roots, and pebble-stones, | which broke their waves, and 
 turned them into foam : | and sometimes I beguiled time by viewing the harm- 
 less lambs, some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported 
 themselves in the cheerful sun ; and saw others craving comfort from | the 
 swollen udders of their bleating dams. | As I thus sat, these and other sights 
 had so fully possessed my soul with content, that I thought, as the poet has 
 happily expressed it, etc."
 
 INTERCHAPTER II 
 
 IN the last (and first) Interchapter, what we had to 
 survey was entirely, or almost entirely, tentative ; and, 
 what is more, tentative that for the most part, and almost 
 entirely, did not know what it was attempting, or even 
 that it was making any attempt. Chaucer * makes no 
 apology for his early prose as he does for his verse : it is 
 true that his prose is by no means very much in need of 
 any, but consciousness of this is far less likely to have 
 been the reason of the silence than unconsciousness of the 
 existence of any standard, such as was felt, in the other 
 case, to crave or get attainment, or to be, if possible, sur- 
 passed. Caxton feels vaguely that French is a " fair 
 language," and that English (at least his English) is not. 
 Pecock and the translators of the Imitation feel that 
 English vocabulary needs a great deal of supplementing. 
 Fisher applies some of the tricks and figures of the 
 traditional rhetoric to the exornation of the vernacular. 
 Once Chaucer, whether knowingly or not knowingly, 
 makes his prose definitely rhythmical, in a wrong direction, 
 by stuffing or dredging it with blank verse. Once again, 
 in a major instance Malory certainly, and others in minor 
 instances probably, adopt a more cunning manipulation 
 of verse-rhythm, so as to make it genuine but beautiful 
 prose. Yet this, like the whole character of his master- 
 piece the one masterpiece of the entire Middle English 
 
 1 If anybody says here or elsewhere, "You have said all this before," I 
 can only allege the novelty of the whole subject. "What is told three 
 times " is perhaps not necessarily " true," or at least more true, for that ; but 
 unless the teller is very clumsy, and the hearer preternaturally quick or preter- 
 naturally slow, it ought to be more clear. I wish to " couple up" the history 
 as distinctly and in as many different ways as may be legitimately possible. 
 
 217
 
 2i8 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 period in prose is, as it were, a blessed accident, a 
 chance-medley of man and hour, with gracious result. 
 
 On the other hand, in the long procession of centuries 
 earlier, though it is hardly possible to point to any 
 achieved pattern of prose-rhythm or of prose, not a little 
 material, and even some method, had been, however un- 
 consciously, amassed. If we have not been able to work 
 out, in such detail as was once hoped, that interesting 
 suggestion 1 as to the influence of Anglo-Saxon verse 
 upon Middle and Modern English prose, there is fortun- 
 ately no necessity to abandon it as altogether, or even to 
 any great degree, a mistake. I believe it to be the fact 
 that alliteration does play a greater part in our later prose 
 than it did in our earliest, excluding, of course, prose-verse 
 or verse-prose like ^Ifric's. I believe that trochaic 
 rhythm is more conspicuous in modern English prosfe of 
 the elaborate kind than it is in modern English verse. 
 And it is certain that what would once have been called 
 the irregularity what it is better to call the extreme 
 freedom in correspondence of Anglo-Saxon verse, reflects 
 itself to some extent in that of the kola of modern English 
 prose, while balance and parallelism, and what we have 
 called the telescopic arrangement of clause, certainly 
 appear in the two, and may bear a relation of inheritance. 
 Undoubtedly Anglo-Saxon verse and modern English 
 prose are more like each other than the former is like 
 modern English verse. 
 
 But we must not omit to resume once more the char- 
 acteristics and achievements of Anglo-Saxon prose itself. 
 Its extreme earliness, its use for businesslike and for 
 literary purposes at a time when almost every other 
 European nation took refuge in Latin, is a very remark- 
 able point. The early elaboration, so easy-looking, but 
 by its rarity shown to be so difficult, of a simple narrative 
 style like that of Apollonius, is another. But the most 
 remarkable for our purpose is a third, different from these. 
 
 This is the early, the abundant, the quite evidently 
 conscious and deliberate adoption of highly rhythmical 
 1 V. sup. pp. 10 and n note.
 
 INTERCHAPTER II 219 
 
 prose by these our ancestors. It is, of course, easy to say, 
 as has been sometimes said, that this is mainly or merely 
 imitation of a tendency of the Latin of the Dark Ages as 
 we find it in Martianus Capella and Sidonius Apollinaris 
 and Venantius Fortunatus. There is no need to deny 
 as indeed there could hardly be any object in denying 
 a possible indebtedness of suggestion, for all these writers, 
 and some others like them, were undoubtedly earlier than 
 our Old English prose-poets, while Martianus was cer- 
 tainly, and the others were probably, well known to them. 
 But while these were equally known in other countries, 
 they did not produce the same effect in other vernaculars ; l 
 and what is even more important, the whole character of 
 Old English rhythm is so different from that of Latin 
 that imitation, beyond mere suggestion, is impossible. As 
 to the positive artistic value of such work as ^Ifric's 
 alliterative and counter -stressed prose, opinions may 
 differ ; but I cannot conceive any sober critic denying 
 that the presence of such work, and its proportion in a 
 not very extensive literature, is a phenomenon which must 
 be taken into consideration, especially when we remember 
 what later stages of the same language have done in 
 the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth. I am 
 quite careless of the reproach of vulgar patriotism when I 
 say that we have the most glorious ornate prose in 
 Europe ; I think that I am historically secure when I say 
 that we have also the earliest. 1 
 
 But before these later stages could be reached long 
 before they actually were the language itself had to go 
 through processes of disorganisation and reorganisation 
 which made an elaborate prose for a long time impossible. 
 In almost the last moments of the life of pure Anglo- 
 Saxon in the closing passages of the Chronicle far into 
 the twelfth century the old tongue showed its already- 
 mentioned grasp of simple, straightforward narration. A 
 
 1 The chief competitors that might perhaps be adduced as against the two 
 propositions above are Irish, Old High German, and Icelandic. But the 
 last-named does not produce elaborate prose till the twelfth or thirteenth 
 century ; the Irish dates are extremely uncertain ; and Notker is slightly 
 junior to JElfric, as well as less advanced.
 
 220 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 fairly full and formed command of Middle English, for 
 this and other purposes, appears in the interesting group of 
 " those about " Chaucer, well before the end of the four- 
 teenth. But between the two we have, as has been shown 
 in detail, little or nothing, with the Ancren Riwle for excep- 
 tion, proving this other generalisation. Not merely has the 
 blend of language itself to be mixed, to ferment, and to 
 mature, but it is hardly applied in prose save to the most 
 limited and stereotyped use. The late fourteenth and 
 fifteenth centuries removed the reproach, but in no very 
 audacious or successful fashion ; and they have been 
 sufficiently dealt with. 
 
 The test of consciousness, applied to the beginners in 
 the great Elizabethan school, yields results in two different 
 ways. With any deliberate intention to improve upon 
 their predecessors, as with any serious or historically 
 co-ordinated knowledge of those predecessors, they cannot 
 be credited. Except in the way of a vague reverence for 
 Chaucer which one of them, Wilson, pretty certainly did 
 not share, while we may have grave doubts about its 
 being shared by Ascham it is but too probable that they 
 exemplified and exaggerated the deplorable, but perhaps 
 inevitable, ignorance and contempt of the Renaissance 
 generally for the older vernaculars. But they redeemed 
 this by an honest and manly desire and endeavour to 
 rescue, as they thought, the honour of their mother 
 tongue by new work, inspired as much as possible by 
 study of classical models, but not (according to their 
 famous fad) borrowing from these models to an extent 
 endangering " bankruptcy." That there may have been 
 a certain amount of mere mannerliness something like 
 the mincings of a modest maiden in the days when she 
 was asked to " sit down to the instrument " in Ascham's 
 protestations as to writing in English is possible. But 
 he had been elaborately taught and elaborately exercised 
 in writing Latin ; he had not been taught or exercised 
 in writing English. 
 
 As soon as he and other persons began to " go and do 
 it" their sense of difficulty at least of the difficulty of
 
 INTERCHAPTER II 221 
 
 doing anything good if it really existed, must have 
 vanished at once. The Paston Letters had shown, as we 
 have shown from them, that even two, nay three, genera- 
 tions earlier, in the most unliterary people's hands or 
 mouths, the vernacular had quite got out of mere rusticity 
 or childish babblement. What the unlearned could do, 
 the learned, so soon as they chose, could do much better ; 
 and there is certainly no sign of strain or of " translation- 
 in-the-head " in Toxophilus or in the freer parts of Wilson's 
 Rhetoric. Moreover, as soon as these learned men began 
 to write English, they could not but apply to it those 
 lessons for the cultivation and exornation of style which 
 existed in the ancient languages. They could not be 
 content, as Caxton had been (if indeed he was), with a 
 vague discomfort over the sense that other languages 
 were " fairer " than English, or, as Ascham was not, with 
 a pedantic-Pharisaic conclusion that English composi- 
 tion was, and must be, " mean." It was their business 
 to make English " fair," to make it cease to be " mean," 
 and they were furnished by the ancients themselves with 
 analyses and praxes of the art of elaboration and beauti- 
 fication. On one obvious device these ancients, while 
 admitting its existence and power, had taught them to 
 look with distrust, and they accordingly denounced " ink- 
 horn terms." But they were not warned against " figures," 
 and they used them ; they found elaborate passages about 
 rhythm, and though these were excessively difficult of 
 direct application to English, something similar might be 
 attained. 
 
 On the most obvious, universal, and perennial instru- 
 ment of this balanced and antithetic arrangement of 
 clause they could not fail to hit, almost without teachers ; 
 while the secular and ineradicable tendency of the 
 language drove them to adopt what the ancients had 
 used little, because their race-spirit did not drive them to 
 it alliteration. And before long the influence of Biblical 
 translation enabled them, as few if any other European 
 nations were enabled, to substitute for the harder and 
 more mechanical balance, a subtler and more evasive but
 
 222 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 infinitely more musical parallelism, which permeated the 
 whole literary language. Immense influence was also 
 exercised, in a direction running rather contrary to the 
 principles of the Cambridge school, by the flood of 
 neologisms which translators, poets, pamphleteers, writers 
 of all kinds, began to pour into the vocabulary ; and in 
 the later years of the century, yet before the greatest 
 literary outburst of its last two decades or fifteen years, 
 we find at least two authors to whom the rather odious, 
 but as yet unreplaced, word " stylist " unquestionably 
 applies. These two Lyly and Hooker opposed to each 
 other in everything but their obvious attention to style 
 itself, yet stand side by side at the head of the ever- 
 increasing procession of craftsmen in English prose. 
 
 It is with these two and with their contemporaries 
 and followers, throwing back a little to the Biblical 
 translations, which did not, however, exhibit their full 
 rhythmical magnificence till both Lyly and Hooker were 
 dead, that the elaborate mode of English prose, only 
 to be properly analysed by quantification, comes into 
 existence ; and continues to produce examples of varying, 
 and for some time ever-increasing, beauty during the best 
 part of a century. Side by side with it, there goes on 
 perfecting itself, in a different but parallel way, the plainer 
 style which aims little or not at all at rhythm, and which, 
 though susceptible of quantification and foot - division, 
 presents both less obviously, and sometimes hardly requires 
 them at all. For the beautiful sentence, as Dionysius 
 pointed out long ago, depends on minor beauties of 
 phrase and word and even letter. And these subsidiary 
 but ever important beauties challenge attention, insist 
 that you shall pronounce them with the lips and turn 
 them over with the tongue, if not of your body, of your 
 mind. Such pronunciation, still more such turning over, 
 cannot exist without the appreciation of the length and 
 shortness, the emphasis or slur, the pause or " carry-over " 
 of the individual syllable ; and the instant that this takes 
 place, scansion comes irresistibly with it. On the other 
 hand, the plainer style, where the conveyance of the
 
 INTERCHAPTER II 223 
 
 meaning is the thing solely or mainly aimed at, admits 
 of, in fact prefers, merely logical emphasis the integers 
 or closely connected groups of sense, not those of sound, 
 engage the attention. And though at this time the 
 close-packed nature of the meaning itself, and the evident 
 sententiousness, preserve an obvious foot-division to some 
 extent ; we shall find that later, and during the triumph 
 of plainness in the next period, this division, though never 
 perhaps actually absent, tends to merge itself into long 
 and largely slurred sections, rhythmically little remarkable 
 except at their close. 
 
 For the Interchapter dealing with that period remarks 
 on the minor rhythmical (or arrhythmic} characteristics 
 of this plainer style will be best reserved. We may here 
 chiefly confine ourselves to those of the ornate. In the 
 numerous and wonderful examples of this, which have 
 been accumulated and analysed in the three preceding 
 chapters, one thing must be clear to all careful observers, 
 and that is the Cleopatra-like variety of this style. In 
 Raleigh and Greville and Donne ; in Taylor and Browne 
 and Milton ; in others of three generations down to 
 Glanvill and Thomas Burnet ; nothing is more remark- 
 able than the absence of those " moulds " which present 
 themselves in even the finest eighteenth-century style. 
 If any writer for a time seems to use one he breaks it 
 soon ; while in the greatest of all, Browne, there seems to 
 be none at all the inexhaustibly plastic fingers have no 
 need of the slightest assistance of model, the faintest 
 suggestion of previously used means and previously 
 achieved effect. Hardly anywhere, perhaps, is this 
 unconquerable variety more noticeable than in the actual 
 parallelisms of the Authorised Version, when you compare 
 them with balanced pairs or batches in members of the 
 opposite class so distant from each other in time, subject, 
 spirit as Ascham and Gibbon, Jonson and Johnson. No 
 motive is merely repeated, or allowed to remain unfugued : 
 and yet the whole, however polyphonic, never, in the best 
 examples, which are not occasional purple patches, but 
 constantly met with and integral constituents of the
 
 224 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 style, loses symphony. For some reason or other, the 
 power of appreciating concerted harmonies in articulate 
 and sense-bearing language, seems to be much rarer than 
 that of enjoying music proper. Yet it is certain that the 
 tens who appreciate the close of the Urn Burial, or that 
 sentence of Glanvill's, receive as keen and as systematic 
 a pleasure as the tens of thousands who listen to Beethoven 
 or Bach. 
 
 These remarks may perhaps excite though they 
 have as a matter of fact partly answered it by anticipa- 
 tion a demand somewhat of the nature of a grumble. 
 " This," the reader may say, " is all very fine ; but can 
 you not, after this display of history, and this parade of 
 quantitative analysis, give us some general rules by which 
 the fine effects are attained some prose-forms corre- 
 sponding to the recognised forms of verse, or some laws 
 answering to those which govern the musical effects to 
 which you have compared them ? " Alas ! (though to 
 my own mind there is no need for any regret in the 
 matter except for disappointed expectations) I cannot ; 
 and whether anybody will ever be able to do so I very 
 gravely doubt. In the first place, let me remind the 
 reader, according to a hint just given, that what apparently 
 makes the charm of prose rhythm is not Uniformity but 
 Variety ; and that, as has just been said, this greatest 
 prose of English has the greatest variety of any prose, 
 and to all appearance is greatest in other ways just 
 because of that very fact. 
 
 In the second place, let him remember that none of 
 the great Greek and Roman critics, who as we saw 
 employed these same methods of analysis, in languages 
 as indisputably as perhaps ours is only disputably (cer- 
 tainly disputedly} suited to them, that neither Aristotle 
 nor Quintilian, neither Cicero nor Longinus, succeeded in 
 indicating more than certain apparent virtues of certain 
 feet in certain places, 1 or was able to give us a formula 
 or prescription for making rhythmical prose, though they 
 
 1 For something similar to this (and perhaps a little more) see Appendix 
 III. On Latin formulae see Appendix II.
 
 INTERCHAPTER II 225 
 
 were able, as I think we have been able, to show, in some 
 cases, how rhythmical prose has actually been made. 
 
 Not till that re-examination of the plain style which 
 has been promised can we perhaps pursue part of this 
 subject to advantage ; but on other parts something must 
 be said here. The great ornate prose which we have 
 examined, in its greatest examples more especially, bears 
 out most amply that saying of the elders, that " from 
 prose no rhythm is excluded." It bears out no less the 
 caution that no rhythm should be too much repeated, or 
 presented in too absolutely complete a fashion. We have 
 got in some cases we could probably get in almost all 
 examples more or less fragmentary, and so instructive 
 in their fragmentariness, of rhythms or all but metres, as 
 complicated as those which Quintilian admits, Ionic and 
 Sotadic and Galliambic as well as still more compli- 
 cated sodalities, of every foot from pyrrhic to dochmiac, 
 which possess no congeners in verse. These have been, 
 in the examples, examined and arranged as best might 
 be. Opinions may, of course, differ as to the gain of the 
 proceeding. Opinions may, and perhaps should, differ 
 more widely still as to the accuracy of its details. But it 
 has been taken from two points of view which seemed to 
 the writer to be worth taking. One is that of the pure 
 historian the governing principle of which is that it is 
 always profitable to know what did happen, to disengage 
 the fact from the mere appearance, and, above all, to sift 
 and riddle out, from the confused crowd of facts, something 
 not confused and so more stimulating. 
 
 The other point is that of the pure aesthetic the 
 person who prefers not to "like grossly," but to get as 
 far as may be at the reasons of his liking. He knows 
 none better that this is not very far, that he will be met 
 sooner or later, and in this case very particularly sooner, 
 by the impenetrable and insurmountable wall * on which 
 
 1 If you could get over this wall, would you be any better off? I have never 
 seen any discussion of the most mysterious of mediaeval stories, that of Gauterus 
 (Wright's Latin Stories, No. L. p. 48, Percy Society, 1842), who sought a 
 place ubi semper gauderet, et nullam molestiam in carne nee in corde sustineret. 
 He tried various promising situations, where he was offered a beautiful wife, 
 
 Q
 
 226 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 is written, " No farther." The end of all things is baffle- 
 ment ; but it is good not to be baffled too soon. 
 
 These Interchapters are intended to lead up to a 
 Conclusion, and it would be a mistake to anticipate too 
 much of what is to be said there, as well as what is 
 to follow more immediately. But it may at least be 
 observed that before the stop is reached there is plenty to 
 be done and enjoyed. The greater passages and, for the 
 matter of that, the lesser, and all of them can be laid out 
 in regular partition, where the harp and the psaltery and 
 the dulcimer, and all kinds of prose music, will be found 
 to have each, as Pecock says, " his proper-to-him " place 
 and office. When that partition is mastered, to go over 
 it will, to the right ears and fingers, give a similar pleasure 
 to that given by playing and hearing a piece of music 
 which you have not made for yourself, and which you 
 could not make for yourself. You may even, though I 
 think you will never upset the general system, make 
 independent ^partitions of it. 
 
 And, if you have the true historical spirit, you will go 
 on without grutch or grumble to see what people did 
 when they lost the secret of this polyphony, or were 
 weary of the taste of its delight, and tried for something 
 else. 
 
 a great kingdom, a Palace of Delights, etc., but in each case there was an 
 unpleasant bed, surrounded with ferocious animals, in which he had to sleep. 
 At last he found an old man sitting at the foot of a high wall, against which 
 leant a convenient ladder. The old man said that this led to what he wanted. 
 Ascendens ergo Gauterus quae diu quaesierat invenit. I have always thought 
 that he probably broke his neck ; though if anybody else thinks this an 
 uncomfortable ending, our old friends the Deadly Sins, and a hint at the 
 Trinity for the wall is "three-staged" will provide something more in the 
 common allegorising way of the Gesta and their likes, and there will be 
 quies in coelo.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 AUGUSTAN PROSE 
 
 The prevailing of the plain style The group of 1630 Distribution 
 of the chapter Cowley Dryden South Halifax Temple 
 and his masterpiece The plainest styles, vulgar and not vulgar 
 The non-vulgarians : L'Estrange and Tom Brown Bunyan 
 The vulgarians The effect of abbreviations Instances from 
 Rymer, etc. Defoe Swift The rhythmical character of irony 
 Addison Hurd's dealings with his rhythm His supposed 
 "Addisonian termination" His general view of Addison's 
 " harmony " Specimens of Addison himself Rhythmical 
 analysis of them Selections of other Queen Anne men 
 necessary Berkeley Shaftesbury Bolingbroke Letter- 
 writers and novelists to be shortly dealt with Conyers 
 Middleton Efforts at variety Adam Smith Interim observa- 
 tions on this prose Attempts to raise it Johnson : different 
 views respecting him His relation to Browne Characteristics 
 of the Johnsonian style Burke : his oratorical ethos His 
 declared method Early examples Middle Later Examples 
 and comments Gibbon : his peculiarity Its general effect, 
 and that of the other reformers The standard Georgian style 
 Southey. 
 
 WE have seen, in the last two chapters, how, between The prevailing 
 1600 and 1660, a sort of underground, and, as the French t le e pa 
 would say, sourd, conflict went on between the style or 
 styles of prose which carried the use of rhythm almost to 
 its farthest possible, and that or those which, without 
 entirely disregarding it (for there will hardly be found an 
 example of any such at this time), did not make it a 
 chief object, neglected its finer and more elaborate forms, 
 and used few of its more notable figures and schemes 
 except balance. The state of things is not very different 
 from that which prevailed contemporaneously in verse, 
 
 227
 
 228 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 and its results were also in a way not dissimilar. But 
 only in a way. For in the verse-case, a deliberate, if 
 more or less unconscious, change of taste seems to have 
 been at the bottom of the thing ; people really persuaded 
 themselves, extraordinary as it may seem to us, that the 
 stopped couplet was not merely the neatest and most 
 useful, but the sweetest and the most splendid form of 
 verse. 
 
 In prose, though there must have been something of 
 the same kind at work, the main motives and influences 
 were different. People wanted to do different things, and 
 accordingly used different implements. The famous and 
 epoch-making passage l of Sprat does not directly touch 
 on rhythm, and it is not very probable that the future 
 bishop, the actual versifier and friend of Cowley, 
 thought directly about it. But elaborate rhythmical 
 arrangement is quite evidently one of the things which 
 are not wanted in scientific discussion, and which, if any- 
 body is in the unfortunate mood to do so, may be 
 stigmatised as " beautiful deceits." 
 
 The group of At any rate it is certain that among the most remark- 
 able group of prose writers who were all born about 
 i63O, 2 the contrast which we have discussed and illus- 
 trated in the last two chapters evolves itself further, or 
 rather almost ceases to be a contrast, and becomes a 
 merely one-sided development. Of all the group only 
 Temple (who by the way was actually the " eldest hand ") 
 achieves, or appears to have cared to achieve, anything 
 like elaborate descants in prose. Halifax (whether it 
 were Halifax or Coventry does not in the very least 
 matter to us) would almost seem to have gone out of his 
 way to illustrate the phenomenon we are discussing by 
 producing a pendant to Milton's splendid passage on 
 Truth. South, a man of great eloquence and even rather 
 antique in his use of phrase and figure, expressly belabours 
 
 1 History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), p. 1 1 1 sq. It will be found 
 in Sir Henry Craik's English Prose Selections (London, 1894), iii. 271, 
 272. 
 
 2 Dryden, 1631; Halifax, 1633; Locke, 1632; South, 1634; Temple, 
 1628 ; Tillotson, 1630.
 
 viii AUGUSTAN PROSE 229 
 
 and condemns l the rhythmical splendours of Taylor, and 
 himself employs hardly anything but a balanced parallelism 
 of cadence. Tillotson is plainer and more " prosaic " than 
 any of these ; and as for the two most famous of the 
 group, Dryden, capable of positive and varied magnificence 
 in verse, and able to give the stopped couplet a variety of 
 cadence and temper which it had never attained before, 
 and has never regained since, sets himself to attain, and 
 does attain, in prose a manner in rhythm as in all other 
 ways, now easy, now forcible, now combative, now 
 playful, admirably suited for narrative, and as admirably 
 for exposition or argument, but essentially conversational, 
 and, in virtue of that very quality, expressly eschewing and 
 almost ostentatiously abjuring the complicated fugue- 
 solos of the generation of his youth. While 2 Locke, 
 whatever may be his merits in other ways irrelevant to 
 us, for almost the first time makes English prose positively 
 mean in every point of style, and in rhythm most of all. 
 It had stammered and shown lack of the rudiments ; it 
 had been incorrect, gaudy, unequal, awkward, dull. But 
 it had never, in the hands of a man of anything like 
 Locke's powers, so fulfilled the words of that very intel- 
 ligent patriarch, Photius, seven centuries before, when he 
 said that the use of merely straightforward periods brings 
 style down to flatness and meanness. But we should 
 illustrate all this : and should perhaps first subdivide the 
 long period which this chapter will include. 
 
 The chapter which is to deal with practically the Distribution of 
 whole of English prose from 1660 to 1820, cannot in the cha P ter - 
 any case be a short one ; but the want of apparent 
 correspondence between the length of the period and the 
 length of the chapter is not due to contempt. The person 
 who should despise not merely Dryden, Addison, Berkeley, 
 Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon, but dozens and scores of 
 
 1 Not, it is true, from the definite point of view of rhythm ; which, as has 
 been said, hardly seems to have been consciously taken by any one, except 
 perhaps Samuel Woodford. 
 
 2 Some people, I know, object to this use of " while." I can only say that 
 though they may know English grammars, they know very little of English 
 grammar.
 
 230 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 other " Augustan " or quasi-Augustan writers from Temple 
 to Southey, would be little better or no better than a fool. 
 But, in and from the very nature of the case, description 
 and analysis of the various modes of these authors requires 
 much less space spent on it. It is true that one of the 
 writers mentioned, Addison, was made by Hurd the sub- 
 ject of about the first and, till very recently, almost the 
 only attempt (except Mason's) to analyse prose rhythm. 
 But as we shall shortly see, the attempt itself was very 
 rudimentary ; it came to little or nothing ; and selection 
 of its subject may unhesitatingly be set down to the two 
 obvious facts that Addison was the most popular author 
 of the time, and that Hurd was dealing with him, rather 
 than to any special suitableness on his part for the 
 operation. To some extent the general outlines o the 
 style-history of these hundred and sixty years are reflected 
 in the special history of prose rhythm. In the easier or 
 statelier antithesis of all the group above described, except 
 in the vulgar slovenliness of the degeneration from Rymer 
 to Mandeville ; in various efforts at reform made by 
 Addison, Steele, Swift, Berkeley ; in the drab though 
 decent nullity of the Conyers Middleton phase ; in the 
 fresh attempts at exaltation by Johnson, Burke, Gibbon ; 
 and in the stationary state, not even yet wholly obsolete, 
 of the standard late Georgian style rhythm obeys the 
 " general orders of the day," though it has altogether lost 
 its pride of place. But illustration is wanted from indi- 
 viduals, and that illustration, subject to the caution put 
 in, shall now be given. 
 
 Cowiey. It has been not unusual, and one need not quarrel 
 over the matter, to discover the first signs of the conver- 
 sational tone l in Cowley's Essays, none of which was 
 written very early, but which proceeded from an older 
 man than the members of the group so often mentioned. 
 Cowiey does not maintain it as Dryden does, and he may 
 be said even not to attain it with perfect sureness. The 
 old long and somewhat broken-backed sentences reappear, 
 
 1 I use " tone " here in its proper sense of " sound-effect " as well as in its 
 applied one of "manner."
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 231 
 
 and as in his verse so in his prose, there is an occasional 
 tendency to the conceited and " metaphysical." But 
 compare the following with Bacon, Jonson, or even 
 Burton in their lighter veins, and you will see the 
 difference ; in fact, the single italicised sentence is enough 
 to signalise it : 
 
 The first minister of state has not so much business in public, as 
 a wise man has in private : if the one have little leisure to be alone, 
 the other has less leisure to be in company ; the one has but part of 
 the affairs of one nation, the other, all the works of God and nature 
 under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as 
 that which I hear -very often : that a man does not know how to pass 
 his time. 'Twould have been but ill spoken by Methusalem, in the 
 nine hundred sixty-ninth year of his life ; so far it is from us, who 
 have not time enough to attain to the utmost perfection of any part 
 of any science, to have cause to complain, that we are forced to be 
 idle for want of work. But this, you'll say, is work only for the 
 learned, others are not capable either of the employments, or diver- 
 tisements, that arrive from letters. I know they are not : and 
 therefore cannot much recommend solitude to a man totally illiterate. 
 But if any man be so unlearned as to want entertainment of the 
 little intervals of accidental solitude, which frequently occur in 
 almost all conditions (except the very meanest of the people, who 
 have business enough in the necessary provisions for life), it is truly 
 a great shame, both to his parents and himself; for a very small 
 portion of any ingenious art will stop up all those gaps of our time, 
 either music, or painting, or designing, or chemistry, or history, or 
 gardening ; or twenty other things will do it usefully and pleasantly ; 
 and if he happen to set his affections upon poetry (which I do not 
 advise him to immoderately), that will overdo it : no wood will be 
 thick enough to hide him from the importunities of company or 
 business, which would abstract him from his beloved. 
 
 The truth is that, as was noted above, the conver- Dryden. 
 sational tone excludes anything more than a hint at 
 elaborate rhythm. A man who talked Taylorian or 
 Brownese would be an intolerable nuisance ; and though 
 a certain management of emphasis is permissible and 
 even desirable in speech, its governing and directing 
 principle must be meaning only. Even in English, 
 moreover, though not so much as in some foreign 
 languages, well-bred conversation exacts considerable 
 runs of unemphatic and almost unaccented syllables 
 which can hardly be got into any rhythm, certainly not
 
 232 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 into any rhythm capable of notation in feet. And there- 
 fore it is that, except very rarely, it would be, though 
 quite possible, almost superfluous to arrange Dryden's 
 prose in quantitative rhythm. It obeys Aristotle's 
 dictum : it is not arrhythmic very much the reverse. 
 But, except in a very few set pieces like the great Shake- 
 speare passage, this rhythm is kept down to almost the 
 minimum, and where it appears it is rarely elaborated 
 by any device except the usual balance and antithetic 
 emphasis. I enlisted myself in Dryden's service some 
 thirty years ago, and I admire his prose almost as much 
 as his verse. But as Johnson, in his praise of Addison, 
 points out in regard to that master, Dryden did not 
 aim at elaborate rhythm in prose, and indeed aimed away 
 from it : in the very fact of hitting his own mark he f did 
 not hit the other. So with South, an admirable writer 
 and a great master of balance ; so with Tillotson. But 
 Halifax, for the passage above noted, and Temple, for his 
 whole conception of arrangement, should be more fully 
 dealt with. 
 
 For Dryden the best known and probably the most 
 carefully prepared passages those on Shakespeare and 
 Chaucer will do. I have divided the former, but not (as 
 a whole) the latter. In the Shakespeare the remarkable 
 variety of the parallel /cwXa should be noticed, and the 
 skilful placing of the monosyllable " soul," as well as, in a 
 less degree, " too " and " there," etc. I have indicated 
 by italics some of the "runs" of slightly quantified syllables, 
 making six or more in a batch, referred to above : 
 
 To begin then | with Shakespeare. | He was the man (who of 
 all | modern | and perhaps | ancient | poets | had the largest | and 
 most comprehensive \ soul. | All the images | of nature | were still 
 | present | to him, | and he drew them | not laboriously | but 
 luckily : | when he describes | anything | you more | than see it, | 
 you feel it | too. | Those who accuse him | to have wanted | learn- 
 ing, | give him | the greater | commendation : | he was naturally | 
 learned ; | he needed not | the spectacles of books | to read | nature ; 
 
 he looked | inwards, 
 is everywhere | alike ; 
 
 and found her | there. | I cannot say | he 
 were he so, | I should do him | injury | to 
 
 compare him | with the greatest | of mankind. | He is many 
 times | flat, | insipid ; | his comic | wit | degenerating | into
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 233 
 
 clenches, | his serious | swelling | into bombast. | But he is 
 always | great, | when some great | occasion | is presented | to him : 
 | no man | can say | he ever | had a fit | subject | for his wit | and 
 did not | then | raise himself [ as high | above the rest | of poets 
 Quantum lenta solent inter mburna cupressi. 
 
 He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive 
 nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken 
 into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and 
 humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation, in his 
 age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims are 
 severally distinguished from each other ; and not only in their 
 inclinations, but in their very physiognomies and persons. Baptista 
 Porta could not have described their natures better than by the 
 marks which the poet gives them. The matter and manner of their 
 tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their different education, 
 humours, and callings, that each of them would be improper in any 
 other mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are dis- 
 tinguished by their several sorts of gravity ; their discourses are 
 such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding ; such 
 as are becoming of them, and of them only. Some of his persons 
 are vicious, and some virtuous ; some are unlearned, or (as Chaucer 
 calls them) lewd, and some are learned. Even the ribaldry of the 
 low characters is different ; the Reeve, the Miller, and the Cook are 
 several men, and distinguished from each other as much as the 
 mincing Lady Prioress, and the broad-speaking, gap-toothed wife of 
 Bath. But enough of this ; there is such a variety of game spring- 
 ing up before me, that I am distracted in my choice, and know not 
 what to follow. It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, 
 that here is God's plenty. We have our forefathers and great 
 grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days ; their 
 general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in 
 England, though they are called by other names than those | of 
 monks, | and friars, | and canons, | and lady-abbesses, | and nuns ; * 
 for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though 
 everything is altered. 
 
 For South the following will do excellently : South. 
 
 He came into the world a philosopher, which sufficiently appeared 
 by his writing the nature of things upon their names ; he could view 
 essences in themselves, and read forms without the comment of their 
 respective properties : he could see consequents yet dormant in their 
 principles, and effects yet unborn, and in the womb of their causes : 
 his understanding could almost pierce into future contingents, his 
 conjectures improving even to prophecy, or the certainties of pre- 
 
 1 Observe one of the lengthenings and shortenings of foot-length so often 
 noted.
 
 234 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 diction ; till his fall, it was ignorant of nothing but of sin ; or at 
 least it rested in the notion, without the smart of the experiment. 
 Could any difficulty have been proposed, the resolution would have 
 been as early as the proposal ; it could not have had time to settle 
 into doubt. Like a better Archimedes, the issue of all his inquiries 
 was an evprjKa, an evprjKa, the offspring of his brain without the 
 sweat of his brow. Study was not then a duty, night-watchings 
 were needless ; the light of reason wanted not the assistance of a 
 candle. This is the doom of fallen man, to labour in the fire, to 
 seek truth in pro/undo, to exhaust his time and impair his health, and 
 perhaps to spin out his days, and himself, into one pitiful, contro- 
 verted conclusion. There was then no poring, no struggling with 
 memory, no straining for invention : his faculties were quick and 
 expedite ; they answered without knocking, they were ready upon 
 the first summons, there was freedom and firmness in all their 
 operations. I confess, it is difficult for us, who date our ignorance 
 from our first being, and were still bred up with the same infirmities 
 about us with which we were born, to raise our thoughts and 
 imagination to those intellectual perfections that attended our nature 
 in the time of innocence ; as it is for a peasant bred up in the 
 obscurities of a cottage, to fancy in his mind the unseen splendours 
 of a court. But by rating positives by their privatives, and other 
 arts of reason, by which discourse supplies the want of the reports 
 of sense, we may collect the excellency of the understanding then, 
 by the glorious remainders of it now, and guess at the stateliness 
 of the building, by the magnificence of its ruins. All those arts, 
 rarities, and inventions, which vulgar minds gaze at, the ingenious 
 pursue, and all admire, are but the reliques of an intellect defaced 
 with sin and time. We admire it now, only as antiquaries do a 
 piece of old coin, for the stamp it once bore, and not for those 
 vanishing lineaments and disappearing draughts that remain upon 
 it at present. And certainly that must needs have been very 
 glorious, the decays of which are so admirable. He that is comely 
 when old and decrepid, surely was very beautiful when he was 
 young. An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens 
 but the rudiments of Paradise. 
 
 The contrasted character noted above may here be 
 seen in perfection the comparative archaism of some of 
 the diction, the occasional metaphysicality of the thought, 
 but, on the other hand, the new polished balance of the 
 rhythm, which often reaches not merely the usual double 
 contrast (" the obscurities of a cottage . . . the splendours 
 of a court "), but the full Johnsonian intricacy of triple- 
 rowed equivalence : 
 
 fAn Aristotle 
 \and Athens 
 
 (was but the rubbish 
 \but the rudiments 
 
 Jof an Adam, 
 \ of Paradise.
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 235 
 
 South, it will be observed, is not afraid of alliteration, 
 though he does not push it to Lylyan extremes. 
 
 These passages deserve plenty of study, but there is Halifax, 
 more " curiosity," in the modern sense, about the Truth 
 passage of Halifax : 
 
 Our Trimmer adores the Goddess Truth, tho' in all ages she 
 has been scurvily used, as well as those that worshipped her. 'Tis 
 of late become such a ruining virtue, that mankind seems to be 
 agreed to commend and avoid it ; yet the want of practice, which 
 repeals the other laws, has no influence upon the law of Truth, 
 because it has root in heaven, and an intrinsic value in itself that 
 can never be impaired : she shows her greatness in this, that her 
 enemies, even when they are successful, are ashamed to own it. 
 Nothing but power full of truth has the prerogative of triumphing, 
 not only after victories, but in spite of them, and to put conquest 
 herself out of countenance. She may be kept under and sup- 
 pressed, but her dignity still remains with her, even when she is 
 in chains. Falsehood, with all her impudence, has not enough to 
 speak ill of her before her face ; such majesty she carries about 
 her, that her most prosperous enemies are fain to whisper their 
 treason ; all the power upon the earth can never extinguish her ; 
 she has lived in all ages ; and let the mistaken zeal of prevailing 
 authority christen any opposition to it with what name they please, 
 she makes it not only an ugly and an unmannerly, but a dangerous 
 thing to persist. She has lived very retired indeed, nay, sometimes 
 so buried, that only some few of the discerning parts of mankind 
 could have a glimpse of her ; with all that, she has eternity in her, 
 she knows not how to die, and from the darkest clouds that shade 
 and cover her, she breaks from time to time with triumph for her 
 friends, and terror to her enemies. 
 
 I have always thought that whoever wrote this must 
 of a certainty have known the parallel passage in the 
 Areopagitica (v. sup. p. 170), and may not impossibly 
 have designed emulation of it. At all events the reader 
 will find it by no means uninteresting to look back and 
 compare the two. The writer has even kept to the 
 loss and damage of an otherwise fine period the pro- 
 voking Miltonic addition " she shows . . . own it." He 
 has achieved a really fine piece of rhetorical prose, with a 
 rhythm sufficient for any Rhetoric that does not approach 
 the line dividing its own dominions from those of Poetry. 
 But the musical accompaniment, the concert of the plain 
 of Dura that has gone utterly ; and nothing remains
 
 236 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 with us but oratorical balance, varied enough and effective 
 enough, but with no magic about it, only an excellent 
 cleverness. 
 
 Temple and The position of the wonderful sentence which has 
 been already referred to as giving, of itself, a position, by 
 himself, to Sir William Temple, is an odd one. There 
 is nothing else like it in his work, though the longer 
 passage which has led up to it is itself in part, but in 
 part only, somehow different from the work of most of 
 the group, and here and there suggestive, not indeed of 
 Browne or Taylor, but of Walton. It will probably be 
 best to give the whole : 
 
 ; Whether it be that the fierceness of the Gothic humours, or noise 
 of their perpetual wars, frighted it away, or that the unequal 
 mixture of the modern languages would not bear it ; certain it is, 
 that the great heights and excellency both of poetry and music 
 fell with the Roman learning and empire, and have never since 
 recovered the admiration and applauses that before attended 
 them. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they must be confessed 
 to be the softest and sweetest, the most general and most innocent 
 amusements of common time and life. They still find room in 
 the Courts of Princes, and the cottages of shepherds. They 
 serve to revive and animate the dead calm of poor or idle lives, 
 and to allay or divert the violent passions and perturbations of 
 the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects are of 
 equal use to human life ; for the mind of man is like the sea, 
 which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager in a 
 calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by 
 gentle gales ; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy 
 passions and affections. I know very well, that many, who pre- 
 tend to be wise by the forms of being grave, are apt to despise 
 both poetry and music as toys and trifles too light for the use 
 or entertainment of serious men. But, whoever find themselves 
 wholly insensible to these charms, would, I think, do well to keep 
 their own counsel, for fear of reproaching their own temper, and 
 bringing the goodness of their natures, if not of their understand- 
 ings, into question ; it may be thought at least an ill sign, if not 
 an ill constitution, since some of the fathers went so far as to 
 esteem the love of music a sign of predestination, as a thing 
 divine, and reserved for the felicities of heaven itself. While this 
 world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and requests of these 
 two entertainments will do so too : and happy those that content 
 themselves with these, or any other so easy and so innocent ; 
 and do not trouble the world, or other men, because they cannot 
 be quiet themselves, though no body hurts them !
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 237 
 
 When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, 
 but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured 
 a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over. 
 
 A most curious macedoine \ One might be inclined 
 to pish and pshaw about the fierceness of the Gothic 
 humours ; about the excellence of the Roman poetry, of 
 which Sir William did not know very much, and that of 
 the Roman music, of which he, like everybody else, must 
 have been almost wholly ignorant. But the opening 
 sentence is a good one in the modern style, and those that 
 follow are still better. Nay, when you get to " the mind 
 of man is like the sea " you half wonder whether this 
 genteel writer is going somehow to produce something 
 better than balance, something more exquisite than ease 
 with dignity. The doubt a wholly agreeable, if still 
 unsatisfied, doubt continues for the rest of the para- 
 graph, to change for a moment only, but a moment of 
 delight, with the brief coda. Here the Muses were 
 indeed good to Sir William ; perhaps for his somewhat 
 blundering but well-intentioned championship of the 
 youth of their immortality. The thing is not in the 
 ineffable key of Browne or Donne, it has not the 
 magnificence of Milton or the floriation of Taylor ; but 
 it has the homeliness and friendliness which are the best 
 sides of the Augustan period when it has " off-stilted " 
 a little, combined with something antiker Form sich 
 nahernd something almost prose- Shakespearian. 
 
 When all | is done, | human | life | is, | at the greatest | and the 
 best, | but like | a froward | child | that must be played with | and 
 humoured | a little | to keep it | quiet | till it falls | asleep ; | and 
 then | the care | is over. 1 
 
 1 It will, no doubt, occur to some that, for the last half-dozen or even the 
 last dozen words, a continuous trochaic scansion, " Keep it | quiet | till it | 
 
 falls a | sleep ; and | then the | care is | over," is possible. To my mind and 
 ear this would spoil the beauty of the passage ; but that may be matter of 
 taste. What is important is the unquestionable and remarkable difference 
 which these various foot-scansions make. It is surely impossible, in the face 
 of such an example, to regard them as mere pedantic trifling.
 
 238 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 The plainest 
 
 vulgar. 
 
 Thenon- 
 
 and Tom 
 
 You may force part of this into blank-verse rhythm, 
 but it does not come naturally, and does not in the 
 least suit with the rest. The actual measure is mostly 
 iambic (whence the blank-verse suggestion), but legiti- 
 mately coupling itself up here and there with at least 
 one paeon and several amphibrachs the two great 
 specially prose feet. It is not Corinthian at all, but it 
 is very nearly Attic in the rhetorical order of thought, 
 certainly Ionic in the architectural. Elsewhere Sir 
 William, though always agreeable in tone, is not ravishing. 
 He varies, like the rest of them, between for his narratives 
 and descriptions of moxas and peach-trees and German 
 drinking bouts the pure conversational "straightforward 
 period " redeemed from flatness by ease and good-breeding, 
 and, for argument and display, the balanced arrangement. 
 
 The prophetic character of the qualities which we 
 have exhibited in this group has been hinted at already, 
 and should be more fully brought out in the Interchapter 
 which will follow this : we may now and here best pass to 
 the succeeding phases as they have been scheduled above. 
 
 The Photian nemesis did not take long to show itself. 
 ^ our " naked natural way " does not easily escape the fate 
 of being also, as Hobbes, who lived nearly long enough 
 to see the whole transformation scene, had already trans- 
 lated it in his disillusionising fashion, " poor and brutish." 
 In the very group itself which we have been discussing, 
 Locke showed great part of the danger, and was only 
 saved from showing the whole of it by the gravity of his 
 subjects, and by the fortunate fact that he had no 
 propensity to joking. But the general tendency of the 
 age was different ; and in the last quarter of the century 
 the vulgarising of English style and English rhythm for 
 rhythm is like some delicate meats, it taints at once in 
 corrupt company is flagrant. It is not quite fair, 
 though it has been done, to charge this on L'Estrange ; 
 and (though the eighteenth century would sometimes 
 have done this) nobody is now likely to charge it on 
 Bunyan. I do not think that whatever Tom Brown's 
 delinquencies (and they are not inconsiderable) it is fair
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 239 
 
 to charge it on Tom who was saved in form by a little 
 scholarship, as Bentley was not by much. The editor of 
 the Observator, and the author of the Letters from the 
 Dead to the Living, use slang and neologism without the 
 slightest compunction, and though Tom at least was by 
 no means without a vein of poetry, their subjects did not 
 invite " high strains " of any kind. But though both, 
 and especially Tom, can be horribly coarse in substance 
 and diction, their rhythm is never vulgar : it is purely 
 conversational, but of a not very polished type. 1 
 
 As for Bunyan, here as everywhere, he stands quite by Bunyan. 
 himself. I think he had read a good deal more than some 
 persons of worship fancy ; but there is little doubt that 
 the common idea as to the Bible furnishing him with his 
 only formal models is correct enough. And by special 
 genius he had managed to combine Biblical music with 
 the style of the most ordinary, yet never in the least 
 vulgar, vernacular after a fashion which seems to me 
 almost more marvellous than Browne's weaving of the 
 Biblical magic into his own splendour, or Taylor's decking 
 texts with his prettiest trills and flourishes. All these, 
 however, really belong to the group already dealt with as 
 far as general rhythm goes belong to it, indeed, with a 
 closeness which the nature of their subjects ought not to 
 veil, though with many people it probably does. 
 
 On another group, however of which the most The vulgarians 
 prominent members are Rymer the critic, Bentley the 
 scholar, Jeremy Collier the divine and historian, with 
 others down to the somewhat later Mandeville, the curse 
 has come. Its manifestation is partly of a kind which 
 may seem accidental, if not mechanical ; but Swift, who 
 was possessed of a tolerably acute intellect, did not think 
 so. This is the use of colloquial contractions a thing 
 the destructiveness of which as regards harmony either 
 in verse or prose is not altogether easy to account 
 
 1 To see the difference, let the reader for once descend into the actual 
 gutter, and read Ned Ward. There is not much, if anything, to choose 
 between Ned and Tom in decency of matter, but there is everything in 
 quality of style.
 
 240 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 for, 1 and has been overlooked in the strangest and most 
 varied fashions, 2 but which certainly exists. Except " 'tis " 
 (which has secured itself a singular privilegium, perhaps 
 because of the exceptional ugliness of " it's ") it would be 
 difficult to mention a single contraction of the class which 
 is not instantly fatal to verse (think of what " I'm dying, 
 Egypt," would be in Antony's mouth, and of what the 
 lower, but really in substance pathetic, " Don't hear me 
 wronged " of Monimia actually is), and at least excessively 
 dangerous to prose, unless introduced for a special purpose, 
 instances What possible harmony or rhythmical effect can you 
 
 from Rymer, ^ Qut Qf ^ j efky vu l gar i ty Q f R yme r's " Fancy leaps 
 
 and frisks, and away she's gone " ? out of Bentley's " But 
 it's utterly false that Professors of it lasted longer in 
 general than those of the others " (where the man shows 
 his lack of ear, not merely by "it's," but by the*un- 
 necessary " in general " shoved in to spoil what little 
 rhythm there is) ? out of Collier's " Can't a toad spit 
 venom because she's ugly " ? Swift's well-known onslaught 
 on this kind of thing in the Tatler 3 was no doubt directed 
 rather at the vocabulary than at the rhythmical effect. 
 But this latter is really worse than the intrinsic badness 
 of the language. Nobody bars " it's " and " we're " in 
 actual conversation, or in that letter-writing which is 
 merely conversation through the post. But in book-prose 
 they are seldom (though I'd not say never) in place. As 
 for Mandeville, his liking for, and practice in, the actual 
 Dialogue may make it seem rather unfair to say much 
 of him ; but he certainly belongs to the vulgar class. 
 Defoe. Yet another isolated and remarkable writer has to be 
 
 briefly dealt with before we come to the first group of 
 reformers Swift himself, Addison, and Steele. Defoe, 
 however, does not from our present point of view, though 
 he certainly does from others, stand in any very different 
 position, now from the least specially rhythmical of the 
 
 1 Familiar, and therefore contemnible, if not contemptible, association is 
 only a part cause. But it is evident that contraction must in any case, and of 
 necessity, change rhythm. 
 
 2 As, for instance, by those who prefer elision to substitution in prosody. 
 
 3 No. 230. Sept. 28, 1710.
 
 vni AUGUSTAN PROSE 241 
 
 Dryden group, now from the least vulgar of the others. 
 In his abundant dialogue-work he is less rough than 
 Mandeville, but hardly more ambitious. When, on the 
 other hand, he attempts, as in most of his novels, and in 
 Robinson rather specially, set passages of description or 
 otherwise, he advances this style, by the aid of balance, 
 quite after the general fashion. 
 
 From the paper above cited, and from other things of Swift. 
 his, 1 it is quite certain that Swift deliberately meditated a 
 reform of prose ; and his influence on his friends was so 
 extraordinarily germinal and protreptic that he may well 
 be credited with some upon Addison's performance. But 
 his own protest, as has been said, was mainly, if not 
 wholly, confined to diction. As to practice, his temper, 
 his age, and his preferred subjects, necessarily confined 
 him to a plain style a style in a way the plainest of the 
 plain. But partly the general tendency of his great 
 ironic gift, and partly his special genius, brought about a 
 peculiarity, strictly rhythmical, which, though not quite 
 absent from some passages of that " Cousin Dryden " to 
 whom " Cousin Swift " was so ungrateful, is first found 
 eminently in Swift himself, and has probably been to 
 some extent imitated from him, directly or indirectly, by 
 all who have displayed it since. 
 
 The essence of irony, when irony itself is in quintes- The rhythmical 
 sence, is quietness. If the ostensible expression attracts cl } aracter 
 
 r of irony. 
 
 too much notice to itself by clangour of sound, or by 
 flamboyance of colour, the inner meaning has no (or at 
 least less) opportunity to slip its presence into the reader's 
 mind, and its sting into the enemy's body. Hence it is 
 almost impossible for the ironist to be too grave, in rhythm 
 as in all other points. In such passages as the address to 
 Prince Posterity in The Tale of a Tub, and almost the 
 whole of the Argument against Abolishing Christianity 
 and the Modest Proposal, the subjects, and even to some 
 extent the styles, are widely different. The Address 
 starts with the roundest mouth ; puts on an apparent 
 stateliness. The Argument, as befits its theme, has much 
 
 1 The Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue, for instance. 
 
 R
 
 242 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 of the same quality. The Proposal is wildly burlesque in 
 substance, and specially homely, though not in the least 
 vulgar, in phrase. But all of them equally abstain from 
 the slightest noisiness (we want a better word for tapage) 
 in cadence as in diction. A well - bred absence of 
 emphasis distinguishes all. The clauses are neatly but 
 not obtrusively balanced ; there are none of the sharp 
 pulls-up, or the variations of final sound, which even 
 Augustan writers permit themselves, and, in their highest 
 strains, even seek. The whole glides along in a smooth 
 and deadly flood, like that of Till in the old rhyme. It 
 is just the same with the most withering passages of 
 Gulliver. In prose as in verse (with one memorable and 
 not demonstrably certain exception) x Swift never raises 
 his voice. His prose is never, to a sound taste well 
 cultivated, inharmonious, or monotonous, or mean ; but 
 there never, in English, has been a prose in which 
 harmony was secured with so few means taken to secure 
 it, and monotony avoided with so little apparent effort to 
 safeguard the avoidance. A single example may suffice : 
 
 I profess | to your highness, | in the integrity | of my heart, | 
 that what | I am going | to say | is literally | true | this minute | I 
 am writing : what revolutions may happen before it shall be ready 
 for your perusal, I can by no means warrant : however, I beg you 
 to accept it as a specimen | of our learning, | our politeness, | and 
 our wit. | I do therefore affirm, upon the word of a sincere man, that 
 there is now actually in being a certain poet, called John Dryden, 
 whose translation of Virgil was lately printed in a large folio, well 
 bound, and, if diligent search were made, for aught I know, is yet 
 to be seen. There is another, called Nahum Tate, who is ready to 
 make oath, that he has caused many reams of verse to be published, 
 whereof both himself and his bookseller (if lawfully required) can 
 still produce authentic copies, and therefore wonders why the world 
 is pleased to make such a secret of it. There is a third, known by 
 the name of Tom Durfey, a poet of a vast comprehension, a universal 
 genius, and most profound learning. There are also one Mr. Rymer, 
 
 1 Not that I myself have the least doubt as to Swift's authorship of the 
 "Last Judgment" lines, the transmission of which we owe to Chesterfield. 
 The internal evidence is overwhelming, and while Chesterfield, great as were 
 his wits, could not possibly have written them himself, he was neither careless, 
 nor a mystifier, nor ill-informed. But the certainty morally as strong as 
 possible, and hardly less so critically falls short of both logical and legal 
 requirements.
 
 viii AUGUSTAN PROSE 243 
 
 and one Mr. Dennis, most profound critics. There is a person 
 styled Dr. Bentley, who has written near a thousand pages of 
 immense erudition, giving a full and true account of a certain 
 squabble, of wonderful importance, between himself and a bookseller ; 
 he is a writer of infinite wit and humour ; no man rallies with a better 
 grace, and in more sprightly turns. Further, | I avow | to your 
 highness, | that with these eyes | I have beheld | the person | of 
 William | Wotton, | B. |D., | who has written | a good | sizeable | 
 volume | against a friend | of your governor | (from whom, alas ! he 
 must therefore look for little favour), in a most gentlemanly style, 
 adorned with the utmost politeness and civility ; replete with dis- 
 coveries equally valuable for their novelty and use ; and embellished 
 with traits of wit, so poignant and so apposite, that he is a worthy 
 yokemate to his forementioned friend. 
 
 I have marked a few passages of this only, because it 
 seemed unnecessary to do more. No reader with any ear 
 can fail to notice the unostentatious undulation of the 
 scheme : now rising from dissyllabic or monosyllabic feet 
 through trisyllabic to paeons or even dochmiacs ; now 
 reversing the process ; but in no case transcending a sort 
 of grave oratorical rhythm or a quiet caricature thereof. 
 
 The positive achievement of Addison in prose-form Addison. 
 must in any case have assured him no small place here ; 
 and his immense and prolonged influence might have 
 challenged such a place if he had been less intrinsically 
 good. But even if his deserts from either point of view, 
 or both, had been very much less, the position (already 
 more than once glanced at) which he holds, as having been 
 the first English writer on whose work a commentator 
 bestowed special attention from the rhythmical point of 
 view, would have made him all important to us. We 
 shall, indeed, take this side first, because it is first in its 
 own division. 
 
 Kurd's first note 1 on Addison's rhythm starts with a 
 
 1 On Spec. 94. See Bohn edition of Addison, vol. ii. pp. 416, 417. But 
 I append the passage : 
 
 " Which the prophet took a distinct view of.~\ This way of throwing the 
 preposition to the end of a sentence, is among the peculiarities of Mr. 
 Addison's manner ; and was derived from his nice ear. The secret deserves 
 to be explained. The English tongue is naturally grave and majestic. The 
 rhythm corresponds to the genius of it ; and runs, almost whether we will 
 or no, into iambics. But the continuity of this solemn measure has an 
 ill effect where the subject is not of moment. Mr. Addison's delicate ear 
 made him sensible of this defect in the rhythm of our language, and sug-
 
 244 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Kurd's deal- misconception which, in a man of the Bishop's reading 
 rhythm' lS an( ^ critical power, 1 shows how very ignorant his genera- 
 tion was of the history of English language and literature. 
 Of course, the preposition at the end of the sentence is 
 no peculiarity of Addison's, but an old and genuinely 
 English idiom which pedantry has at different times con- 
 demned, but which no one who really knows his mother 
 tongue will hesitate to use when he pleases. It has often 
 recently been pointed out that one of the most curious 
 differences between the first and the later editions of 
 Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy is the removal of the 
 preposition (probably in mistaken deference to French 
 usage) from the end. But this matters very little 
 nothing at all, indeed to Kurd's rhythmical criticism. 
 This, though it shows a creditable application of the 
 principles of Cicero and Quintilian certainly, and perhaps 
 of Aristotle and Longinus, to English, is, as was natural, 
 a little rudimentary. 
 
 Hurd is, of course, perfectly right, though not in the 
 
 gested to him the proper cure for it ; which was, to break the continued 
 iambic measure, especially at the end of a sentence, where the weight of it 
 would be most felt, by a prepositim, or other short word, of no emphasis in 
 the sense, and without accent, thrown into that part : whence a trochee, being 
 introduced into the place of an iambus, would give that air of negligence, and 
 what the French call ' legerete,' which, in a work of gaiety or elegance, is 
 
 found so taking. For instance, had the author said, ' of which the prophet 
 
 took a distinct view,' the metre had been wholly iambic, or, what is worse, 
 would have been loaded with a spondee in the last foot, and the accent must 
 have fallen, with solemnity, on the word '"view.'' But by reserving the 
 preposition * of to the end of the sentence, he gains this advantage, that 
 ' view of ' becomes a trochee ; and the ear is not only relieved by the variety, 
 but escapes the ' ictus ' of a too important close. For the same reason, he 
 frequently terminates a sentence, or a paragraph, by such unpretending 
 
 phrases as, of it of him to her from them, etc. ; which have the same 
 effect on the ear (the accent, here, falling on the preposition), and give a 
 careless air to the rhythm, exactly suited to the subject and genius of these 
 little essays : though the common reader, who does not enter into the beauty 
 of this contrivance, is ready to censure the author, as wanting nerves and force. 
 
 " In the formal style, it is evident, this liberty should be sparingly used ; 
 but in conversation, in letters, in narratives, and, universally, in all the lighter 
 forms of composition, the Addisonian termination, as we may call it, has an 
 extreme grace." 
 
 1 For a vindication of this from a trick of undervaluing him which repays 
 his own ignorance in kind, see Hist. Crit. iii. 72-80.
 
 vni AUGUSTAN PROSE 245 
 
 least original, in declaring the general rhythm of English His supposed 
 
 to . be iambic ; and he is equally right, and rather more |^S|J|f?, 
 
 original, in desiderating substitution of other feet, though 
 
 one may smile (to be smiled at in return, no doubt, by 
 
 others hereafter, if there be a hereafter for this book) at 
 
 the " air of taking negligence " given by a single trochee. 
 
 But in applying this principle he " sticks in the bark " 
 
 remarkably. His " wholly iambic " observation, on his 
 
 own scanning, would require an accentuation of " distinct " 
 
 which was pretty certainly no more usual in his time than 
 
 in ours. Indeed, his horrified suggestion of a spondee 
 
 seems to admit this. He gives no reason why accent 
 
 should not, or why it must, " fall, with solemnity, on the 
 
 word ' view,' " and he clearly never thought of, and 
 
 would doubtless have regarded with horror, the scansion 
 
 " a distinct | view ," which is pretty certainly the right 
 one. But he is perfectly right as to the different effects 
 of iambic and trochaic endings, though, as was noted 
 above, the assumption that it is an " Addisonian termina- 
 tion " would seem to argue a beginning of study of 
 English prose with Addison himself, and an ignoring of 
 all that had gone before. 1 
 
 Hurd's other passage on Addison's rhythm is very His general 
 much longer ; but, long as it is, it must be given, 2 and Addison's 
 
 1 I suspect that, great as was the authority of Dryden's verse in Hurd's 
 day, the prose was little read. 
 
 2 On Spec. 409, ed. cit. sup. iii. 389-391 : 
 
 "A man who has any relish for fine writing.] This mystery of fine 
 writing (more talked of than understood) consists chiefly in three things. I. 
 In a choice of/?/ terms. 2. In such a construction of them as agrees to the 
 grammar of the language in which we write. And, 3. In a pleasing order 
 and arrangement of them. By the first of these qualities, a style becomes 
 what we call elegant ; by the second, exact ; and, by the third, harmonious. 
 Each of these qualities may be possessed by itself ; but they must concur, to 
 form a finished style. 
 
 " Mr. Addison was the first, and is still perhaps the only, English writer 
 in whom these three requisites are found together, in almost an equal degree 
 of perfection. It is, indeed, one purpose of these cursory notes, to show that, 
 in some few instances, he has transgressed, or rather neglected, the strict 
 rules of grammar ; which yet, in general, he observes with more care than 
 any other of our writers. But, in the choice of his terms (which is the most 
 essential point of all), and in the numbers of his style, he is almost faultless, 
 or rather admirable. 
 
 " It will not be easy for the reader to comprehend the merit of Mr. Addison's
 
 246 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 commented on with some fulness. It will be observed 
 that Cicero and Quintilian, rather than the Greeks, are, 
 as was above suggested, Hurd's guides. Yet he has not 
 
 prose, in these three respects, if he has not been conversant in the best 
 rhetorical writings of the ancients, and especially in those parts of Cicero's 
 and Quintilian's works which treat of what they call composition. But, 
 because the harmony of his style is exquisite, and this praise is peculiar to 
 himself, it may be worth while to consider in what it chiefly consists. 
 
 "I. This secret charm of numbers is effected by a certain arrangement of 
 words in the same sentence ; that is, by putting such words together as read 
 easily and are pronounced without effort ; while, at the same time, they are 
 so tempered by different sounds and measures, as to affect the ear with a sense 
 of variety, as well as sweetness. As, to take the first sentence in the follow- 
 ing essay : ' Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our 
 senses. ' If you alter it thus, ' Our sight is the perfectest and most delight- 
 ful of all our senses,' though the change be only of one word, the difference 
 is very sensible ; perfectest being a word of difficult pronunciation, and 
 rendered still harsher by the subsequent word most, which echoes to the 
 termination est. 
 
 " Or, again, read thus ' Our sight is the most perfect and most pleasing 
 of all our senses.' Here, the predominance of the vowel e, and the allitera- 
 tion of the two adjectives, perfect and pleasing, with the repetition of the 
 superlative sign ' most,' occasions too great a sameness or similarity of sound 
 in the constituent parts of this sentence. 
 
 "Lastly, read thus 'Our sight is the most complete and most delightful 
 sense we have.'' But then you hurt the measure or quantity, which, in our 
 language, is determined by the accent ; as will appear from observing of 
 what feet either sentence consists. 
 
 "'Our sight-is the most-complete-and most-delight-ful sense-we have.' 
 Here, except the second foot, which is an anapaest, the rest are all of one 
 
 kind, i.e. iambics. Read now with Mr. Addison ' Our sight-is the most- 
 
 perfect-and most delight-ful of all-our senses.' And you see how the rhythm 
 is varied by the intermixture of other feet, besides that the short redundant 
 
 syllable, ses, gives to the close a slight and negligent air, which has a better 
 effect, in this place, than the proper iambic foot. 
 
 "2. A sentence may be of a considerable length : and then the rhythm 
 arises from such a composition, as breaks the whole into different parts ; and 
 consults at the same time the melodious flow of each. As in the second 
 period of the same paper ' It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, 
 converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest 
 in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments.' 
 
 " A single sentence should rarely consist of more than three members, and 
 the rhythm is most complete when these rise upon and exceed each other in 
 length and fulness of sound, till the whole is rounded by a free and measured 
 close. In this view, the rhythm of the sentence here quoted might be improved 
 by shortening the first member, or lengthening the second, as thus ' it fills 
 the mind with the most ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest 
 distance,' etc. Or thus ' it fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, 
 has the advantage of conversing with its objects at the greatest distance,' etc. 
 
 "These alterations are suggested only to explain my meaning, and not to 
 intimate that there is any fault in the sentence, as it now stands. It is not
 
 vni AUGUSTAN PROSE 247 
 
 quite assimilated even his Latin lessons, and he has not 
 dared to make the very smallest advance upon them. He 
 does here admit an anapaest, but l he does not dream of 
 
 necessary, nay it would be wrong, to tune every period into the completest 
 harmony : I would only signify to the reader, what that arrangement of a 
 complicated period is, in which the harmony is most complete. We have 
 numberless instances in Mr. Addison's writings ; as in the next of his papers 
 on the imagination ' the eye has room to range abroad, to expatiate at 
 large on the immensity of its views, and to lose itself amidst the variety of 
 objects that offer themselves to its observation.' 
 
 " The instance here given is liable to no objection. But there is danger, no 
 doubt, lest this attention to rhythm should betray the writer, insensibly, into 
 some degree of languor and redundancy in his expression. And it cannot be 
 denied, that Mr. Addison himself has sometimes fallen into this trap. But 
 the general rule holds, nevertheless ; and care is only to be taken, that in 
 aiming at a beauty of one kind, we do not overlook another of equal, or, as 
 in this case, of greater importance. 
 
 " What has been said may enable the reader to collect the rule in shorter 
 sentences, or in sentences otherwise constructed. 
 
 " 3. The rhythm of several sentences combined together into one paragraph 
 is produced, in like manner, by providing that the several sentences shall 
 differ from each other in the number of component parts, or in the extent of 
 them, if the number be the same, or in the run and construction of the parts, 
 where they are of the like extent. The same care must also be taken to 
 close the paragraph, as the complex sentence, with a gracious and flowing 
 termination. Consider the -whole first paragraph of the paper we have now 
 before us, and you will not find two sentences corresponding to each other in 
 all respects. Each is varied from the rest ; and the conclusion fills the ear, 
 as well as completes the sense. 
 
 " Something like the same attention must be had in disposing the several 
 paragraphs of the same paper, as in arranging the several periods of the same 
 paragraph. 
 
 "But, 'verbum sapienti.' The charm of Mr. Addison's prose consists 
 very much in the dexterous application of these rules, or rather, in consulting 
 his ear, which led him instinctively to the practice from which these rules are 
 drawn. 
 
 " If it be asked, whether the harmony of his prose be capable of improve- 
 ment, I think we may say in general, that, with regard to this way of writing, 
 in short essays to which Mr. Addison's style is adapted, and for which it was 
 formed, it is not. There is, with the utmost melody, all the -variety of com- 
 position (which answers to what we call pause in good poetry) which the 
 nature of these writings demands. In works of another length and texture, 
 the harmony would be improved in various ways ; and even by the very 
 transgression of these rules. 
 
 " Every kind of writing has a style of its own ; and a good ear formed on 
 the several principles of numerous composition will easily direct how, and 
 in what manner, to suit the rhythm to the subject and the occasion. There 
 is no doubt that what is exquisite in one mode of writing would be finical 
 in another. It is enough to say, that the rhythm of these essays, called 
 Spectators, is wonderfully pleasing, and perhaps perfect in its kind." 
 
 1 And he is hardly to be blamed for this, for much more than a century 
 was to pass, and the enfranchisement of poetry and prose alike had to take 
 place, before it was (quite recently) recognised.
 
 248 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 the monosyllabic foot, which is the complement of ana- 
 paestic division. And his classical guides have not in the 
 least suggested to him (as here they ought to have done) 
 the necessity, or at any rate the great advantage, of the 
 paeon. He clings to his iamb ; and the result is that, 
 flying directly in the face of those very advisers, he does 
 not, indeed, make Addison write blank verse, but attributes 
 (without special objection) to one of his specimens, a 
 blank-verse arrangement which it need not in the least 
 undergo. His " negligent redundance " would be much 
 better interpreted as a deliberate and very skilful amphi- 
 brach ; and the whole would be best scanned as iamb, 
 dochmiac, dochmiac, iamb, amphibrach. 1 
 
 This, however, may be put aside as a question of taste. 
 There is a great deal of uncontroversial matter in ( the 
 note, for which Hurd deserves hearty commendation, and 
 which shows acute and original sense joined to a good 
 knowledge of the ancients. He has mastered the great 
 principle of variety in clause, sentence, and paragraph, in 
 composition and termination. He is perhaps, if not 
 wrong, dangerous in specially suggesting rising amplifica- 
 tion of members ; for though this is sometimes (as has been 
 and will be shown here) effective, it is tricky and mono- 
 tonous, and very liable, as in Johnson, to pall. But on 
 the whole he is a pioneer, 2 and a good pioneer ; and so 
 all honour be to him. 
 
 Specimens of What is more, he not only gives us invaluable in- 
 formation as to the standpoint and outlook of his own 
 day on these matters, but positively adds interest to the 
 study of Addison's rhythm from points and manners of 
 view quite different. We turn to the Spectator itself, and 
 what do we find there ? As Mr. Courthope has most 
 truly observed, 3 though he has not quite followed out the 
 observation in our direction, Addison's style" is " an 
 extension of that of Dryden " in other words, purely con- 
 
 1 " Our sight | is the most perfect | and most delightful | of all | our 
 
 senses. | " 
 
 2 See on Mason, post, App. II. 
 
 3 Craik's English Prose Selections, iii. 489.
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 249 
 
 versational ; in rhythm, as in other things, with little 
 harmonic device except balance, but further modernised, 
 and, it may be, with more definite attention to niceties of 
 cadence. Let us accumulate some well-known passages 
 the more well-known the better and analyse them. 
 
 Our ships are laden with the harvest of every climate ; our tables 
 are stored with spices, and oils, and wines : our rooms are filled 
 with pyramids of china, and adorned with the workmanship of 
 Japan : our morning's draught comes to us from the remotest 
 corners of the earth : we repair our bodies by the drugs of America, 
 and repose ourselves under Indian canopies. My friend Sir Andrew 
 calls the vineyards of France our gardens ; the spice-islands our 
 hot-beds ; the Persians our silk-weavers, and the Chinese our potters. 
 Nature indeed furnishes us with the bare necessaries of life, but 
 traffic gives us greater variety of what is useful, and at the same 
 time supplies us with everything that is convenient and ornamental. 
 Nor is it the least part of this our happiness, that whilst we enjoy 
 the remotest products of the north and south, we are free from those 
 extremities of weather which give them birth ; that our eyes are 
 refreshed with the green fields of Britain, at the same time that our 
 palates are feasted with fruits that rise between the tropics. 
 
 Nature seems to have taken a particular care to disseminate her 
 blessings among the different regions of the world, with an eye to 
 this mutual intercourse and traffic among mankind, that the natives 
 of the several parts of the globe might have a kind of dependence 
 upon one another, and be united together by their common interest. 
 Almost every degree produces something peculiar to it. The food 
 often grows in one country, and the sauce in another. The fruits of 
 Portugal are corrected by the products of Barbadoes : the infusion 
 of a China plant sweetened with the pith of an Indian cane. The 
 Philippic Islands give a flavour to our European bowls. The single 
 dress of a woman of quality is often the product of a hundred 
 climates. The muff and the fan come together from the different 
 ends of the earth. The scarf is sent from the torrid zone, and the 
 tippet from beneath the pole. The brocade Petticoat rises out of 
 the mines of Peru, and the diamond necklace out of the bowels of 
 Indostan. 
 
 MR. SPECTATOR Now, Sir, the thing is this ; Mr. Shapely is 
 the prettiest gentleman about town. He is very tall, but not too 
 tall neither. He dances like an angel. His mouth is made I do 
 not know how ; but it is the prettiest that I ever saw in my life. 
 He is always laughing, for he has an infinite deal of wit. If you 
 did but see how he rolls his stockings ! He has a thousand pretty 
 fancies ; and I am sure, if you saw him, you would like him. He 
 is a very good scholar, and can talk Latin as fast as English. I
 
 250 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 wish you could but see him dance ! Now, you must understand, 
 poor Mr. Shapely has no estate ; but how can he help that, you 
 know ? and yet my friends are so unreasonable as to be always 
 teasing me about him because he has no estate ; but I am sure he 
 has that that is better than an estate ; for he is a good-natured, 
 ingenious, modest, tall, well-bred, handsome man ; and I am obliged 
 to him for his civilities ever since I saw him. I forgot to tell you 
 that he has black eyes, and looks upon me now and then as if he 
 had tears in them. And yet my friends are so unreasonable that 
 they would have me be uncivil to him. I have a good portion which 
 they cannot hinder me of, and shall be fourteen on the 2gth day of 
 August next, and am therefore willing to settle in the world, as soon 
 as I can, and so is Mr. Shapely. But everybody I advise with here 
 is poor Mr. Shapely's enemy. I desire, therefore, you will give me 
 your advice, for I know you are a wise man ; and if you advise me 
 well I am resolved to follow it. I heartily wish you could see him 
 dance ; and am, Sir, Your most obedient servant, B. D. 
 
 He loves your Spectators mightily. 
 
 . . . . . , 
 
 He then led me to the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing 
 me on the top of it, cast thy eyes eastward, said he, and tell me 
 what thou seest. I see, said I, a huge valley, and a prodigious tide 
 of water rolling through it. The valley that thou seest, said he, is 
 the vale of misery, and the tide of water that thou seest is part of 
 the great tide of eternity. What is the reason, said I, that the tide 
 I see rises out of a thick mist at one end, and again loses itself in a 
 thick mist at the other ? What thou seest, said he, is that portion 
 of eternity which is called time, measured out by the sun, and reach- 
 ing from the beginning of the world to its consummation. Examine 
 now, said he, this sea that is bounded with darkness at both ends, 
 and tell me what thou discoverest in it. I see a bridge, said I, 
 standing in the midst of the tide. The bridge thou seest, said he, 
 is human life, consider it attentively. Upon a more leisurely survey of 
 it, I found that it consisted of threescore and ten entire arches, with 
 several broken arches, which, added to those that were entire, made 
 up the number about an hundred. As I was counting the arches, 
 the genius told me that this bridge consisted at first of a thousand 
 arches ; but that a great flood swept away the rest, and left the 
 bridge in the ruinous condition I now beheld it : but tell me further, 
 said he, what thou discoverest on it. I see multitudes of people 
 passing over it, said I, and a black cloud hanging on each end of 
 it. As I looked more attentively, I saw several of the passengers 
 dropping through the bridge, into the great tide that flowed under- 
 neath it ; and upon further examination, perceived there were in- 
 numerable trap-doors that lay concealed in the bridge, which the 
 passengers no sooner trod upon, but they fell through them into the 
 tide and immediately disappeared. These hidden pit-falls were set 
 very thick at the entrance of the bridge, so that the throngs of
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 251 
 
 people no sooner broke through the cloud, but many of them fell 
 into them. They drew thinner towards the middle, but multiplied 
 and lay closer together towards the end of the arches that were entire. 
 
 When I look | upon the tombs | of the great, | every | emotion | 
 of envy | dies in me : | when I read | the epitaphs | of the beautiful, 
 | every | inordinate | desire | goes out : | when I meet | with the 
 grief j of parents | upon a tombstone, | my heart | melts | with 
 compassion : | when I see | the tombs | of the parents | themselves, 
 | I consider I the vanity | of grieving | for those | whom we must 
 
 quickly | follow : | when I see 
 posed them, | when I consider 
 
 kings | lying | by those | who de- 
 rival | wits | placed | side by side, 
 
 or the holy men | that divided | the world | with their contests | 
 and disputes, | I reflect | with sorrow j and astonishment | on the 
 little | competitions, | factions, | and debates | of mankind. 
 
 These passages differ from each other almost as much Rhythmical 
 in what we may call atmosphere of subject as in subject as 
 itself; yet the atmosphere of rhythmical treatment is 
 surprisingly uniform. The ease, the fluency, the con- 
 cinnity, is everywhere ; but perhaps there is everywhere 
 also that almost obstinately " middle " quality upon which 
 Johnson insisted. Nothing ever jars ; and in such a 
 passage, for instance, as the delightful malice of poor 
 " B. D.'s " letter (which has no parallel anywhere except in 
 Miss Austen) there is nothing wanting. In fact, here the 
 conversational, almost or altogether, becomes the dramatic ; 
 and you hear " B. D." sighing in a really pathetic 
 fashion, " I wish you could see him dance," and still more 
 pathetically faltering as she tells of tears in Mr. Shapely's 
 black eyes. But this is suggested delivery rather than 
 pure rhythm of reading. So again in the beautiful and 
 famous " Westminster Abbey " passage, it is only the 
 thought that is very eloquent : the accompaniment is 
 little more than a usually careful and prolonged example 
 of balance, and of that extension of clause, like a flight of 
 steps expanding upwards or downwards, which has been 
 so often noted. In fact, it may be questioned whether 
 the actual conclusion " on the . . . mankind " is very 
 happy in its rhythmical composition. But the piece is, 
 in that respect, the most ambitious of the four ; and so I 
 have at least divided it.
 
 252 A HISTOR Y OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Selections of 
 other Queen 
 Anne men 
 necessary. 
 
 Berkeley. 
 
 On the other hand, in the vivid and almost Macaulayish 
 reflections on the Exchange, and even in the most serious 
 and ambitious part of the "Vision of Mirza," we cannot 
 but feel, good as both are, what a falling off there is from 
 Sir Thomas Browne, who, be it remembered, did not die 
 till Addison was already a schoolboy. Think how Sir 
 Thomas would have lengthened out the sharp staccato 
 phrases, about Timbuctoo, Barbadoes, and the Philippines, 
 with erudite or metaphysical conceits couched in long- 
 drawn symphonies ! how the " Vision " would have decked 
 itself with all the colours, and bidden its arches play with 
 all the fugues and toccatas, of Urn Btirial and the Garden 
 of Cyrus \ Far be it from me, now or at any time, to 
 commit the unscholarly and Philistine error and ineptitude 
 of rinding fault with a thing because it is not something 
 else. If I contrast the meditations of Addison perhaps 
 more appropriate to the stately tombs or cenotaphs of 
 the basilica on Ludgate Hill than to those of the older 
 fane on the Isle of Thorney with the remarks of Browne 
 on the rude urns brought to light in a Norfolk field, it is 
 not to scout the one and flatter the other, but simply to 
 emphasise the difference between them, and to point out 
 the limitations of the later style. It neither aims at, nor 
 does it admit of, the gorgeousness of its predecessor ; 
 mainly, or at least partly, because it does not aim at or 
 admit of that predecessor's variety of rhythm. 
 
 In the respect with which alone we have to do, Steele 
 is merely a more careless Addison, and Arbuthnot, in 
 this as in others, is almost inseparable from Swift. 
 Atterbury is slightly older-fashioned than the others, and 
 nearer the Dryden group. But three of the greater 
 Queen Anne men, Berkeley, Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke, 
 must be noticed in some little detail ; and these three 
 differ from each other in the most curious fashion. 
 
 Berkeley, I confess, appears to me to have been 
 almost the greatest writer, from our own and the nearest 
 adjacent points of view, whom the new style post 1660 had 
 yet produced greater than Addison, if not so variously 
 agreeable, and though not so great as Dryden, possessing
 
 viir AUGUSTAN PROSE 253 
 
 the advantage that, as he only used one harmony (for his 
 few verses are negligible in form) he was able to pour his 
 whole strength into it. 
 
 He is not, of course, flamboyant ; his time would not 
 let him be ; but read this : 
 
 Natural | phenomena | are only | natural | appearances. | They 
 are, | therefore, | such | as we see | and perceive them. | Their real | 
 and objective | natures | are, [ therefore, | the same ; | passive j 
 without anything | active, | fluent | and changing | without any- 
 thing | permanent | in them. | However, | as these | make the first | 
 impressions, | and the mind | takes her first | flight | and spring, | 
 as it were, | by resting | her foot | on these objects, | they are not 
 only | first | considered [ by all men, | but most | considered | by 
 most men. j They | and the phantoms | that result | from those | 
 appearances, | the children of | imagination | grafted | upon sense, | 
 such | for example | as pure space, | are thought | by many | the 
 very first | in existence | and stability, | and to embrace | and com- 
 prehend | all other | beings. | 
 
 A very careless reader may say, " Good enough in the 
 plain-style way ; but what is there in it to justify the 
 encomium just passed ? " I had at first neither divided 
 nor scanned anything in the passage itself, and though I 
 have changed my mind, it cannot be difficult for any one 
 to disregard the symbols and observe for himself how 
 much above the " stop " system of clauses in the same 
 sentence is the sentence-division and arrangement in the 
 first three full-stop spaces here. See, reading it carefully, 
 how much spring and swell of cadence there is everywhere, 
 and especially note that remarkable inset " the children of 
 imagination j grafted | upon sense " with the change and 
 idiosyncrasy of its harmony suiting the almost poetic 
 figure expressed in it. 
 
 Berkeley can apply this silver-gilt, if not actually 
 golden, style, not merely to the austerities of philosophy
 
 254 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 and theology, but, as in Aldphron and the Siris, to much 
 more miscellaneous subjects. I had the good luck to 
 stumble upon the two last-named books when I was 
 quite a boy ; and I think they first gave me the idea of 
 beautiful prose as such. But the abstruser treatises x are 
 not less distinguished by it : I think they are even more 
 so. There is hardly any writer (I may be allowed to 
 repeat the exceptions of Plato and Malebranche, while I 
 should not feel disinclined now to add Schopenhauer and 
 Nietzsche) who shows better how perfectly idle is the 
 notion (entertained by some ancients, and a great many 
 moderns to the present day, and formulated apologetically 
 by Kurd in the passage quoted above) that attention to 
 rhythm will betray the writer into " languor and redundancy 
 of expression," or, one may add, that attention to it on the 
 part of the reader means indifference to the meaning, or 
 failure to appreciate it. And Berkeley, while he can be 
 almost as mellifluous as Hooker with greater variety, can 
 be as pungent as Swift, adapting his rhythm to pungency 
 in a way which Swift hardly cared to use ; as here 
 
 All these | advantages | are produced | from drunkenness | in the 
 vulgar way | by \ strong I beer ; | 
 
 where the molossus or, if still greater emphasis is wanted, 
 the trebly repeated monosyllabic foot at the end, clenches 
 the defiance 2 of the precedent groups of lighter syllables 
 in the most charming way. 
 
 Shaftesbury. That there should be strong differences of opinion as 
 to Shaftesbury as a thinker is not surprising ; nor, 
 perhaps, is surprise exactly the word for the way in 
 which one discovers similar differences about his style. 
 Mr. E. K. Chambers 3 thinks it " consummately easy and 
 lucid," holds (this itself is rather surprising considering 
 dates) that he " brings into English prose an order and 
 clearness of which it was beginning to stand in need," 4 
 
 1 The above is from The Principles of Human Knowledge. 
 
 2 The phrase, it may be just desirable to say, is from the grave burlesque 
 of the " private-vices-public-benefits " argument in Aldphron. 
 
 3 In the section on Shaftesbury in Sir Henry Craik's book, iii. 448. 
 
 4 The italics are mine. Shaftesbury is not known to 'have written (or
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 255 
 
 but admits that he is " terribly affected." Lamb, we all 
 know, thought him " genteel." But the author of the 
 Philosophy of Rhetoric^ one of the very best critics of style 
 in the eighteenth century, and very far indeed from being 
 negligible to-day, made out his lordship, in a most 
 vigorous and unsparing examination, 1 to be, " though far 
 from deficient in acuteness, invention, or vivacity," 
 " perhaps the most eminent of all that have written in the 
 English language" for "galimatias" "bombast," and "the 
 sublime of nonsense." 
 
 One is bound to say that the examples which Campbell 
 produces prove his own point to the hilt, and show, from 
 ours, that Shaftesbury could at any rate be guilty of the 
 clumsiest lumps of inharmonious composition : 
 
 If the savour of things lies cross to honesty, if the fancy be 
 florid and the appetite high towards the subaltern beauties and 
 lower order of worldly symmetries and proportions, the conduct will 
 infallibly turn this latter way. Characteristics, III. ii. 2. 
 
 But what can one do ? or how dispense with these darker 
 disquisitions or moonlight voyages, when we have to deal with a 
 sort of moon-blind wits who, though very acute and able in their 
 kind, may be said to renounce daylight, and extinguish in a manner 
 the bright visible outward world, by allowing us to know nothing 
 beside what we can prove by strict and formal demonstration. 
 Ibid. III. iv. 2. 
 
 The last sentence, particularly, is as formless a heap 
 as can be found in mid-seventeenth century, without any 
 of the rhythmical beauty of parts which so often redeems 
 the prose of that time. 
 
 Of course Shaftesbury is not always as bad as this ; 
 but it must be confessed that he is seldom successful in 
 turning out a harmonious sentence, as may be seen from 
 the very first paragraph of his which Mr. Chambers 
 himself has extracted : 
 
 Thus, my Lord, there are many panics in mankind, besides 
 merely that of fear. And thus is religion also panic, when 
 
 at least published) anything before 1708, and had been born in 1671. 
 Dryden and the minor apostles of "order and clearness" had been born, 
 and had written, forty years before him. 
 
 1 Philosophy of Rhetoric, Book ii., chap, vi., part ii. To be found at 
 p. 247 of Tegg's edition (London, 1850).
 
 256 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 enthusiasm of any kind gets up, as oft, on melancholy occasions 
 it will; for vapours naturally rise, and in bad times especially, 
 when the spirits of men are low, as either in public calamities, 
 or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet, or when convulsions 
 happen in nature, storms, earthquakes, or other amazing prodigies : 
 at this season the panic must needs run high, and the magistrate 
 of necessity give way to it. For, to apply a serious remedy, and 
 bring the sword, or fasces, as a cure, must make the case more 
 melancholy, and increase the very cause of the distemper. To 
 forbid men's natural fears, and to endeavour the overpowering 
 them by other fears, must needs be a most unnatural method. The 
 magistrate, if he be any artist, should have a gentler hand, and 
 instead of caustics, incisions, and amputations, should be using the 
 softest balms, and, with a kind sympathy, entering into the concern 
 of the people, and taking, as it were, their passion upon him, should, 
 when he has soothed and satisfied it, endeavour, by cheerful ways, 
 to divert and heal it. 
 
 It can only be by accident if a writer of such a 
 sentence as that italicised here achieves anywhere even a 
 sentence, much more a paragraph, of any rhythmical 
 beauty, and I think we need not further ransack the 
 Characteristics in search of one. The fact is that Shaftes- 
 bury, despite his gentility, really belongs as a writer to 
 the disorderly house, against which Swift, Addison, and 
 their followers were contemporaneously protesting. His 
 well-known dislike of Dryden may be, as some have said, 
 excused on the score of filial piety ; but his own 
 composition is generally " an unfeathered thing " (if not 
 even an " unfooted"} and not unfrequently "a shapeless 
 lump." 
 
 Boiiugbroke. There has, of course, been much more controversy 
 about the other " sophist of quality " (as his contempor- 
 aries might have called, and perhaps did call him) about 
 Bolingbroke. But whether he was a " brilliant knave " 
 or " a much misunderstood politician " ; a traitor or a 
 patriot, an atheist in subterfuge or merely a rationalist 
 in not the worst sense of the term, there can, I 
 think, be little dispute between competent persons on the 
 proposition that he was an uncommonly good writer. 
 Hardly any one of the group of which we are now 
 speaking, except Berkeley, seems to me to have excelled 
 him in faultlessness of form ; for Addison, much more
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 257 
 
 agreeable, and, at his best, superior in most other ways, is 
 also much more unequal in this respect. If few people 
 " now read Bolingbroke " except to write books on him, 
 it is chiefly because his subjects have lost interest ; perhaps 
 also (I should hardly deny it) because the charges of 
 hollowness, and of a certain monotony in excellence, are 
 true. Except Halifax, he is our first known example 
 of the fact that a very great orator practically must be 
 a good writer. 1 But he is also an example, as (I should 
 say, though some would not) Cicero himself is, that a 
 very good orator may be a rather tiresome writer. 2 
 Bolingbroke's ineluctable adequacy does become something 
 wearisome ; but it exists. You never " catch him out." 
 From the Letter to Wmd/iam (which is, I suppose, his diploma 
 piece), through his " occasional " writings, his Dissertations, 
 and his Letters and his Essays, through the Patriot King 
 and the Pope and Pouilly epistles, and the Historical 
 Remarks, down to those " Fragments or Minutes " as 
 to which he does admit correction, but which, if they 
 were not castigated with all the author's skill and 
 pains, are the most remarkable " jottings " ever written 
 you never catch him out. My friend Sir Henry 
 Craik has called him a " journalist " ; and I followed 
 that way of life myself too long to think the appella- 
 tion necessarily a reproach. But if so, he was one of 
 the first of journalists in more than one sense of the 
 ordinal. 
 
 And a certain kind of rhythm was one of the chief 
 weapons which made him so formidable and so resourceful 
 in his own kind of journalism. Read this passage, taken 
 almost at haphazard from the Windham letter : 
 
 His religion is not founded on the love of virtue and the 
 detestation of vice, on a sense of that obedience which is due to the 
 
 1 The chief exception usually made is Mr. Gladstone. Of this oratorical 
 style another example is " Junius." His exaggeration of it brought him most 
 of his undeserved praise ; and it has doubtless been a main cause of his well- 
 deserved oblivion. 
 
 2 I do not blush to confess that my own copy of his complete Works 
 (8 vols., London, 1809) is largely uncut. I had read him before I bought 
 it ; and I have only cared to read him again in parts. 
 
 S
 
 258 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 will of the Supreme Being, 1 and a sense of the obligations which 
 creatures formed to live in a mutual dependence on one another lie 
 under. The spring of his whole conduct is fear : fear of the 
 horns of the Devil and of the flames of Hell. He has been taught 
 to believe that nothing but a blind submission to the Church of 
 Rome, and a strict adherence to all the terms of that communion, 
 can save him from these dangers. He has all the superstition of a 
 Capuchin ; but I found on him no tincture of the religion of a prince. 
 Do not imagine that I loose the reins of my imagination, or that I 
 write what my resentments dictate : I tell you simply my opinion. I 
 have heard the same description of his character made by those who 
 know him best ; and I conversed with very few among the Roman 
 Catholics themselves who did not think him too much a Papist. 
 
 Now I certainly am not bribed by any agreement 
 with the animus of this character of "James III.," inas- 
 much as I am a Tory of Tories now, and should have 
 been a Jacobite of Jacobites then. But how artistepient 
 complet it is in its combination of the finish and fineness 
 of the rapier with the smashing effect of the bludgeon ! 
 the mixture of short and long sentences ; the scaffolding 2 
 of the longer ones ; the unerring, yet unmechanical, 
 use of balance, cumulation, parallelism ! The little 
 
 sentence coming after a long one " The spring of | his 
 
 whole conduct | is fear ' amphibrach, antispast or third 
 paeon, and iamb, with the emphasised and contemptuous 
 
 "fear" making almost another amphibrach (is fee-ar) is 
 like the advance and retreat, to gain momentum and final 
 impetus, of a battering-ram. And the whole run of the 
 various sentences shows equal mastery. It is unnecessary 
 to multiply instances ; but this has only the advantage 
 over hundreds that might be given of that personal 
 animus, fair or unfair, which gives so much life to speech 
 and style. 
 
 It is, of course, improbable that many if indeed it be 
 possible that any careful readers should miss the 
 oratorical tone which, even in this comparatively familiar 
 
 1 " Que tu m'emt&es avec ton Etre supreme!" And, indeed, he was 
 almost the father of all such as use that abstraction or evasion. 
 
 2 I had used the word without thinking of its double meaning, but the 
 passage is almost a spiritual guillotine for the poor Chevalier.
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 259 
 
 passage, Bolingbroke suggests, and which, in his more 
 rhetorical writings, is still more prominent. I shall 
 endeavour, in the Interchapter, to show more minutely 
 what rhythmical characteristics this oratorical tone carries 
 with it ; but it will hardly be contested that in various 
 forms, from the conversational to the conciliatory, whether 
 the latter be of the concio ad vulgus or of the concio ad 
 clerum> it pervades the whole century from Addison to 
 Mackintosh. This necessarily impresses a considerable 
 sameness upon the results, and dispenses the historian 
 from giving very numerous examples of them. There 
 are indeed whole classes of authors, distinguished, and 
 even highly distinguished, in other ways, who, for reasons 
 which may be shortly presented, hardly come in here at 
 all. The most important of these are the letter-writers 
 and the novelists. 
 
 It is evident that the epistoler steps out of his proper Letter-writers 
 course, and is deliberately aiming at publication, if he ^^shortiy 
 puts into his letters anything but the movement of un- dealt with, 
 affected conversation. Gray may do it, because he has a 
 certain ineradicable artificiality ; * just as, long afterwards, 
 Shelley may, because his soul is a harmony and its utter- 
 ances cannot but be harmonious. Lady Mary has a 
 good deal of the formal, balanced, semi-oratorical cadence 
 of the time ; but this chiefly appears in her earliest letters, 
 where the Master of Peterhouse is doubtless right in 
 setting it down to "juvenile affectation," or in her very 
 latest, which have been sometimes suspected of " literary " 
 contamination. Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, though 
 the intention of the first was certainly didactic, and the 
 mood of the second was never quite free from pose, no 
 more aim at " fine writing " in our sense than does 
 Cowper. 
 
 On the other hand, the novelist, in parts of his work at 
 any rate, is perfectly at liberty to indulge in the most 
 elaborate prose ; arid we shall or should be able to draw 
 striking examples of it from the great novelists of the 
 
 1 I use the word in no bad sense ; and any one, if he likes, may substitute 
 " classicality " or whatever complimentary synonym pleases him.
 
 260 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 mid-nineteenth century. But their forerunners at this 
 time had quite enough to do to use the new familiar style 
 which had been provided for them by Dryden, Addison, 
 and Swift, to think of fioriture or flamboyance. Fielding, 
 indeed, in the ironical and other parabases which diversify 
 his work, writes somewhat ambitiously, but hardly attempts 
 any rhythmical device save a generally oratorical balance ; 
 Richardson is too clumsy ; Smollett, where he affects 
 ceremony, is as the other formal scribes of his time ; and 
 Sterne's deliberate and constant use of mechanical means, 
 to enforce such emphasis as he aims at, puts him practi- 
 cally out of court with us. Goldsmith's much and justly 
 praised quality of style depends in no respect upon 
 elaborate rhythmical cadence. 
 
 It will therefore probably be best to content ourselves 
 with taking Conyers Middleton' as an example of the earlier 
 Augustan or post-Augustan style, handled not as Berkeley 
 handled it ; glancing next at Hume and Robertson and 
 " Junius," and taking something more than a glance at 
 Adam Smith; dealing more thoroughly with the three great 
 agents in raising this style Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon, 
 and finally exemplifying the " standard Georgian " style 
 of the latest eighteenth and the earlier nineteenth century. 
 Conyers We have, of course, nothing to do with the question 
 
 Middleton. of c onyers Middleton's honesty or orthodoxy indeed it 
 has become so common for Canons, Professors, Deans (if 
 not also Bishops) to take, as De Quincey, when it was 
 not so common, said, " large quarterly cheques from an 
 institution of which they have become enemies," that, on 
 the method of compurgation, he would probably be 
 acquitted. Nor have we much, though a little, more to 
 do with his general style. That Parr, who attacked his 
 plagiarisms so fiercely, should have put him next to 
 Addison as a writer, goes for very little. Parr's claims as 
 a literary critic, at least in English, are non-existent ; 
 and, being quite as acrid and quite as unscrupulous a 
 controversialist as Middleton himself, he doubtless knew 
 the value of throwing up a general attack by a particular 
 acknowledgment. On the other hand, De Quincey,
 
 vni AUGUSTAN PROSE 261 
 
 Middleton's chief later assailant, had both general and 
 particular prejudices against his form as well as his 
 matter. 
 
 For myself, though I am quite " on the other side of 
 the way " to him in matters theological, I am by no 
 means sure that Middleton was a scoundrel ; and though 
 I could not put him in the same class (even if he were at 
 the bottom and the other at the top) with Addison, I do 
 not think he was a bad writer. But from our special 
 point of view he certainly shows the dangers of Augustan 
 " plainness," and explains those various efforts to raise it to 
 which we shall soon come. 
 
 Here are two passages from Middleton which show 
 him, the first I think as nearly as possible at his best 
 from our point of view ; the second, if not at his worst 
 (for it would hardly be fair to sift out such a thing), very 
 decidedly not at his best, but (as I can say from a 
 sufficient study of his whole works) by no means much, 
 if at all, below his average : 
 
 This is commonly called the first triumvirate ; which was nothing 
 else, in reality, but a traitorous conspiracy of three the most 
 
 powerful citizens of Rome, | to extort | from their country, | by 
 
 violence, | what they could not | obtain | by law. | Pompey's chief 
 motive was to get his acts confirmed by Caesar in his consulship ; 
 Caesar's, by giving way to Pompey's glory, to advance his own ; and 
 Crassus's, to gain that ascendant, which he could not sustain alone, 
 by the authority of Pompey and the vigour of Caesar. But Caesar, 
 who formed the scheme, easily saw that the chief advantage of it 
 would necessarily redound to himself: he knew that the old enmity 
 between the other two, though it might be palliated, could never be 
 healed without leaving a secret jealousy between them ; and as, by 
 their common help, he was sure to make himself superior to all 
 others, so, by managing the one against the other, he hoped to gain, 
 at last, a superiority also over them both. To cement this union 
 therefore the more strongly, by the ties of blood as well as interest, 
 he gave his daughter Julia, a beautiful and accomplished young 
 lady, in marriage to Pompey ; and, from this era, all the Roman 
 writers date the origin of the civil wars which afterwards ensued, 
 and the subversion of the Republic, in which they ended. 
 
 If the religion of a country was to be considered only as an 
 imposture ; an engine of government to keep the people in order ;
 
 262 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 even then an endeavour to unhinge it, unless with a design to 
 substitute a better in its stead, would in my opinion be highly 
 unreasonable. But should the priests of such a religion, for the 
 sake of their authority and power, labour to impose their own 
 failures for divine truths ; to possess the people with an enthusiastic 
 zeal for them, manageable only by themselves and to be played 
 even against the government, as oft as it served their separate 
 interests ; in such a case, 'tis the duty of every man who loves his 
 country and his fellow-creatures, to oppose all such attempts ; to 
 confine religion to its proper bounds ; to the use for which it was 
 instituted ; of inspiring benevolence, modesty, submission into the 
 people ; nor suffer the credit of it to grow too strong for that of the 
 State ; the authority of the priest, for that of the magistrate. 
 
 Here there is no positive fault to find with No. i ; on 
 the contrary, it gives us a pretty good notion what made 
 people admire Middleton. It is a very fair example of 
 the clear, business-like style ; it is even not inharmonious 
 in the balanced mode. 1 But it does little if anything 
 more than escape zircharmony : harmony in any distinct 
 and delightful sense it cannot be said to possess. No. 2, 
 on the other hand, begins in much the same way, but, in 
 the second sentence, goes from not bad to very decided 
 badness and inharmoniousness. It is too long ; the 
 members of it are badly adjusted ; the combination of 
 " manageable," which itself would be manageable enough 
 in Latin, gives a jolt in sense and a jar in sound to the 
 English ; and the subsequent clauses are ill-jointed, ill- 
 interproportioned, and productive, as a whole, of no 
 rhythmical effect. 
 
 At such an effect, indeed, it is pretty certain that 
 Middleton did not aim, or dream of aiming, and it would 
 be absurd to subject his productions to any process of 
 rhythmical analysis. If he has not actually attained the 
 " flatness and meanness " of the Photian warning, he has 
 gone very near it, except in such a piece as the Letter to 
 Venn, where interested controversy excites him up to, but 
 not beyond, a tone of dignity. 
 
 This, not exactly cacorrhythmic but, arrhythmic char- 
 acter affects almost all the prose of the first half of the 
 eighteenth century, except where, as we have seen in 
 
 1 See the scanned portion.
 
 viii AUGUSTAN PROSE 263 
 
 Bolingbroke, the oratorical cadence manifests itself emi- 
 nently, or where, as in the last-mentioned work of Middleton, 
 the thrust and parry of controversy and personal feeling 
 infuses a rhythm of its own. It is visible in the very 
 remarkable learnt English of Hume and Robertson, in the 
 pinchbeck of " Junius," in such vigorous and really idiom- 
 atic stuff as the writing of William Law, in the sinewy 
 but graceless, if not exactly ungraceful, logic of Butler. 
 
 But the inevitable law of ups-and-downs, which no- Efforts at 
 where works more regularly than here, decreed the rise of vanety ' 
 dissatisfaction with this drabness of colour and monotony 
 of sound. It was too early to go back to gorgeous 
 phraseology and intricate symphonic effects. But the 
 unfailing engine of balance, which all the writers mentioned 
 applied more or less freely, and all others, but the lowest, 
 to some extent, could be set to work more and more 
 elaborately, and it was. A third writer of the Scotch 
 school (let it be remembered that we have not merely 
 probability but positive evidence to establish the fact of 
 their deliberately writing English as a half -foreign 
 language), Adam Smith, exhibits the tendency, combined 
 with that of step-arrangement, almost before he could 
 have learnt anything from his enemy, Johnson, as here, 
 where I have taken the liberty to carve the paragraph 
 into its constituent rhythmical members. 
 
 The violator of the more sacred laws of justice can never reflect Adam Smith, 
 on the sentiments which mankind must entertain with regard to him, 
 without feeling all the agonies of shame and horror and consterna- 
 tion. When his passion is gratified, and he begins coolly to reflect 
 on his past conduct, he can enter into none of the motives which 
 influenced it. They appear now as detestable to him as they did 
 always to other people. By sympathising with the hatred and 
 abhorrence which other men must entertain for him, he becomes in 
 some measure the object of his own hatred and abhorrence. The 
 situation of the person, who suffered by his injustice, now calls upon 
 his pity. He is grieved at the thought of it, regrets the unhappy 
 effects of his own conduct, and feels at the same time that they have 
 rendered him the proper object of the resentment and indignation of 
 mankind, and of what is the natural consequence of resentment, 
 vengeance and punishment. The thought of this perpetually haunts 
 him, and fills him with terror and amazement. He dares no longer 
 look society in the face, but imagines himself, as it were, rejected,
 
 264 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 and thrown out from the affections of all mankind. He cannot hope 
 for the consolation of sympathy in this his greatest and most dreadful 
 distress. The remembrance of his crimes has shut out all fellow- 
 feeling with him from the hearts of his fellow -creatures. The 
 sentiments which they entertain with regard to him are the very 
 thing which he is most afraid of. Everything seems hostile, and 
 he would be glad to fly to some inhospitable desert, where he might 
 never more behold the face of a human creature, nor read in the 
 countenance of mankind the condemnation of his crimes. But 
 solitude is still more dreadful than society. His own thoughts can 
 present him with nothing but what is black, unfortunate, and 
 disastrous, the melancholy foreboding of incomprehensible misery 
 and ruin. The horror of solitude drives him back into society, and 
 he comes again into the presence of mankind, astonished to appear 
 before them, loaded with shame and distracted with fear, in order to 
 supplicate some little protection from the countenance of those very 
 judges who he knows have already all unanimously condemned him. 
 Such is the nature of that sentiment which is properly called remorse ; 
 of all the sentiments which can enter the human breast the < most 
 dreadful. It is made up of shame from the sense of the impropriety 
 of past conduct ; of grief for the effects of it ; of pity for those who 
 suffer by it ; and of the dread and terror of punishment from the 
 consciousness of the justly provoked resentment of all rational 
 creatures. 
 
 The violator of the more sacred laws of justice can never reflect 
 
 on the sentiments which mankind must entertain with regard to him, 
 
 without feeling all the agonies of shame and horror and consternation. 
 
 When his passion is gratified, 
 
 and he begins coolly to reflect on his past conduct, 
 
 he can enter into none of the motives which influenced it. 
 
 They appear now as detestable to him 
 
 as they did always to other people. 
 
 By sympathising with the hatred and abhorrence 
 
 which other men must entertain for him, 
 
 he becomes in some measure the object 
 
 of his own hatred and abhorrence. 
 
 The situation of the person, 
 
 who suffered by his injustice, 
 
 now calls upon his pity. 
 
 He is grieved at the thought of it, 
 
 regrets the unhappy effects of his own conduct, 
 
 and feels at the same time that they have rendered him the proper 
 object of the resentment and indignation of mankind, and of 
 what is the natural consequence of resentment, vengeance and 
 punishment. 
 
 The thought of this perpetually haunts him, 
 
 and fills him with terror and amazement. 
 
 He dares no longer look society in the face,
 
 via AUGUSTAN PROSE 265 
 
 but imagines himself, as it were, rejected, and thrown out from the 
 
 affections of all mankind. 
 
 He cannot hope for the consolation of sympathy 
 in this his greatest and most dreadful distress. 
 The remembrance of his crimes has shut out 
 all fellow-feeling with him from the hearts of his fellow-creatures. 
 The sentiments which they entertain with regard to him 
 are the very thing which he is most afraid of. 
 Everything seems hostile, 
 
 and he would be glad to fly to some inhospitable desert, 
 where he might never more behold the face of a human creature, 
 nor read in the countenance of mankind the condemnation of his 
 
 crimes. 
 
 But solitude is still more dreadful than society. 
 His own thoughts can present him with nothing 
 but what is black, unfortunate, and disastrous, 
 the melancholy foreboding of incomprehensible misery and ruin. 
 The horror of solitude drives kim back into society ', 
 and he comes again into the presence of mankind, 
 astonished to appear before them, 
 loaded with shame 
 and distracted with fear, 
 in order to supplicate some little protection from the countenance of 
 
 those very judges who he knows have already all unanimously 
 
 condemned him. 
 
 Such is the nature of that sentiment, 
 which is properly called remorse ; of all the sentiments which can 
 
 enter the human breast 
 the most dreadful. It is made up 
 
 of shame from the sense of the impropriety of past conduct ; 
 of grief for the effects of it ; 
 of pity for those who suffer by it ; 
 and of the dread and terror of punishment from the consciousness of 
 
 the justly provoked resentment of all rational creatures. 
 
 This 1 is comparatively simple in its swing backwards 
 and forwards, and its architecture of extended clauses ; 
 while the two italicised phrases especially show the 
 novice. Johnson would almost certainly have made the 
 second run " The horror of solitude drives him back into 
 the shelter of society," or something of that sort But 
 more of that when we come to the Great Cham himself. 
 
 Before doing so, it may be well to call a halt for some 
 
 1 Of course, a similar process may be applied not merely to Hooker or 
 Bacon, but even to Taylor or Browne ; but to nothing like the same extent, and 
 with a vast deal left unaccounted for, and corresponding to nothing here. It 
 is folding against fluency.
 
 266 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 interim general observations, which may be expanded in the 
 
 on S< this ti0nS Interchapter, but cannot be wholly pretermitted here. 
 
 prose. It may already have suggested itself to an observant 
 
 reader that, independently of a tendency to impoverish 
 rhythm, or rather in pretty close dependence on such 
 impoverishment, a remarkable difference in kind of 
 rhythmical arrangement manifests itself. Foot-scansion 
 is still applicable in fact, as should have been sufficiently 
 shown by this time, it is as impossible for prose as for 
 poetry to get out of it. But at the very moment when 
 the quality of the individual foot was assuming a 
 tyrannous importance of uniformity in verse, it was 
 almost disappearing in prose. Except at the end of 
 clauses and sentences (to which point accordingly Hurd 
 (v. sup.\ all unknowing of the general law, but observing it, 
 devoted his chief attention), the constitution of the feet 
 produces very little effect, and for the most part is only 
 technically noticeable. 1 The balance of blocks of feet, 
 which corresponds in prose to the variety and symphonic 
 interweaving of lines in verse, only requires consideration 
 of the blocks themselves, and indeed might be rather 
 endangered by anything else. The architecture, to 
 change the analogy, is not exactly " Cyclopean," because 
 the blocks of which it consists are in some cases fair and 
 square ashlar ; but they are of great size, and the orna- 
 ment consists almost solely in their overlapping and 
 arrangement, not in any carving or arcading. 
 
 Attempts to It was therefore in the direction of minuter and more 
 complicated attention to details of arrangement that 
 attempts at improvement were likely to be first made ; 
 and this in accordance with the general tendency of the 
 century till nearly its close, when the reaction in all ways 
 was all the more violent took place, not by way of 
 revolt against the general arrangement, but by way of 
 supplement and embellishment of these details. 
 
 Into the more general controversies about Johnson's 
 style there is little need for us to enter. It was, of course, 
 
 1 To which it may be added that the "extended feet," or groups of six or 
 even more syllables, suggest themselves more than ever.
 
 via AUGUSTAN PROSE 267 
 
 extravagantly caricatured and unjustly depreciated by Johnson . 
 the earlier Romantics ; and scanty justice was done to it v^ 
 even by a person so very unlike a Romantic as Macaulay. ing him. 
 On the other hand, some recent authorities of great 
 competence have reverted to even more than the admira- 
 tion of contemporaries ; and my friend Sir Henry Craik 
 thinks that the great doctor " set a standard of prose style 
 that might establish its own laws beyond all gainsaying " 
 that, if I do not misunderstand him, Johnson set " a model 
 for all time." One may dissent as strongly as possible 
 from the first set of views without quite going to the 
 furthest length of the second. I should myself say that 
 if any one man ever set a model for all time in English 
 prose it was Dryden ; that while Swift in one way and 
 Addison in another had lengthened and varied the 
 Drydenian model, their contemporaries and successors 
 had mainly derogated from it ; and that it was Johnson's 
 work to restore it, with fresh and striking, if not always 
 quite palmary, variations, and in a manner which could be 
 easily followed. But our business is to show, with especial 
 reference to rhythm, what that manner was. 
 
 Whatever the much -talked -of influence of Browne His relation 
 upon Johnson may have been, it certainly was small to Browne - 
 here. A characteristic sentence of Johnson and a 
 characteristic sentence of Sir Thomas could only be 
 compared, as regards rhythm, by an ear so dull as to be 
 ab initio disqualified. Every now and then the virility of 
 Johnson's natural genius will produce something quite out 
 of his ordinary mannerism, and of all time or of no time 
 at all. But I think it not rash to say that it never takes 
 either Browne's special flow, or any of the special seven- 
 teenth-century cadences. The general principles of John- 
 son's sentence-and-clause architecture, and consequently of 
 his sentence-and-clause rhythmical effect, are simply those 
 which we have traced from Dryden before him to Smith 
 alongside of him parallelism, balance, and occasionally 
 what we have called " step " construction the lengthen- 
 ing and shortening of kola in systematic arrangement, like 
 the sky-line of a certain kind of gable or the section-profile
 
 268 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 of the perron of a house. His main peculiarity this 
 statement has been demurred to by his extreme admirers 
 as grudging, but I think it can be proved to the hilt is 
 parallelism pushed to an extreme, and sometimes beyond all 
 doubt an exaggerated, degree. To exhibit the inwardness 
 of Johnson's handling, as in the two following passages, 
 one really wants, as in some other cases, coloured inks. 
 
 The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or 
 to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them j either 
 to let new light in upon the mind, and open new scenes to the 
 prospect, or to vary the dress and situation of common objects, so as 
 to give them fresh grace and more powerful attractions, to spread 
 such flowers over the regions through which the intellect has already 
 made its progress, as may tempt it to return, and take a second 
 view of things hastily passed over, or negligently regarded. 
 
 Either of these labours is very difficult, because that they may 
 not be fruitless, men must not only be persuaded of their errors, but 
 reconciled to their guide ; they must not only confess their ignorance, 
 but, what is still less pleasing, must allow that he from whom they 
 are to learn is more knowing than themselves. 
 
 It might be imagined that such an employment was in itself 
 sufficiently irksome and hazardous j that none would be found so 
 malevolent as wantonly to add weight to the stone of Sisyphus; and 
 that few endeavours would be used to obstruct those advances to 
 reputation, which must be made at such an expense of time and 
 thought, with so great hazard in the miscarriage, and with so little 
 advantage from the success. 
 
 Yet there is a certain race of men, that either imagine it their 
 duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every 
 work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of 
 fame, and value themselves upon giving ignorance and envy the first 
 notice of a prey. 
 
 Even the acquisition of knowledge is often much facilitated by the 
 advantages of society : he that never compares his notions with those 
 of others, readily acquiesces in his first thoughts, and very seldom 
 discovers the objections which may be raised against his opinions ; 
 he, therefore, often thinks himself in possession of truth, when he 
 is only fondling an error long since exploded. He that Jias neither 
 companions nor rivals in his studies, will always applaud his own 
 progress and think highly of his performances, because he knows 
 not that others have equalled or excelled him. And I am afraid it 
 may be added, that the student who withdraws himself from the 
 world will soon feel that ardour extinguished which praise or 
 emulation had enkindled, and take the advantage of secrecy to sleep, 
 rather than to labour.
 
 viii AUGUSTAN PROSE 269 
 
 Now this mosaic arrangement, necessarily and of itself, 
 creates rhythm ; and this rhythm is as necessarily 
 harmonious to a certain extent. Both the resemblances 
 and the differences produce this necessity, and their multi- 
 plicity and intricacy increase the quality of the rhythm 
 itself. But any one who examines Johnson's composition 
 with sufficient care will discover that whether deliberately 
 and consciously or not, as has been said so often, does 
 not in the least matter he adds immensely, and as none 
 of his forerunners, save perhaps Addison and certainly 
 Berkeley, had done, while these had done it to a much 
 less extent, by varying or repeating, coupling or contrasting, 
 the rhythmical and musical value of the clauses, word- 
 groups, and words paralleled with each other. Compare 
 
 " hastily | passed over " with " negligently | regarded " ; 
 value together " the acquisition of knowledge " | with 
 " the advantages of society " ; juxtapose deftly " errors " 
 and " guide " ; consider the more complicated criss-cross 
 of " hazard in the miscarriage " | and " advantage | from 
 
 the success." 
 
 The result of such study which may be considerably 
 amplified even from these extracts, but which may, of 
 course, be much better supplemented by wider reading of 
 Johnson must surely be clear already. Not merely 
 does Johnson probably aim at, and certainly secure, 
 much more rhythmical character than had been seen for 
 nearly a century ; but he secures it, to a large extent, by 
 recurrence to the manipulation of the individual foot, as 
 well as of the clause or block. This was a great recovery, 
 and it merited the admiration which it received. I may 
 even go so far, in the direction of Sir Henry Craik's 
 encomium, as to say that Johnson did lay down more 
 imitable examples, and so indirectly canons, of the Augustan 
 style than any one had ever done before. 
 
 Nothing could be easier and nothing could be more 
 insufficient than to divide up these passages as we did
 
 270 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 in the case of Smith. The divisions are there so patent 
 to the ear, if not even to the eye, that almost any man 
 could mark them off as fast as he reads the passage. 
 But they are very much more intricate ; and they have 
 not merely general and external, but particular and multi- 
 plied internal, correspondences or contrasts of the most 
 curious kind. 
 
 Thus we have, in the first place and paragraph, the 
 obvious parallelism of the clauses introduced by the 
 repeated " cithers " and " ors." In the second place, but in 
 this same paragraph, we have the telescoping out of these 
 clauses, so that the first " either " clause has six words 
 exclusive of the " either," and the first " or " clause ten ; 
 while the second "either" has sixteen and the second 
 " or " no less than fifty-eight. 1 But this is nothing like 
 all. In the third place, we find parallelism within 
 parallelism. " Teach " corresponds to " recommend " ; 
 " what is not known " to " known truths by his manner of 
 adorning them." " Let in new light upon the mind " sets 
 to " open new scenes to the prospect " in a single main 
 clause itself. Nor does the " laborious orient ivory sphere 
 in sphere " of the arrangement cease yet. " Light " 
 balances itself with " scene," " mind " with " prospect," 
 within this very counterpoise. And so it goes on 
 throughout the parallelism of clause, not seldom ex- 
 panding into triplets, as in the italicised close of the third 
 paragraph. 
 
 But " example " and " imitable," as we wrote above, 
 are two words which inevitably arouse remembrance of 
 the other word that comes between them in the tag. 
 Are we here also to supply vitiis ? 
 
 Characteristics As a matter of fact, " Yes " ; as a matter of necessity, 
 
 Johnsonian " No." The drawbacks in the mould its stiffness, its 
 
 style. monotony, its indifference to the matter put inte it are 
 
 unmistakable and undeniable. From such immediate 
 
 followers as Hawkesworth to the almost inimitable 
 
 1 It has been suggested to me that the comparison would be strengthened 
 by giving the number of syllables in each clause. It is six, fifteen, eighteen, 
 eighty-three.
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 271 
 
 caricatures provided by Sydney Smith on Mackintosh, 1 
 by that respectable defender of the French Revolution 
 himself, almost beyond caricature, and by Miss Ferrier in 
 a short and charming passage, 2 the fact is proved beyond 
 all contradiction. But clearly this is no fault of Johnson's. 
 He did not write nonsense, either unintentionally or in 
 caricature. Whether it is not the fault of the style is a 
 subtler question, and perhaps it can only be answered by 
 a sort of admission that all hard-and-fast quasi-mechanical 
 forms of style are open to this drawback. The bottle 
 cannot help its contents, and the stronger and more rigid 
 its form is the more patient it is of bad wine. The 
 scaffolding or skeleton cannot help what you choose to 
 accumulate upon it or by its means. 
 
 But take the other side, and the justice, up to a certain 
 point, of Sir Henry Craik's view is attested from our own 
 position. Up to this time there had been hardly any- 
 thing to guide the rash neophyte in English prose. The 
 triplets and initial inversions of Fisher and his school, 
 the rudimentary balance of Ascham in one way and Lyly 
 in another, were rudimentary merely. The swallow- 
 sweeps of Hooker, and much more the half-amorphous 
 magnificence of the great seventeenth-century men, were 
 scarcely, or not at all, imitable. That memorable phrase 
 of Balzac's to his sister, Sans genie je suis flambe ("It is 
 all up with me if I have not genius "), might be written 
 over them all. So was it, in a different way, and after 
 the great change of style, with Dryden and Addison, 
 though not quite to the same extent perhaps with Swift. 
 But Swift's style is only applicable to a few purposes, 
 perhaps only to one that of satirical exposition and 
 comment. Arbuthnot is a first-class Swift, and Cobbett 
 a lower-class one ; I imagine that George Warrington 
 wrote like Swift, and I know that Henry Duff Traill did. 
 
 1 Too long to quote, but too delightful not to be more fully indicated. 
 It may be found very conveniently extracted by Mr. Bonar in Sir H. Craik's 
 English Prose, iv. 589, 590. 
 
 2 " 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." The Inheritance, vol. i. pp. 49, 50 
 (London, 1882).
 
 272 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Thackeray (in falsetto) could write like Addison, but 
 nobody else even in that. And who has ever written, 
 except " by and large," like Dryden ? 
 
 It would not be merely unfair, it would be untrue, to 
 say that Johnson made prose, as Pope is said to have 
 made poetry, " a mere mechanic art." The finer resources 
 of his composition, pointed out above, are by no means 
 mechanical, and it was not his fault if his imitators 
 neglected them or could not reach them. But he un- 
 doubtedly did provide something approaching to mechanism 
 something like " plant," that, used with reasonable care, 
 would turn out a pretty certain and a rather uniform 
 result. Still, this result, in his own case, has qualities 
 including that just mentioned, but going beyond it 
 which are very far from mechanical dignity, if not 
 magnificence ; decent architectural scheme of proportion 
 and even ornamentation instead of the examples of drab 
 stucco provided by writers like Middleton ; decorous 
 language instead of vulgarity and colloquialism ; a clear 
 grammar ; a vocabulary sometimes, though not so much as 
 used to be thought, over-Latinised, and constantly injured 
 by the great vice of the century in prose and verse alike 
 unnecessary and therefore sometimes ludicrous or 
 disgusting periphrasis but, on the whole, useful and 
 effective ; and seldom, if ever (what it has most unjustly 
 been accused of being), tautologous. Above all, he may 
 be said to have restored the consideration of rhythm to 
 an important place in the conditions of English com- 
 position. His rhythm may be too monotonous in principle 
 (it can hardly be said to be so in practice), and it certainly 
 never, or but occasionally and accidentally, attains the 
 more magical graces in kind never by any accident the 
 more elaborate in degree. But it is there ; and it is even 
 secured and guaranteed, as it had never been before, by 
 the mechanical devices adopted. 
 Burke : his This, partly at least, mechanical character makes the 
 style of the first and, in a way, greatest member of the 
 second group of Demiurges in this construction of 
 standard English style easy enough to analyse ; that of
 
 vni AUGUSTAN PROSE 273 
 
 the second member is more difficult. Although the 
 superiority of Burke read to Burke heard is one of those 
 things that it is hardly lawful to mention because of 
 their hackneyedness, yet just as it is well to remember 
 that Shakespeare was, after all, a dramatist, it is also 
 well to remember that Burke was, before all, an orator. 
 His lexis may have been altogether superior to his hypo- 
 crisis ; but it is quite certain that he always wrote and 
 thought as a speaker. The Thoughts on a Regicide Peace 
 and the Letter to a Noble Lord are practically as con- 
 cionatory as any of the actual speeches and more 
 effectively so. The greatest passages of the Present 
 Discontents and the French Revolution are oratory pure 
 and simple. Moreover, it is another constat that Burke 
 began by the imitation in style, if by the criticism in 
 matter, of Bolingbroke, who was an orator or nothing. 
 Further still, it has been already observed that the whole 
 tendency of style in this century was of the same kind. 
 Even Johnson's, though the complexity of its arrange- 
 ment, and the excessive dignity of its manner, would make 
 it very tedious to hear, and, except for quick intellects, 
 not too easy to follow, is oratorical in principle ; Burke's 
 was so both in principle and in practice. 
 
 Now oratorical rhythm per se (as has been observed His declared 
 almost to satiety, no doubt) is somewhat limited. But method - 
 if the orator allows himself any considerable amount of 
 description, illustration, and the like, his range of rhythm 
 becomes largely extended. Burke is said * to have 
 expressed it as both his principle and his practice that 
 every " purple " passage should contain, not merely a 
 thought, but an image and a sentiment. The style of 
 the eighteenth century had hitherto busied itself much 
 with thought, to a certain extent with a certain kind of 
 sentiment, but hardly at all with imagery ; and the 
 peculiar character both of its thought and of its senti- 
 ment had not lent itself to any great variety or fineness 
 
 1 See De Quincey, Essay on Rhetoric. The remark was made to 
 Dr. Lawrence, of Rolliad notoriety. As for the principle, I think I have 
 seen it formulated earlier than by Burke, but I cannot remember exactly where. 
 
 T
 
 274 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Early 
 examples. 
 
 Middle. 
 
 of rhythmical expression. But imaginative writing, even 
 when the imagination is limited in the Addisonian sense 
 to " images furnished by sight," admits of, and, in fact, 
 demands, an instrument of far more strings, a concert 
 of far more instruments, to express itself; and this was 
 well seen of Burke. His earlier work, indeed, displays 
 \[^\Q o f the good influence. The Vindication, as has 
 been said, is partly a parody, partly a direct imitation, 
 of Bolingbroke. As to the Sublime and Beautiful, that 
 from one side diverting, from another disappointing work, 
 it is almost sufficient to say that Burke, though he actually 
 concludes it with a section on the sources of these qualities 
 " as found in words," says absolutely nothing of their 
 rhythmical arrangement, even in poetry ; but speaks 
 volumes, as to the actual condition of his mind and taste, 
 by preferring Pope's flat paraphrase and " amplification " 
 of Homer's lines on Helen to the exquisite description 
 of Belphcebe in Spenser. 
 
 In what may be called the " middle " work which 
 includes most of the Speeches, and those Thoughts on 
 the Present Discontents, which, as has been said, are 
 practically a long speech, some changes, and even some 
 advances, are visible. Something of the Johnsonian 
 scheme, though with a difference, may be seen in two 
 passages towards the beginning and the end of the 
 Thoughts : 
 
 To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present 
 possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant 
 hopes of the future are the common dispositions of the greatest 
 part of mankind ; indeed the necessary effects of the ignorance and 
 levity of the vulgar. 1 
 
 Of what sort of materials must that man be made how must 
 he be tempered and put together, who can sit whole years in 
 Parliament with five hundred and fifty of his fellow-citizens, amidst 
 the storm of such tempestuous passions, in the sharp conflict of so 
 many wits and tempers and characters, in the agitation of such 
 mighty questions, in the accession of such vast and ponderous 
 
 1 The "ignorance and levity of the vulgar" seem to have made some 
 progress since Burke's time. They have learnt to forget "to lament the 
 past."
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 275 
 
 interests, without seeing any sort of men whose character, conduct, 
 and disposition would lead him to associate himself with them to 
 aid and be aided in any one system of public utility ? 
 
 To complain of the age we live in, 
 to murmur at the present possessors of power, 
 to lament the past, 
 
 to conceive extravagant hopes of the future 
 are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind ; 
 indeed, the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the 
 vulgar. 
 
 Of what sort of materials 
 
 must that man be made 
 
 how must he be tempered and put together, 
 
 who can sit whole years in Parliament 
 
 with five hundred and fifty of his fellow-citizens, 
 
 amidst the storm of such tempestuous passions, 
 
 in the sharp conflict of so many wits and tempers and characters, 
 
 in the agitation of such mighty questions, 
 
 in the accession of such vast and ponderous interests, 
 
 without seeing any sort of men 
 
 whose character, conduct, and disposition would lead him to associate 
 
 himself with them 
 to aid and be aided in any one system of public utility ? 
 
 Here, as the typographical disposition will have shown 
 at once, there is rhythm, but rhythm attained almost 
 solely by the parallelism of the members, and the difference 
 of their length and terminations. 
 
 He manages, however, to get a little more out of the 
 following definite picture (though it is curious to think 
 how much more still might have been got out of that 
 gorge of the Avon, of which good judges have very truly 
 said that if it were anywhere but in England it would 
 be one of the sights of the world) : 
 
 As for the trifling petulance which the rage of party stirs up in 
 little minds, though it should show itself even in this court, it has 
 not made the slightest impression on me. The highest flight of 
 such clamorous birds is winged in an inferior region of the air. We 
 hear them, and we look upon them, just as you, gentlemen, when 
 you enjoy the serene air on your lofty rocks, look down upon the 
 gulls that skim the mud of your river when it is exhausted of its tide. 
 
 This has not a little merit, though both the rocks
 
 276 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP- 
 
 and the gulls might have their attributes amplified and 
 cadenced further with no small profit. 
 
 Later. But it was not till the last glorious decade of Burke's 
 
 life when he at last gave up to mankind what had too 
 frequently before been restricted to party, and showed 
 himself the Apollo of the loathsome reptiles, the St. 
 Michael of the hideous fiends who were uncivilising 
 Europe that he attained the full majesty of his style. 
 There is no need to seek for instances ; the two most 
 famous and best known passages have never, at least to 
 my knowledge, been analysed from this special point of 
 view before, and will " amply repay the expense " of 
 such analysis here. 
 
 Examples and It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of 
 
 comments. France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles ; and surely never lighted 
 
 on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful 
 
 vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering 
 
 the elevated sphere she just began to move in ; glittering | like the 
 
 morning | star, | full of life, | and splendour, | and joy. Oh! what a 
 revolution ! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without 
 emotion that elevation and that fall ! Little did I dream when 
 she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, 
 respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp 
 
 antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom ; little | did I 
 dream | that I should have lived | to see such | disasters [ fallen | 
 upon her | in a nation | of gallant | men, | in a nation | of men of 
 
 honour | and of cavaliers. | I thought ten thousand swords must 
 have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that 
 
 threatened her with insult. But the age | of chivalry | is gone. 
 That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded ; and 
 the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, 
 shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud 
 submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, 
 which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted 
 freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, 
 the nurse of manly sentiments and heroic enterprise is gone ! It is 
 gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt 
 a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated 
 ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice 
 itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 277 
 
 How often has this passage been laughed at ! and 
 how easy it is to laugh at it ! I am not talking of those 
 who follow the smug respectability of Mackintosh in 
 taking briefs from Mr. Attorney Hubert and Mr. Solicitor 
 Chaumette as to Marie Antoinette's character. But it is 
 a passage undoubtedly sentimental ; and you can make 
 fun of sentiment as easily as you can trample flowers in 
 mud. Yet if any one can regard it impartially, and (as 
 he must be able to do if he has any critical faculty at all) 
 forget jokes about " the cheap defence of nations " and so 
 forth, he will be puzzled to find in English, for more than 
 a century before it, a more beautiful passage merely as 
 harmonious phrase. The rhythm is still generally of the 
 kind we have been discussing stepped and paralleled 
 and balanced. Except in these ways, the author's chief 
 device of variation and harmonic contrast is connected (as 
 we have seen had become usual since Addison) with 
 
 the ends of the clauses and sentences " years " and " at 
 
 ~ - _ _ -u~ 
 
 Versailles " ; " orb," " touch," but then " vision " ; the 
 
 descents of the two next sentences to the contrasted 
 
 monosyllables of " joy " and " fall " ; and so throughout. 1 
 But, in its own way, in the juxtaposition of long sentences 
 and short ; of rising and falling clauses ; even, a new 
 thing to be thought of, or rather an old one revived, in the 
 vowel-sound of the paralleled word-groups "that senstbilt'ty 
 of prznczple," " that chastity of honour," the thing is a 
 masterpiece a little in bravura perhaps to those who, 
 while doing its form justice, do not sympathise with its 
 matter, but certainly something much above bravura to 
 those who do. 
 
 Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial 
 institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful 
 instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, 
 we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from 
 considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always 
 
 1 Not, however, wholly. The scansion given of portions might have been 
 carried throughout with no violence and some advantage. But the rhythm is 
 still, largely if not mainly, a rhythm of sections.
 
 278 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of 
 freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an 
 awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a 
 sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence 
 almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first 
 acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a 
 noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a 
 
 pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has | its bearings | and its 
 
 ensigns | armorial. It has its galleries of portraits ; its monumental 
 inscriptions ; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure 
 reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature 
 teaches us to revere individual men ; on account of their age ; and 
 on account of those from whom they are descended. All your 
 sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a 
 rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, 
 who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts 
 rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines 
 of our rights and privileges. 
 
 The substance of this extract requires and receives a 
 setting on a graver and quieter motive. It has some 
 familiar rhetorical devices, such as the abundance of 
 epanaphora or repetition of the same initial words, " It 
 has," etc. Its long sentences shorten in the central group, 
 and then swell out towards the end in an equally 
 ceremonial fashion. Nowhere, perhaps, is the trick of 
 expanding parallel clauses more admirably applicable than 
 in those of the last sentence, and in one point the inver- 
 sion and the splendid vowel-music of " ensigns armorial " 
 we see revived the grandest manner of the seventeenth 
 century itself. 
 
 But the passage on which Burke is said to have most 
 specially prided himself is the great utilising, in the 
 Letter to the Duke of Bedford, of the scenery, the history, 
 and the lesson of Windsor Castle : 
 
 Such | are their | ideas ; | such their | religion, | a"hd such | 
 their | law. | But as | to our country | and our race, | as long as | 
 the well-compacted | structure | of our church | and state, | the 
 sanctuary, | the holy | of holies | of that ancient law, | defended | by 
 reverence, | defended | by power, a fortress | at once | and a temple, |
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 279 
 
 shall stand | inviolate | on the brow | of the British | Sion | as 
 long | as the British | monarchy, | not more limited | than fenced | 
 by the orders | of the state, | shall, | like the proud | Keep | of 
 Windsor, | rising | in the majesty | of proportion, | and girt | with 
 the double | belt | of its kindred | and coeval | towers, | as long as | 
 this awful | structure | shall oversee | and guard | the subjected 
 land | so long | the mounds | and dykes | of the low | fat | 
 Bedford | level | will have nothing | to fear | from all | the pickaxes | 
 of all j the levellers | of France. | As long as | our sovereign | 
 Lord | the King, | and his faithful | subjects, | the Lords | and 
 Commons | of this realm, | the triple | cord, | which no man | can 
 break ; | the solemn, | sworn | constitutional | frank-pledge | of this 
 nation ; | the firm | guarantees | of each other's | being | and each 
 other's | rights ; | the joint | and several | securities, | each | in its 
 place | and order, | for every | kind | and every | quality | of 
 property | and of dignity ; | as long as | these | endure, | so long | 
 the Duke | of Bedford | is safe : | and we are all | safe | together 
 the high | from the blights | of envy | and the spoliations | of 
 rapacity ; | the low | from the iron | hand | of oppression | and the 
 insolent | spurn | of contempt. 1 
 
 It would take pages to bring out even the most strictly 
 rhythmical characteristics of this wonderful tour de force ; 
 for there is hardly a word, save the merest particles, which 
 does not contribute to the effect. The antithetic emphasis 
 of " their " and " our " ; the arrangement of " ideas," 
 " religion," and " law " ; the climax of the clause from 
 " But as " to " Sion," and the parallel description of 
 
 1 The quotation-<r0<fiz in the original is rhetorically separable, and there are 
 reasons at the present moment for separating and presenting it only in a 
 note. May it soon be restored to the text ! 
 
 " Amen ! and so be it : and so it will be, 
 
 Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum 
 Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."
 
 280 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Windsor itself ; the splendour of the " kindred and coeval 
 towers " ; the touch of the xenon the strange arresting 
 word in " frank -pledge "; the ironic drawl of "the 
 low | fat | Bedford | level"; the ordered processional and 
 recessional of cadences to the close all this cannot be 
 beaten in the style. You may like some other style 
 better if you please : I myself prefer several others. But 
 if you do not like this, if you do not see the mastery and 
 the beauty of this, there is a blind facet to your eye for 
 style, a deaf spot in the drum of your ear for rhythm. 
 
 Even if the gossip about this passage were only gossip, 
 there could be no doubt that the man who wrote it was 
 deliberately aiming at the Longinian " Sublime " at a 
 " height of eloquence " which should be far above, and 
 widely separated from, any mere " naked, natural way 
 of speaking," or any conversational norm, even convention- 
 ally clothed beyond the naked and raised above the natural. 
 It is, of course, open to that vague and vernacular charge 
 of being " stilted," which is the usual refuge of the Philistine 
 in self-defence. It is open likewise to a subtler objection, 
 one less easy also to ignore, that its method has some- 
 thing of Rhetoric, if not in the bad sense, at any rate in 
 that which her biographer and exponent, Martianus, 
 somewhat slily touched when he said that " she can do 
 nothing quietly" We may go even further and admit 
 that it evades, rather than definitely discards, the fault of 
 all eighteenth -century style, that of being too sharply 
 divided into blocks. Burke might "wind into a subject 
 like a serpent," as far as his argumentative and expository 
 manner was concerned ; but he certainly did not serpen- 
 tine so much as echelon his form. The noiseless, foamless, 
 irresistible tide of words in which Browne is the greatest 
 magician, and which some nineteenth-century writers have 
 mastered not ill, is not for Burke. But the modes of 
 majesty are many, and he has displayed more than one. 
 Above all, he has shown (and his great reputation and 
 influence made the exhibition operative in almost the 
 highest degree) that majesty is compatible with clear- 
 ness, with order, and with an abstinence from any
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 281 
 
 excessive indulgence in unusual or unfamiliar words. 
 The style and the rhythm of Burke are still " classical," 
 but they employ all the ornament that a classical style 
 admits. 
 
 Although some recent attempts to depreciate Coleridge 
 as a critic are merely negligible, everybody knows, or 
 should know, that his genius occasionally indulged itself 
 in the most uncritical utterances possible. And of these 
 the observation that " Gibbon's manner is the worst of all " 
 ranks pretty high, or low, according to calculus. In fact, 
 the earlier Romantics, though they found less fault with 
 Burke than with Gibbon himself or with Johnson, very 
 naturally did not like any one of the three great beauti- 
 fiers of the Augustan style much. We have none of their 
 causes of prejudice, and we ought to be able to see the 
 merits of both orders. 
 
 Those of Gibbon, from our present point of view, are Gibbon : his 
 certainly extraordinary. As a constant master of prose ** 
 rhythm he seems to me the superior both of Johnson and 
 of Burke ; and he is certainly less open to the charge of 
 visible skeleton-clock mechanism than the one, or to the 
 reproach of calculated purple patches than the other. 
 The only valid objection that I know against his harmony 
 is that it is monotonous ; and I am by no means sure 
 that this is not very much a matter of taste. Once more, 
 one would not like all literature to be Gibbon ; but one 
 may be very well satisfied with that part of literature 
 which is. Moreover, if it is a merit that a writer's sources 
 of rhythm should not be too easily perceptible, Gibbon 
 may certainly claim it. I have admired and enjoyed his 
 style for at least half a century, and I have more than 
 once or twice endeavoured to give critical account of it ; 
 but its secret, though perfectly easy to feel, is very diffi- 
 cult to describe precisely. Take two passages, one from 
 the Decline and Fall, the other from the Memoirs : x 
 
 1 I know, of course, that the textus receptus of the Memoirs is apparently 
 a " made-up " one. But if so, Lord Sheffield must have been an exceedingly 
 clever maker-up, and I wish all editors who pursue the doubtful art of text- 
 making had possessed his skill.
 
 282 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 The protection of the Rhastian frontier and the persecution of 
 the Catholic church detained Constantius in Italy above eighteen 
 months after the departure of Julian. Before the emperor returned 
 into the East, he indulged his pride and curiosity in a visit to the 
 ancient capital. He proceeded from Milan to Rome along the 
 ^Emilian and Flaminian ways ; and, as soon as he approached 
 within forty miles of the city, the march of a prince who had never 
 vanquished a foreign enemy assumed the appearance of a triumphal 
 procession. His splendid train was composed of all the ministers 
 of luxury ; but in a time of profound peace, he was encompassed 
 by the glittering arms of the numerous squadrons of his guards 
 and cuirassiers. Their streaming banners of silk, embossed with 
 gold, and shaped in the form of dragons, waved round the person 
 of the emperor. Constantius sat alone on a lofty car resplendent 
 with gold and precious gems ; and, except when he bowed his 
 head to pass under the gates of the cities, he affected a stately 
 demeanour of inflexible and, as it might seem, of insensible 
 gravity. The severe discipline of the Persian youth had been 
 introduced by the eunuchs into the imperial palace ; and such< were 
 the habits of patience which they had inculcated, that during 
 a slow and sultry march, he was never seen to move his hand 
 towards his face, or to turn his eyes either to the right or to the 
 left. He was received by the magistrates and senate of Rome ; 
 and the emperor surveyed with attention the civil honours of the 
 republic and the consular images of the noble families. The streets 
 were lined with an innumerable multitude. Their repeated acclama- 
 tions expressed their joy at beholding, after an absence of thirty-two 
 years, the sacred person of their sovereign ; and Constantius himself 
 expressed, with some pleasantry, his affected surprise that the 
 human race should thus suddenly be collected on the same spot. 
 The son of Constantine was lodged in the ancient palace of 
 Augustus ; he presided in the Senate, harangued the people from 
 the tribunal which Cicero had so often ascended, assisted with 
 unusual courtesy at the games of the circus, and accepted the 
 crowns of gold, as well as the panegyrics which had been prepared 
 for the ceremony by the deputies of the principal cities. His short 
 visit of thirty days was employed in viewing the monuments of art 
 and power, which were scattered over the seven hills and the 
 interjacent valleys. He admired the awful majesty of the capital, 
 the vast extent of the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, the severe 
 simplicity of the Pantheon, the massy greatness of the amphi- 
 theatre of Titus, the elegant architecture of the theatre of Pompey 
 and the temple of peace, and, above all, the stately structure 
 of the forum and column of Trajan ; acknowledging that the 
 voice of fame, so prone to invent and to magnify, had made an 
 inadequate report of the metropolis of the world. The traveller, 
 who has contemplated the ruins of ancient Rome, may conceive 
 some imperfect idea of the sentiments which they must have
 
 vin A UGUSTAN PROSE 283 
 
 inspired when they reared their heads in the splendour of unsullied 
 beauty. 1 
 
 I am disgusted with the affectation of men of letters who complain 
 that they have renounced a substance for a shadow ; and that their 
 fame (which sometimes is no insupportable weight) affords a poor 
 compensation for envy, censure, and persecution. My own ex- 
 perience, at least, has taught me a very different lesson. Twenty 
 happy years have been animated by the labour of my history ; and 
 its success has given me a name, a rank, a character in the world, 
 to which I should not otherwise have been entitled. The freedom 
 of my writings has indeed provoked an implacable tribe ; but as I 
 was safe from the stings, I was soon accustomed to the buzzing of 
 the hornets. My nerves are not tremblingly alive, and my literary 
 temper is so happily framed, that I am less sensible of pain than of 
 pleasure. The rational pride of an author may be offended rather 
 than flattered by vague indiscriminate praise ; but he cannot, he 
 should not, be indifferent to the fair testimonies of private and 
 public esteem. Even his moral sympathy may be gratified by the 
 idea that now, in the present hour, he is imparting some degree of 
 amusement or knowledge to his friends in a distant land : that one 
 day his mind will be familiar to the grandchildren of those who are 
 yet unborn. I cannot boast of the friendship or favour of princes ; 
 the patronage of English literature has long since been devolved on 
 our booksellers, and the measure of their liberality is the least 
 ambiguous test of our common success. Perhaps the golden 
 mediocrity of my fortune has contributed to fortify my application. 
 
 The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more ; and our 
 prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful. This day may possibly be 
 my last ; but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious 
 
 1 Gibbon's everlasting irony is assisted by rhythm, if it can hardly be said 
 to form a part thereof. "The protection | of the Rhsetian | frontier | and 
 the persecution | of the Catholic | church" marks the alliance early here. 
 And his constant allusive periphrasis or parenthesis ("who had never 
 vanquished a foreign enemy," "the son of Constantine," "from the tribunal 
 which Cicero had so often ascended ") stands in somewhat similar 
 relation to it. For actual cadences some have noted a recession or rescission 
 
 towards trochaic ending, as in "after the departure of | Julian," and several 
 other similar passages, one of which is italicised above. But, in the first 
 place, this does not seem to me a prose, but rather a verse, scansion. I 
 
 should arrange it "after | the departure | of Julian"; thus giving that juxta- 
 position of pseon (chiefly third} and amphibrach which will be found almost 
 omnipresent in Gibbon, and which may be a proximate cause of his peculiar 
 undulation. And if the whole of the sentence-ends be examined, it will be 
 found that not merely trochees but dactyls, not merely dactyls but anapaests, 
 iambs, and even long monosyllables, are quite sufficiently represented at the 
 closes. Perhaps I ought to have scanned more of Gibbon ; but, as in some 
 other cases, I thought it might be left to the reader.
 
 284 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 in particular, still allow me about fifteen years. I shall soon enter 
 into the period which, as the most agreeable of his long life, was 
 selected by the judgment and experience of the sage Fontenelle. 
 His choice is approved by the eloquent historian of nature, who 
 fixes our moral happiness to the mature season in which our passions 
 are supposed to have calmed, our duties fulfilled, our ambition 
 satisfied, our fame and fortune established on a solid basis. In 
 private conversation, that great and amiable man added the weight 
 of his own experience ; and this autumnal felicity might be ex- 
 emplified in the lives of Voltaire, Hume, and many other men of 
 letters. I am far more inclined to embrace than to dispute this 
 comfortable doctrine. I will not suppose any premature decay of 
 the mind or body ; but I must reluctantly observe that two causes, 
 the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge 
 with a browner shade the evening of life. 1 
 
 its general Here it may be observed that though both these 
 
 ofthe othe r hat P assa g es are fi ne > an d the second is famous, this latter 
 reformers. does not exhibit so much of Gibbon's characteristic style 
 and rhythm as the first. This may be due negatively to 
 Gibbon's having never " passed it for publication," or 
 positively to some manipulation of Sheffield's ; but of the 
 fact there can be little dispute. Except perhaps in the 
 more imaginative tone and colour of the well-known last 
 phrase (where " brown " is undoubtedly a reminiscence of 
 Dryden 2 ), the autobiographic peroration is much more any 
 gentleman's style at the period in perfection (for the 
 gentleman certainly is not one of the " mob " of his kind) 
 than any particular gentleman's. With the first it is 
 different. Some minor devices of its peculiar effect 
 rhythmical and other can be identified without difficulty. 
 The ear of the eighteenth century had been as a rule dull 
 (though we saw something of sensibility in Addison's) to 
 the musical advantages of proper names. Gibbon's special 
 subject supplied him with these lavishly, and his special 
 genius enabled him to use them to excellent effect. He 
 
 1 " Which sometimes is no insupportable weight " and " the eloquent 
 historian of nature " continue to exemplify the points noted in reference to 
 the other passages. The omission of the first, and the substitution of 
 " Buffon " for the second, would entirely do away with the wave effect. 
 
 2 Some may interject "Gray?" But that free borrower's "broader 
 browner shade " is not quite parallel, and in any case is most likely a reminis- 
 cence of the elder poet's peculiar use of "brown," as in "brown horror" for 
 "night," and elsewhere.
 
 vin AUGUSTAN PROSE 285 
 
 retained the general system of antithetic balance, and of 
 " step " or " telescope " arrangement. But he contrived 
 in a fashion already confessed as easier to feel than strictly 
 to define to impress on his clauses, sentences, sentence- 
 groups, and paragraphs, a peculiar undulating movement 
 which, except occasionally and accidentally, I cannot 
 remember in any writer before him. This undulatory or 
 oscillatory motion is distinguished from that of Hooker 
 by the fact that it does not so much sink at the close as 
 maintain itself at a level from which the movement of 
 the next will somehow start. It may seem at first sight 
 preposterous to compare the Gibbonian sentence with the 
 Spenserian stanza ; yet they are, when considered carefully, 
 alike in their combined faculty of achieving rhythmical 
 completeness in the individual and at the same time 
 handing on the movement to the next member. 
 
 I do not mean to say that Gibbon was at first as The standard 
 much imitated as Johnson and Burke were in the direct Geor ian st y le - 
 way ; what I wish to point out is that all three represent 
 different ways of heightening the plain Augustan style 
 without making it distinctly ornate, much less flamboyant. 
 And there resulted, from the tendencies of which these 
 three were the most distinguished examples in the third 
 and fourth quarters of the century, that " standard 
 Georgian " style, the existence of which has been some- 
 times denied and oftener ignored, but which certainly 
 reigned at the close of that century, and for almost the 
 first quarter of the nineteenth. This style continued to 
 be regarded as the style at which regular teaching of 
 composition should aim, and even at the present day, 
 after two great outbursts of actual flamboyance, after 
 divers recrudescences of slovenliness, and through almost 
 innumerable forms of individual eccentricity, from those 
 of Carlyle and Meredith to those of Cluvienus and myself, 
 it remains with a quasi- Attic reputation, and is practised 
 by those who aim at being classics. This is the style of 
 which Southey is perhaps the most perfect and almost 
 the earliest representative, but which everybody of his 
 generation, with the exception of a very few neoterics, to
 
 286 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 be noticed in the next chapter, wrote in more or less 
 perfection, according as his own genius and industry 
 would let him. 
 
 Southey. The motto of this style, and the secret of its apparent 
 perenniality, is once more old. In rhythm, as in every- 
 thing else, ars est celare artem. Take two famous 
 passages of Southey's own, the immortal close of the Life 
 of Nelson, and the peroration of his reply to the egregious 
 William Smith in the Wat Tyler matter. They are both, 
 of course, somewhat " in full dress," but every one who 
 knows and it is melancholy to think how few there are 
 probably who do know not merely the Life of Nelson, 
 but that of Wesley, and those of the " Admirals," and 
 many others, Espriella and Omniana, the Colloquies, which 
 extorted from Macaulay that amusing mixture of partisan 
 attack and scholarly acknowledgment, the HistoritsfvoA 
 above all the abounding and delightful Doctor knows 
 that Southey could carry the style not merely up to this 
 full dress without undue parade, but down to the very 
 extreme of what the century of his birth would have 
 called " an agreeable negligJ" without ever trenching on 
 vulgarity, or losing distinction. 
 
 There was reason to suppose, from the appearances upon open- 
 ing the body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, 
 like his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have 
 fallen prematurely whose work is done ; nor ought he to be lamented, 
 who died so full of honours, and at the height of human fame. The 
 most triumphant death is that of the martyr ; the most awful, that of 
 the martyred patriot ; the most splendid, that of the hero in the 
 hour of victory ; and if the chariot and the horses of fire had been 
 vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could scarcely have departed 
 in a brighter blaze of glory. He has left us, not indeed his mantle 
 of inspiration, but a name and an example, which are at this hour 
 inspiring hundreds of the youth of England : a name which is our 
 pride, and an example which will continue to be our shield and our 
 strength. 
 
 How far the writings of Mr. Southey may be found to deserve a 
 favourable acceptance from after ages time will decide ; but a name 
 which, whether worthily or not, has been conspicuous in the literary 
 history of its age, will certainly not perish. Some account of his 
 life will always be prefixed to his works, and transferred to literary
 
 vni AUGUSTAN PROSE 287 
 
 histories, and to the biographical dictionaries not only of this but of 
 other countries. There it will be related of him that he lived in the 
 bosom of his family in absolute retirement ; that in all his writings 
 there breathed the same abhorrence of oppression and immorality, 
 the same spirit of devotion, and the same ardent wishes for the 
 melioration of mankind ; and that the only charge which malice 
 could bring against him was that, as he grew older, his opinions 
 altered concerning the means by which the melioration was to be 
 effected, and that, as he learned to understand the institutions of his 
 country, he learned to appreciate them rightly, to love, and to revere, 
 and to defend them. It will be said of him that, in an age of 
 personality, he abstained from satire ; and that during the course of 
 his literary life, often as he was assailed, the only occasion on which 
 he ever condescended to reply was when a certain Mr. William 
 Smith insulted him in Parliament with the appellation of renegade. 
 On that occasion it will be said that he vindicated himself as it 
 became him to do, and treated his calumniator with just and 
 memorable severity. Whether it shall be added that Mr. William 
 Smith redeemed his own character by coming forward with honest 
 manliness and acknowledging that he had spoken rashly and unjustly 
 concerns himself, but is not of the slightest importance to me. 
 
 There are so many things to be said about this style, 
 and it might be illustrated from so many persons, that 
 the whole of this chapter, nay, a very large part of this 
 volume, would hardly be too much for the examples. 
 But speaking by the card, and considering rhythmically, 
 its note is, beyond all doubt, the adjustment of cadence 
 and symphony to matter, in such proportion and fashion 
 that you never feel the want of rhythmical and sonorous 
 quality, but at the same time are rarely tempted to con- 
 centrate your attention on this. All does not exactly 
 depend upon the subject ; but all is subordinated to it. 
 Of the generalities, however, the following Interchapter 
 should better speak.
 
 INTERCHAPTER III 
 
 THE general character of the rhythm of Augustanism 
 and post-Augustanism in prose was foreshadowed in the 
 remarks made at the close of Interchapter II. concern- 
 ing that of the seventeenth-century ornate style, to which 
 it is, here as in all other ways, a direct opposite. To say 
 that it has none would be incorrect and in fact absurd ; 
 for, as has been observed before, entirely unrhythmical 
 prose is almost impossible, the merest conversation 
 having its accents and its emphases though it is true 
 that very clumsy writing may have little rhythm, and that 
 little ugly. It is the character of the rhythm that is 
 changed ; and in the investigation of this change there is 
 not a little interest. 
 
 In prose, as in verse, the set of the general taste was 
 now direct against polyphony. Just as, in the songs of 
 Apollo, they discouraged stanzas and sonnets and 
 fantastically outlined forms of lyric, so, in the words of 
 Mercury, they turned their backs on many - centred 
 harmony of internal composition, in clause and sentence 
 and paragraph, preferring either the merely conversa- 
 tional flow with as little emphasis as possible, or the 
 " methods of the declaimer " clauses of different length 
 indeed, but arranged in parallel, and partitioned off from 
 each other at the ends, by some definite similarity or con- 
 trast like that of rhyme, rather than distinguished through- 
 out by modulation of cadence from beginning to end. 
 And when (for the most part later) they began to aim at 
 heightening effect, and at superadding or at least developing 
 ornament, they could hardly avoid falling into stereotyped 
 moulds of it, as most notably of all in Johnson, but not 
 much less in Gibbon and even in Burke. 
 
 288
 
 INTERCHAPTER III 289 
 
 At first, and especially in Dryden, the characteristic 
 defects and mannerisms of the style are somewhat masked. 
 There should be little doubt, for any one who has con- 
 sidered the subject from our present point of view, that 
 Dryden is not merely one of the greatest, but one of the 
 most puzzling masters of English prose. His ambi- 
 dexterity with the two harmonies led him to confine his 
 higher, or at least highest, strains to verse ; and we can 
 only guess what things like the opening of Religio Laid, 
 the famous " consideration of Life " in Aurengzebe, the 
 passage of the " wandering fires " in The Hind and the 
 Panther, and others, would have been in prose. But his 
 existing production in that kind, limited as it is to 
 " middle subjects " occupied almost wholly with easy 
 exposition, literary criticism, and popular dialectics 
 remains an extraordinary monument of combined earliness 
 and accomplishment. There had been nothing like it 
 before ; and, modern as it is in some ways, there has 
 been nothing like it since. But one thing we may notice 
 which it has in common with all its kind, and that is the 
 small handle which it gives to regular rhythmical analysis. 
 It is only in show-pieces like the famous encomium on 
 Shakespeare at the beginning, and that, which should be 
 almost equally famous, on Chaucer at the end, that definite 
 rhythm disengages itself from a pleasant stream of talk, 
 or a workmanlike tissue of argument, infinitely better, of 
 course, than talk and argument usually are, but with 
 nothing of the set piece about it, and with no ostensible 
 art at all. 
 
 Dryden was Addison's master in style, and there can 
 be little doubt that he acted in the same capacity, though 
 in a different fashion, to ungrateful " cousin Swift." If 
 we contrast his rhythm with, for instance, Temple's, 
 striking differences occur. There is nothing like that 
 famous coda of the poetry passage * in Dryden's prose, and 
 there is certainly nothing like it in Swift or in Addison. 2 
 
 1 V. sup. p. 237. 
 
 2 Compare the " Westminster Abbey," which approaches it very closely 
 in possibilities of modulation. 
 
 U
 
 290 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 But the undulating irony of both the younger men, 
 whether in its less pronounced and more insinuating form, 
 as with Addison, or in its sharper and harder temper, as 
 with Swift, is, if not directly copied from Dryden, a further 
 carrying out of the same principles which made his. 
 Whether Kurd was right in thinking that Addison paid 
 conscious attention to the values of his clause-endings, it 
 is hard to say. I have admitted it to be not impossible, 
 while declining to consider it as very important. But it 
 is certain that in all these writers, including Berkeley, 
 who is perhaps in form the best of them all, the greater 
 number of the kola do not invite elaborate rhythmical 
 analysis, while the conclusions, and the total effect of the 
 contrasted or paralleled groups, do invite it. 
 
 But, in most of the more formal writing of the 
 eighteenth century, the conversational tone passes into 
 the oratorical, and the echo of the speech, the sermon, or 
 the lecture, besets the weary ear throughout. In letters 
 and in fiction, though in both it sometimes likewise 
 mounts the rostrum, it sinks or descends again to mere 
 talk which is not unpleasant it " says " very well, but it 
 never reaches prose "singing." And in a great deal of 
 the prose of the first half of the century, as has been 
 pointed out above, the absence of accompaniment of 
 sound to the sense, of music to the meaning becomes, 
 if not, as it sometimes is, positively disgusting, uninterest- 
 ing to the highest degree. 
 
 The means by which the three great style-raisers of 
 the later century Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon en- 
 deavoured to effect their objects have been carefully 
 examined. It will probably have suggested itself already 
 to some readers that they could not achieve complete 
 success because they omitted to provide themselves with 
 a sufficient reinforcement of " beautiful words " of those 
 words which at once force colour and outline on the 
 mind's eye, sound and echo on the mind's ear. A re- 
 morseless restriction to the understanding and that 
 no very deep one neither still prevailed, especially in 
 Johnson, who, moreover, though he excogitated a machine
 
 INTERCHAPTER III 291 
 
 of sentence -production, sonorous enough and not ill- 
 formed, left it, and could not but leave it, a machine. 1 
 
 Nor, though they went a little farther in the right 
 direction, could Burke's varied appeal to the sentiments 
 and sometimes to the actual senses, Gibbon's gorgeous 
 historical pageantry of background and panorama of 
 action, entirely supply that fatal lack of variety which is 
 the curse of this whole period and department of prose. 
 Nevertheless, the standard style, which resulted from these 
 attempts to raise the plain, may undoubtedly, in its best 
 results at any rate, claim a very high place. Unless Mr. 
 Earle was right in thinking that the style of the tenth 
 century was such another a flight to which I cannot 
 reach I do not know any similar achievement in English 
 prose history considering prose for the moment as " the 
 instrument of the average purpose." It is not so good as 
 Dryden's, but it is certainly more adaptable and slightly 
 more universal in application, not to mention that there 
 is not about it, as there is about Dryden's, anything 
 intrinsically inimitable. To write it with the perfect ease 
 of Southey is indeed not for everybody, but to write this 
 style with adequacy and dignity is within the reach of any 
 educated person who chooses and cares. If there is an 
 educated person who does not care or choose, why he 
 must be, and if he is a person of sense as well as education, 
 is, prepared to pay the penalty. You may have your 
 own style at your own risk ; this patented and minted 
 common-form remains open, to you and to all, at none. 
 
 Nor, until the language alters more than it has done 
 for at least a hundred and fifty years, and in a fashion, as 
 distinguished from a degree, of which there has been no 
 sign for nearly two hundred and fifty, does it seem likely 
 that this style will ever grow obsolete. It corresponds in 
 
 1 There are, of course, sentences of his which far transcend machinery, 
 such as that given by Boswell from the MS. "Collection for the Rambler" 
 " The world lies all enamelled before him, as a distant prospect sun- 
 gilt " : where the remarkable effect of the final compound, as supplying one 
 of the missing "beautiful words," will be felt at once. There are others, 
 besides the well-known lona passage, in the Journey to the Western Isles, 
 and yet others outside of it. But the sentence in the text remains, I think, 
 generally true.
 
 292 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 English to the style introduced by Descartes, or first 
 strikingly exemplified by him, in France a generation or 
 two before anything approaching it was seen with us ; 
 but it is, as suits the language, more tolerant though 
 still not very tolerant of neologism. Like the Cartesian 
 medium, it is perhaps rather free from faults than provided 
 with beauties, but while it is eminently unobjectionable, 
 its attractions are not purely negative. If it has not 
 exactly beauty (and how little it wants to attain that we 
 shall see when we come to such a slight beautification or 
 beatification of it as Newman's), it has that comeliness, ease, 
 and unobtrusive complaisance to circumstance, which 
 some persons, not extremely given to paradox, have, for 
 ordinary occasions at any rate, extolled above beauty in 
 women, and art, and scenery, and other companions a,nd 
 conditions of life.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 
 
 The necessity of reaction Its causes and bents Preoccupation of 
 the ground by poetry ; the Lake group and Scott Byron, 
 Shelley, and Keats The minors : Moore The Epicurean 
 Return to Coleridge in Anima Poetae General descriptive 
 character of these early passages The three chief pioneers 
 De Quincey Specimen phrases and passages, with analysis 
 and comment The Dream-Fugue and the Suspiria the chief 
 quarries Elaborate rhythm by no means often aimed at else- 
 where Its connection with dream The Suspiria again The 
 Autobiography De Quincey's relation to poetry Wilson 
 Landor : his characteristics The relations of his poetry and 
 his prose His critical utterances on the subject Results in a 
 "prose grand style" Specimens Some general observations 
 The four kinds of rhythm in relation to prose I. Non-prosaic 
 rhythm or poetry II. Hybrid verse-prose III. Pure prose 
 highly rhythmed IV. Prose in general. 
 
 ALLOWANCE (not, I think, ungenerous) has been made, at The necessity 
 the close of the preceding Interchapter, for the merits in of 
 rhythm, as in other ways, of the Augustan and post- 
 Augustan style, and of the standard development of it. But 
 I do not pretend that this attitude is anything more than 
 judicial ; or that, in my personal preference, even the finest 
 examples, actual or conceivable, of this order of style and 
 rhythm can vie with the ornater examples given by the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nor can I quite 
 understand how any one, unless blinded by the enchant- 
 ments of that deceiving dame Grammar, or regarding 
 Prose as not at all, or not in the main, an instrument of 
 delight, can prefer it. Beauty, of course, may be this to 
 thee and that to me ; but it scarcely admits of denial 
 
 293
 
 294 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 that Augustan and standard prose is comparatively 
 destitute of that Variety which has been recognised of 
 old, by Classical as well as by Romantic criticism, as 
 the essential virtue of beautiful prose, when it ceases to be 
 a mere lorry for conveying the burden of brute meaning. 
 At any rate, and however this may be, it was certain 
 that, after so long a prevalence of the plainly phrased 
 and faintly or mechanically rhythmed style, the opposite 
 kind would have its turn. 
 
 its causes and For, besides the effect of the general law of revolution 
 and compensation, almost all the particular agencies, in 
 what is commonly called the Romantic Revival, made in 
 this direction. The taste for the picturesque x not merely, 
 in writings about that subject, forced the use of a 
 more gorgeous and highly coloured which necessarily 
 means a more variously and intricately rhythmed style, 
 but independently encouraged the desire for one. The 
 taste for the exotic multiplied and complicated the 
 vocabulary with new and strange-sounding words. The 
 reverence for Elizabethan and seventeenth-century litera- 
 ture revealed the buried magnificences which had been 
 so long ignored. The great development of critical 
 appreciation, as distinguished from rule -criticism, could 
 not leave the finer styles untried or untasted. And, 
 finally, the same movement against monotony, uniformity, 
 convention, which was breaking up the tyranny of the 
 heroic couplet in verse, almost necessitated the return to 
 complicated values and irregular outlines in prose. In 
 one sense, indeed, the return to flamboyant and polyphonic 
 prose was simply a further development of the very 
 movements which had effected the raising of post- 
 Augustan style itself. Johnson had learnt not a little 
 from Browne ; but he might have learnt, and others did 
 learn, a great deal more. Burke's alleged trinity of 
 " sentiment, idea, and image " wanted but little to become 
 a quaternity by the addition of " musical presentment." 
 
 1 If I were writing at greater length, I should like to show, from Gilpin, 
 where the earlier picturesque writers came short. Gray's often -quoted 
 " Sunrise " passage, in a late letter to Bonstetten, is, naturally, further 
 advanced.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 295 
 
 While if Gibbon had had more frequent touches of 
 poetry, and had not been content with the stately but 
 slightly monotoned, if not monotonous, splendour of the 
 main rhythm which he had once achieved, there is no 
 knowing what he might not have done in this direction. 
 
 For a time, however, according to the general course Preoccupa- 
 of literary history, poetry absorbed the chief attention j^unc/by 
 and displayed the chief results. All the great poets of poetry; the 
 the Revival (I must ask for a moment's grace as to Scott) a 
 were good prose-writers. But by far the larger number 
 of them, and of those who rank next, kept to the older 
 style in prose. Southey, the least of them as a poet, 
 was the greatest as a prose-man ; but he is also the 
 greatest treader of the standard via media, and has been 
 already selected as such. Wordsworth, if not so great a 
 master of prose as De Quincey would have him to be, 
 was certainly a master of it ; but the wind of the spirit, 
 which takes him off his legs now and then in verse, seldom 
 disturbs their peaceable prosaic progression. 1 We may 
 now, thanks to Mr. Ernest Coleridge and to Anima 
 Poetae? claim Coleridge, the almost universal pioneer, as 
 a pioneer here also ; and we shall return to him accord- 
 ingly. But, except in these long-unpublished fragments 
 and jottings, he hardly displays himself as a master of 
 ornateness in prose ; while his frankly confessed envy 
 of Southey's style, and vivid denunciation of his own 
 sentences as " Surinam toads with their young ones 
 clinging all round them," is well known. 
 
 As for Scott, if we had to do with a general history 
 of prose style, instead of a history of one aspect of it, 
 multipliciter distinguendum esset. The vulgar depreciation 
 
 1 An exception may be expected for The Convention of Cintra, in which, 
 by the way, De Quincey himself had a revising hand. The passionate dignity 
 of that noble composition certainly shall not be denied or belittled here. But 
 it is, naturally enough, almost pure Burke in rhythm, as in style generally. 
 " A highway of adamant for the sorrowful steps of generation after generation " 
 is admirable, but scarcely new. Even "in the midst of the woods, the 
 rivers, the mountains, the sunshine and shadows of some transcendant land- 
 scape," " transcendant " is a " book- word," almost a "gradus epithet," not 
 a mot propre or a mot de lumiere, 
 
 2 London, 1895.
 
 296 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 of him is here almost more of a vulgar error than is the 
 case in regard to his verse. Occasional carelessness, due 
 to invariable haste of composition, is the only part of 
 the indictment that can be sustained. But as regards 
 elaborately rhythmical prose, every one, of course, must 
 allow that he did not practise it as a rule. There are 
 great exceptions, chiefly in dialogue, or in what may be 
 called dramatic passages. The two finest of all are, I 
 think, the incomparable denunciation of Claverhouse by 
 Habakkuk Mucklewrath, 1 and that, if less tragical, almost 
 equally fine, invective of Meg Merrilies, 2 which the great 
 Lord Derby flung in those faces of Liberals who called 
 
 1 " And thou | who hast partaken | of the wine-cup | of fury, | and hast 
 been drunken | and mad | because thereof, | the wish | of thy heart | shall 
 be granted | to thy loss, | and the hope | of thine own pride | shall destroy 
 
 thee. | " If anybody says, "Oh, Biblical rhythm, and even the very words," 
 let him be good enough to observe that, if the first clause is Biblical in phrase 
 and arrangement, the second is not ; while it might do him no harm to 
 notice also the skill with which the variation "thy heart," but "thine own 
 pride," obviates, at once, monotonous parisosis and too metrical rhythm. 
 
 2 "Ride your ways," j said the gipsy, | "ride your ways, | Laird | of 
 Ellangowan | ride your ways, | Godfrey | Bertram [ This day | have 
 ye quenched | seven | smoking | hearths | see | if the fire | in your ain | 
 parlour | burn | the blither | for that. | Ye have riven | the thack | off 
 seven | cottar | houses | look | if your ain | roof -tree | stand | the faster. 
 Ye may stable | your stirks | in the shealings | at Derncleugh | see | 
 that the hare | does not couch | on the hearthstane | at Ellangowan. 
 Ride your ways, | Godfrey | Bertram | what | do ye glower | after our 
 folk | for ! | There's thirty | hearts there | that wad hae wanted | bread | 
 ere ye | had wanted | sunkets, | and spent | their life-blood | ere 
 ye | had scratched | your finger. | Yes | there's thirty | yonder, | 
 from the auld wife | of a hundred | to the babe | that was born | last week, | 
 that ye have turned | out o' their bits | o' bields, | to sleep | with the 
 tod j and the blackcock | in the muirs ! | Ride your ways, | Ellangowan, | 
 Our bairns | are hinging | at our weary | backs | look | that your braw 
 cradle | at hame | be the fairer | spread up : [not that I am -wishing ill to
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 297 
 
 themselves Churchmen, in connection with the disestab- 
 lishment of the Church of Ireland. Many others could, 
 of course, be added ; but it would be needless for lovers 
 of Scott, and useless for others. And it is, no doubt, a 
 fact that, in narrative, description, and so forth, he was 
 merely a " standard " man, not always quite so careful 
 as that standard requires, but by no means always so 
 careless as the critical " populace " will have him 
 to be. 
 
 Of the three younger members of the Seven, Byron Byron 
 was, usually, eighteenth century or nothing in his prose ; 
 and Keats wrote too little, except in jocular or passionate 
 privacy, to need much consideration here. On the other 
 hand, Shelley's prose, elaborately descriptive as some of it 
 is, and enthusiastic as some of the rest may be, is decidedly 
 nearer to the standard than to the ornate kind a fact 
 which perhaps had something to do with Matthew Arnold's 
 apparently fantastic preference of it over the verse. This 
 opinion may possibly disappoint some readers, and shock 
 others. But I am not afraid that any one who knows the 
 History of Prosody will question my appreciation of 
 Shelley ; and the opinion is the result of many years' 
 reading, constantly refreshed. In the Defence of Poetry, 
 in the Platonic translations, and in the descriptive parts of 
 the letters, there are, of course, passages of the first beauty 
 as prose. But (and this is not in the least wonderful 
 when we remember that, when he wanted Polyhymnia, she 
 was always ready for him in her own singing robes) it 
 will constantly be found to be what we may call super- 
 poetised Burke antithetical and oratorical in general 
 scheme. In a most careful recent scrutiny I have found 
 
 little Harry, or to the babe thafs yet to be born God forbid, and make them 
 kind to the poor, and better folk than their father /] And now, | ride | e'en | 
 your ways ; | for these | are the last words | ye'll ever hear | Meg Merrilies | 
 speak, | and this | is the last reise | that I'll ever cut | in the bonny | woods | 
 
 of Ellangowan. " 
 
 I have bracketed and italicised one clause because it is of the nature of 
 a parenthetic aside, descending purposely to merely colloquial rhythm.
 
 2g8 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 but a very few passages which distinctly class themselves 
 as of the newer type, such as this : 
 
 It is | as it were | the inter] penetration | of a diviner | nature | 
 through our own ; | but its footsteps | are like those | of a wind | over 
 the sea, | which the coming | calm | erases | and whose traces | 
 remain only | as the wrinkled | sand | which waves it. 
 
 There is no mistake about that ; but what follows ? 
 
 These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced 
 principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most 
 enlarged imagination ; and the state of mind produced by them is at 
 war with every base desire. 
 
 Is there any fault to be found with this ? None ; but 
 it does not pretend to the more composite rhythm, and 
 though you can " foot it " well enough, it lends itself much 
 more naturally to the " section " division of standard prose. 
 And so, I think, generally, if not always. 
 
 The minors : Of those who attain not to the Seven, Campbell is in 
 prose merely an inferior Southey ; but Moore, who has 
 been a stumbling-block to the majority of critics in relation 
 to his verse, occupies a rather ambiguous position in rela- 
 tion to his prose. The Epicurean contains things (examples 
 will be given presently) which deserve by no means low 
 rank as specimens of elaborate rhythm, and in particular 
 possess a most singular resemblance to some passages of 
 Landor. But it is late ; l its relations to the verse Alciphron 
 are not very certainly unravelled ; 2 and, excellent as his 
 general prose-writing is, Moore belongs, as a whole, to the 
 standard class. Of Landor we must, of course, speak at 
 great length : he belongs to the definite group of the new 
 
 1 The Prefatory "Letter" is indeed dated "Cairo, June 19, 1800," but 
 of course this (written in character) is merely one of the literary supercheries 
 fashionable at the time. He appears actually to have begun the subject, as a 
 poem, twenty years later, July 25, 1820 ; but found a difficulty in " managing 
 the minor details of a story so as to be clear without growing prosaic," dropped 
 it, and started it again in prose. It was not published till 1827. 
 
 8 I mean that we do not know whether this, not published till twelve years 
 later still (1839), consists of some or all of the original verse of 1820; or 
 whether other passages of the prose, now found in The Epicurean, were 
 originally written in verse.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 299 
 
 prose-men. But, before coming to them, a few specimens 
 of Moore and Coleridge must be given, and Moore himself 
 must be dealt with first. 
 
 Moore's ornate prose is, in fact, curiously transitional, 
 more so indeed than Shelley's. At one moment it is as 
 of a slightly more imaged Burke ; at another it reminds 
 you of De Quincey or Landor. For instance, the admir- 
 able image which I have italicised in the following (I dare 
 say some one knows where he got it, but I don't) does not 
 remove the general late-eighteenth-century character of 
 the passage : 
 
 But, even in sleep, the same faces continued to haunt me ; and a The 
 dream, so distinct and vivid as to leave behind it the impression of Epicurean. 
 reality, thus presented itself to my mind. I found myself suddenly 
 transported to a wide and desolate plain, where nothing appeared to 
 breathe, or move, or live. The -very sky that hung above it looked pale 
 and extinct, giving the idea, not of darkness, but of light that had 
 become dead; and had that whole region been the remains of some 
 older world left broken up and sunless, it could not have presented 
 an aspect more quenched and desolate. 
 
 That is good ; but as a composition, as a symphony, it 
 has too much of the old pendulum swing the rhythm 
 does not progress or gyrate. This is somewhat better : 
 
 When I sailed from Alexandria, the inundation of the Nile was at 
 its full. The whole valley of Egypt lay covered with its flood ; and 
 as, looking around me in the light of the setting sun, I saw shrines, 
 palaces, and monuments encircled by the waters, I could almost 
 fancy that I beheld the sinking island of Atlantis on the last evening 
 its temples were visible above the wave. 
 
 Here the progression is better, and there is less mere 
 see-saw ; but the individual feet, though separable without 
 much difficulty, do not mark themselves sufficiently ; the 
 prose is still mainly sectional. 
 
 Best of all, I think, is this where the rhythm, while 
 not transgressing into the poetical, is both much more 
 marked and much more symphonic : 
 
 Nothing | was ever | so bleak | and saddening | as the appear- 
 ance | of this lake. | The usual | ornaments | of the waters | of
 
 300 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Egypt | were not | wanting to it ; | the tall | lotus | here | uplifted | 
 her silvery | flowers, | and the crimson | flamingo | floated | over the 
 tide. | But they looked not | the same [ as in the world | above : | the 
 flower | had exchanged | its whiteness | for a livid | hue, | and the 
 wings | of the bird | hung heavy | and colourless ; | everything | 
 wore | the same | half-living | aspect ; | and the only | sounds | that 
 disturbed | the mournful | stillness | were the wailing cry | of a heron j 
 among the sedges | and that din | of the falling | waters | in their 
 midway | struggle | above. 
 
 Here at last the writer has got into the new region, 
 though he may carry about him some traces of the old. 1 
 But into that region had already burst, though t the 
 records of the feat long remained unknown, a greater than 
 Moore. 
 Return to It is most curious, even if it can hardly be called 
 
 sur P r i sm g> to see > as we turn over tne leaves of Mr. Ernest 
 
 Coleridge's pious and most welcome recoveries, how the 
 attempt to portray natural beauty exactly, to " count the 
 streaks of the tulip " and assort the colours of the sky- 
 value, which had been so long forbidden even to the poet, 
 requires and brings with it, when the prose-writer essays 
 the task, an immediate reinforcement to sound as well 
 as to sight. Still in the eighteenth century, somewhere 
 between November 1799 and July 1800, we find this 
 entry (an entire one) : 2 
 
 Leaves | of trees | upturned | by the stirring | wind | in twilight | 
 an image | of paleness, | wan | affright. 
 
 Now I hope no one will be so thoughtless as to 
 ejaculate, " Oh ! Coleridge was always thinking, of these 
 effects for his verse ; that is just a note for poetry." But 
 
 1 The strong infusion of Ionic a minore (w w ) or third paeon (w w w) 
 
 may here, as so often elsewhere, be noticed. It is one of the not very 
 numerous footholds that we get in half-wading, half-swimming through this 
 doubtful region. 
 
 2 Anima Poetae, p. 10.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 301 
 
 it is not verse, 1 and whether it is poetry or not depends 
 upon a quarrel which is not at the moment ours. It is 
 perfectly genuine prose rhythm, not verse at all. But it 
 is prose rhythm of something like the highest quality. 
 One little point, the omission of the copula and the use 
 of a kind of apposition at " paleness, wan affright," is 
 something that you will find practically never in Augustan 
 prose, constantly in the nineteenth century ; and it gives 
 a rhythmical heightening of the most definite and peculiar 
 kind. On December 19, 1800, he writes: 2 
 
 The thin | scattered | rain-clouds j were scudding | along the 
 sky | above them | with a visible | interspace ; | the crescent j moon | 
 hung | and partook not | of the motion ; | her own | hazy | light | 
 filled up | the concave | as if j it had been painted | and the 
 colours | had run. 
 
 Here " partook not of the motion " is older-fashioned, 
 in diction, but the rest is new, and all is so in the rhythm. 
 And this, let it be remembered, is more than twenty years 
 before the deliberate colour-and-rhythm school announces 
 itself with De Quincey and Wilson and Landor ; more 
 than forty before a certain " Graduate of Oxford " wrote. 
 
 And so, after all but a century's waiting, Coleridge's 
 position as psychagogue is vindicated in prose, as it has 
 been from the first in poetry and in criticism. 
 
 But we cannot leave the vindication at this point, 
 especially as, though more than a decade and a half has 
 passed since the documents were published, I at least 
 have never seen much notice taken of them. Astonish- 
 ingly Ruskinian, even to the point of frequent but 
 cunningly carried-off intermixture of blank verse, is the 
 following : 3 
 
 A drizzling rain. [ Heavy | masses | of shapeless | vapour | upon 
 
 1 "In twi | light an im | age of pale | ness " is. But as one has so constantly, 
 but always victoriously, to retort the precedent and subsequent clauses 
 entirely preclude such arrangement for the whole, even of this short piece. 
 
 2 Anima Poetae, p. 12. 3 Ibid. p. 34. Dated October 21, 1803.
 
 302 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 the mountains. | O ! | the perpetual | forms | of Borrowdale ; | yet it 
 is no | unbroken | tale | of dull | sadness. | Slanting | pillars | travel] 
 across the lake | at long | intervals ; | the vaporous | mass | whitens | 
 in large | stains | of light ; | on the lakeward | ridge | of that huge | 
 arm-chair | of Lodore | fell | a gleam | of softest | light, | that 
 brought out | the rich hues | of the late | autumn. | The woody | 
 Castle | Crag | between me | and Lodore | is a rich | flower garden | 
 of colours | the brightest | yellows | with the deepest | crimsons | 
 and the infinite | shades | of brown | and green, | the infinite | 
 diversity | of which | blends | the whole, | so that the brighter | 
 colours | seem | to be colours | upon a ground, | not coloured | 
 things. | Little | woolpacks | of white | bright | vapour | rest | on 
 different | summits | and declivities, j The vale | is narrowed | by 
 the mist | and cloud, | yet through | the wall | of mist | you can 
 see | into a bower | of sunny | light | in Borrowdale ; | the birds | 
 are singing | in the tender | rain | as if | it were the rain | of April, 
 and the decaying | foliage | were flowers | and blossoms. | The 
 pillar | of smoke | from the chimney | rises | in the mist, | and is 
 just | distinguishable | from it ; | and the mountain | forms | in the 
 gorge | of Borrowdale | consubstantiate | with the mist | and cloud, 
 even | as the pillar'd | smoke | a shade | deeper | and adeter|minate 
 form. 
 
 Here, of course, you can separate, if you choose, not a 
 few iambic decasyllabics : 
 
 O ! the perpetual forms of Borrowdale 
 The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud 
 The birds are singing in the tender rain 
 
 perhaps one or two more. But they do not, in their 
 context, force themselves on the ear in any unpleasant 
 sing-song, and they easily join with what comes before, or 
 what comes after, in definite prose groups. On the other 
 hand, the word-values are arranged with evident cunning.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 303 
 
 There are many trochees, ditrochees, and even larger 
 groups, in which the vowel-music is most carefully con- 
 trasted (" slanting pillars," " brightest yellows," " deepest 
 crimsons "), and the sharp repetition commonest of tricks 
 now, but a rare and very dubious licence then ! of 
 " white bright vapour " is noticeable. In " the brightest 
 yellows | with the deepest | crimsons " (amphibrach, 
 trochee, third paeon, trochee), I almost dare to say we 
 glimpse one of our panthers, a common - form prose 
 combination corresponding to a verse. Note, too, the 
 familiar-unfamiliar word " woolpacks," the parts of which 
 might have no sense at all it is so perfectly expressive, in 
 sound, of what it means. There are some, of course, who 
 will quarrel with " consubstantiate " and " determinate." 
 Not I ; for there has been so much appeal to the pure 
 sense that this intellectual vocabulary comes as an 
 agreeable set-off; and the objection of homoeoteleuton, 
 which might otherwise be sustainable, is to be met by the 
 answer that good pronouncers do not make a rhyme here, 
 the a being fully sounded in the verb and slightly slurred 
 in the adjective. 
 
 On the other hand, if any one would like a contrast 
 passage where the observation and the reflection have got 
 the better of the prose-making, he will find it at p. 1 1 2. 1 
 But he will also find many (I subjoin some references) 2 
 where science has not defeated or defrauded art. And 
 one I must give at length, because it seems to show that, 
 as indeed we might expect, his beloved and rather over- 
 extolled Jeremy Taylor was sometimes in S. T. C.'s mind 
 when he wrote thus. Sometimes for in the passage 
 previously given I hear little of Jeremy. 
 
 The love | of Nature | is ever | returned | double to us, | not 
 only | [as ?] 3 the delighter | in our delight, | but by linking | our 
 
 1 The opening passage of chap. iv. (January 15, 1805) dealing with such 
 a tempting subject as the halo of the moon. 
 
 2 Pages 1 8, 43, 184, 212. 
 
 3 " As " is not in the original ; but it or something like it seems to me 
 necessary. It would not spoil the rhythm at all, but would simply extend 
 the amphibrach before into a second paeon.
 
 304 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 General 
 descriptive 
 character of 
 these early 
 passages. 
 
 sweetest | but of themselves | perishable | feelings | to distinct | 
 and vivid | images | which we | ourselves | at times | and which a 
 thousand | casual | recollections | recall | to our memory. | She | is 
 the preserver, | the treasurer, | of our joys. | Even in sickness | and 
 nervous | diseases | she has peopled | our | imagination | with 
 lovely | forms | which have sometimes | overpowered | the inward | 
 pain | and brought with them | their old | sensations. | And even | 
 when all men | have seemed | to desert us | and the friend | of our 
 heart | has passed on | with one glance | from his " cold | disliking eye," | 
 yet even then \ the blue heaven \ spreads itself out \ and bends \ over 
 us, | and the little \ tree \ still \ shelters us \ under \ its plumage \ as 
 a second \ cope, \ a domestic \ firmament, \ and the low \ creeping \ 
 gale | will sigh \ in the heath plant j and soothe us \ by sound | of 
 sympathy \ till the lulled \ grief \ lose itself j infixed \ gaze \ on the 
 purple | heath-blossom, | till the present | beauty | becomes | a 
 vision | of memory. | 
 
 That last sentence, at least the italicised portion, is 
 Taylorian (adjusted to a nineteenth - century key, of 
 course), or nothing. But elsewhere I can see no indebted- 
 ness, except of the most general kind, and an immense 
 discovery or recovery. " Blessed is he who first sees the 
 morning star," says Coleridge somewhere in this very book. 
 Yea, and more blessed he who can not only see it, but 
 catch and reproduce the flash of its light and the notes of 
 its singing. 
 
 Now almost if not quite all these passages those 
 from Moore as well as those from Coleridge and those 
 that we might (and may easily) add from Shelley are, of 
 course, description. I have not the slightest intention of 
 ignoring or masking the fact ; on the contrary, I have 
 already drawn, do now once more draw, and may perhaps 
 somewhat weary the reader by drawing, again and again 
 in the future, his attention to it. There may be some 
 fated and metaphysical connection between colour and
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 305 
 
 rhythm here : there certainly is a pretty obvious one 
 between the attentions devoted to th# two kinds of form. 
 And though we shall by no means find that this link is a 
 fetter, that the more elaborate rhythmist in prose is, in 
 the old Scots legal term, " thirled " inevitably bound and 
 restricted to mere word-painting, we shall undoubtedly 
 find that a very large proportion of his most successful 
 and delightful achievements belong to this department. 
 And, for yet other reasons than those given, it was 
 natural that this should be so. Nothing had been more 
 characteristic of the new poetry than its efforts and its 
 successes in this way. Pitt's well-known remark on The 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel (a remark which might have 
 been even better devoted to The Ancient Mariner], that he 
 could have conceived of such effects as being reached by 
 a painter, but not by a poet, is the ^77^77, the chance but 
 final expression and formulation, of the general sense on 
 this head. When the new prose-makers took up the 
 task of showing how near to verse prose could go, they 
 naturally did it in part materia. 
 
 To these, and especially to Coleridge, let all honour, The three 
 therefore, be due ; but there is nothing very wrong in the 
 general opinion which assigns to De Quincey, Landor, and 
 Wilson, chronologically speaking, if not also in other ways, 
 the place of the First Three in the instauration of musical 
 prose. To " place " them in respect of exact date and 
 possible-probable originality would be the task of a thesis- 
 writer. Let us only here remind the reader who may 
 take no further notice of the facts or work them out, 
 just as he pleases that Wilson and De Quincey were 
 friends at the Lakes and in Edinburgh * very early as 
 early at least as 1814; that the latter had been, seven 
 years earlier, under Coleridge's influence ; that Blackwood, 
 in which both wrote, appeared first three years later 
 (1817), but did not for some time display the new 
 style ; that the Confessions of an Opium Eater appeared 
 in the London in 1821, and the first volumes of the 
 
 1 They had been contemporaries at Oxford, but had not there known each 
 other.
 
 306 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Imaginary Conversations three years later again (1824). 
 Landor, though intimate with Southey, had little to do 
 with the other Lakers, or with his " mono-Gebirist " 
 admirer De Quincey ; and he was, in fact, out of England 
 entirely, or almost entirely, from 1811 to 1832. His 
 development must have been independent, as was probably 
 also De Quincey's own except for the all-impregnating 
 influence of " S. T. C." Wilson may have taken more 
 directly from De Quincey himself. But, on the whole, it 
 is best, as always, to regard them as mouthpieces, each in 
 his own sufficiently individual and original way, of a 
 tendency of the time as setting sails of their own cut, 
 and steering their own course, under the influence of the 
 same Time-Spirit. 
 
 De Quincey. I do not, however, see any reason for depriving De 
 Quincey of seniority, if not seignioralty in a certain sense. 
 Since the late Mr. Henley thought fit to attack him, he has 
 perhaps lost something, with les jeunes, of the favour which 
 he used specially to possess with them. But, as every one 
 who really knew Henley is well aware, his " black beasts " 
 were chameleonic creatures, who took their colour from 
 accidents and circumstances, rather than from anything 
 essential to themselves. And I have even recently seen 
 De Quincey described as " decadent," which ought to be a 
 passport to fresh favour nowadays. 2 At any rate, there 
 can be absolutely no chance of making any solid fight 
 against his claim to be a great and a very early master of 
 our later rhythmed prose. The Suspiria have no need 
 of apology or argument : their powers are self-validating 
 to all competent and serious appreciation. Moreover, it 
 is not in De Quincey's case, as it is in some others, un- 
 certain whether the achievement was, or was not, un- 
 conscious and more or less accidental. De Quincey, as 
 
 1 De Quincey's characteristic way of summing up his own alfeged belief 
 that he was the only person who read Gebir at its appearance. The term is 
 open to cavil from the point of view of verbal criticism. 
 
 2 I have myself, I think, dealt pretty faithfully with his general 
 faults and merits in an essay originally contributed to Macmillari's Magazine, 
 and reprinted with Essays in English Literature (London, 1890; Third 
 Edition, 1896). But I there said very little about this particular part of 
 his genius.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 307 
 
 is well known, gave himself up wholly and solely to prose, 
 in a fashion so rare as to be almost unique. Not only 
 did he almost wholly avoid verse, but I fancy that he did 
 not care for it very much as verse. 1 The decision, and in 
 fact the acrimony, of his views, on the vexed question of 
 the connection of verse and poetry, must be well known to 
 any one who knows him at all ; his contempt of merely 
 plain prose likewise. He exhausted even his great 
 powers of ingenious scholasticism, and landed himself in 
 hopeless contradictions, by trying to construct a sort of 
 j#/r-rhetoric (different from eloquence) which should be 
 the perfection of deliberate artistry in writing. 
 
 But he certainly recked his own rede. How early the 
 wonderful harmonies, which he never gave to the public 
 till he was actually " at the middle of the road of our life," 
 came into his ears it is impossible to say, and quite idle 
 to attempt to see amid the luminous haze, but essentially 
 hazy luminosity, of his own statements. If it was at 
 Oxford, why, then, the place fitted the time and the man, 
 as too seldom happens. But we shall disregard all this, 
 and simply analyse the famous passages, hackneyed as 
 they are, or ought to be. Some of these divisions and 
 quantifications are, as far as I am concerned, at least 
 thirty years old, and I think a good deal older ; and, 
 though something like them may have been tried by 
 others in the interval, I do not know it. 
 
 One single sentence, which I have used constantly as a 
 perfect type in miniature of rhythmed prose, may serve as 
 a beginning : 
 
 And her eyes | if they were e|ver seen | would be nei|ther sweet | 
 nor subtle ; | no man | could read | their story ; | they would be 
 found | filled | with perishing | dreams | and with wrecks | of 
 forgotten [ delirium. 2 
 
 1 Compare the curious passage cited inf. and almost any of his criticisms 
 of poets, especially the (generally not unsympathetic) "Shelley" and the 
 almost ludicrously inadequate " Keats." 
 
 2 If anybody prefers it, either from Stevenson's dislike of split words or 
 
 for another reason, I should have no violent objection to "if they were
 
 308 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Specimen 
 phrases and 
 passages, 
 
 with analysis 
 and comment. 
 
 Nothing not more than fifty years' familiarity with its 
 text, and thirty with its analysis ; not even all but a 
 couple of decades of such not endearing use 1 as may be 
 made in lectures and tutorials has lessened, and therefore 
 I think I may say that nothing is ever likely to lessen, the 
 charm of this phrase to me, or its infinite variety of appeal. 
 Short as it is, it is a kind of magazine of the secrets of its 
 kind. In the first place, it illustrates, supereminently, 
 that doctrine of Variety itself which has been, and must 
 be, so often impressed. At first hearing, a hasty ear 
 might prompt the kindred tongue to say, " Oh ! but that is 
 1 emmetric ' ! it breaks the primal law." 2 Examine it, and 
 you will find nothing of the kind. There is not so much 
 as a blank verse in it, even of the cunningly masked kind 
 which has been noticed in Coleridge and others, and will 
 be noticed in Ruskin and others still. There are, indeed, 
 fragments of blank verse 
 
 No man | could read | their story 
 Found filled | with perish [ing dreams | 
 
 which would fit themselves, with Shakspearian ease, to 
 complete contexts in the metre. But this is just what De 
 Quincey avoids. The sections which precede and follow 
 them suggest quite different rhythms, and yet blend with 
 them harmoniously according to the law of prose 
 harmony. 
 
 Again, note the absence of the non-metrical corre- 
 spondence which we have detected as one great note of 
 Augustan prose and its immediate successors. The 
 sections are sections ; but they are not broken into couples 
 and batches ; they serpentine on continuously. Then, 
 too, the conclusions tell the same tale. " Nor subtle," 
 
 ever j seen " | (dochmiac and monosyllable instead of pseon and iamb), or to 
 
 " would be neither | sweet " | (pseon and monosyllable instead of anapaest and 
 iamb). But I think the scansion in text runs better ; and, as I have said, 
 word-splitting has no terrors for me, though I believe rather less in it than I 
 used to do for prose scansion, while I am more convinced than ever of its 
 desirableness in verse. 
 
 1 Usus concinnat amorem very often, no doubt, but hardly this use. 
 
 2 V. sup, p. i. 

 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 309 
 
 an amphibrach with the amphibrach's trochaic close- 
 suggestion. " Their story," the same. But " delirium " 
 lengthens this out to a paeon, and so at once varies and 
 completes the sound effect. Nor are the " beautiful 
 syllables," the " beautiful letters," found wanting. There 
 are no " strange " words, unless " delirium " be called so : 
 the vocabulary is quite ordinary ; but the vowel music, 
 assisted and qualified by the consonants and the word 
 lengths, is unerring. " Sw^t," " nor" " sbtle " ; " man" 
 " read" " story " ; "perishing dreams" " wrecks of forgotten 
 delirium" in all these the marvellous power of contrast, 
 grouped and united under the general rhythm of the 
 sentence, is displayed. And when you have appreciated 
 the details you have only to read the passage again as a 
 whole, and rejoice once more, undisturbed by analysis or 
 anatomy, in its total result as entire and perfect. 
 
 In the very next sentence 1 there is an awful example 
 of the uncertainty of De Quincey's self-criticism. For he 
 speaks of Our Lady of Sighs as having a "dilapidated 
 turban." Grant that perhaps, ninety years ago, " dilapi- 
 dated " had not got into its present state of half-comic 
 vulgarising. But at any time it would have been the 
 wrong word for " turban " ; though no doubt some idea of 
 the towered crown of Cybele (which he was afterwards to 
 use deliberately and admirably in regard to the third 
 sister) may have originated and (as a conception, though 
 not as a phrase) excused it. 
 
 I have said that De Quincey's greatest passages are The Dream- 
 all, more or less, hackneyed ; but we certainly can exercise 5^^^^ 
 selection upon them here. The famous " Bishop of chief quarries. 
 Beauvais ! " peroration of the Joan of Arc he might 
 himself have called " rhetoric " or " eloquence " in different 
 moods or phases of his juggling fits with those terms ; 
 but be it either, it has little for us. It is noisy, and blares 
 which rhythmical prose should never do, though verse 
 sometimes may. The moment that one note in prose so 
 overpowers the next that you cannot attend to it, the 
 
 1 The passage, of course, comes from the description of the second of 
 " Our Ladies of Sorrow," Mater Stispiriorum.
 
 310 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 error of oratorical style, and the Augustan system, returns. 
 So, too, by no means very much in the equally famous 
 Mail Coach (except the Dream-Fugue itself) comes up to 
 our standard. The most perfect example, I think, is 
 before the bravura part begins: 
 
 Moonlight | and the first | timid | tremblings | of the dawn | were 
 
 _ i 
 
 by this time | blending ; | and the blendings | were brought | into a 
 still | more exquisite | state | of unity | by a slight | silvery | mist, | 
 motionless | and dreamy, | that covered | the woods | and fields | 
 but with a veil | of equable | transparency. 1 
 
 Some longer passages from the Dream-Fugue itself 
 must be analysed presently ; for it is from this and from 
 the Suspiria (by no means so much from the original or 
 even the supplemented Confessions] that De Quincey's 
 triumphs in our way come. 
 
 Elaborate Indeed the total bulk of such passages is by no means 
 
 rhythm by no so large as an oblivious, or perhaps originally not very 
 
 means often * 
 
 aimed at else- industrious, reader (inferring from the constant reference 
 where. J.Q ^g au thor in this particular capacity) may think. 
 
 The greater part by far something like ninety-five per 
 cent I should say of De Quincey's voluminous com- 
 positions are written in the " standard " variety observing 
 great precision, and achieving remarkably constant success, 
 wherever he does not digress, or rather divagate, into one 
 of his fits of rigmarole and horse-play. His longest, 
 most elaborate, and most ambitious Essays, such as that 
 on The Casars, are entirely written in this style ; and even 
 the justly famous passage where he elaborates the dreadful 
 inevitableness of Roman tyranny suggested by Gibbon, 
 has hardly more perhaps indeed a good deal less 
 accompaniment of positive rhythm than Gibbon would 
 
 1 Another excellent example of the way in which positive metre is made 
 in prose to yield its legitimate, and withhold its illegitimate influence, may 
 be taken from the opening here. " Moonlight and the first," " tremblings 
 of the dawn," are metrically identical ; but "timid" between them staves off 
 any combined metrical effect, and switches the course of the rhythm into due 
 prose run.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 311 
 
 have given. 1 He does, to some extent, in his own work, 
 honestly carry out the sound artistic doctrine somewhat 
 inconsistently expounded in his Rhetoric Essay, that 
 ornament should never be super-added, that it should 
 grow naturally out of, or with, the development of the 
 subject. It is true that, with his almost uncurbed dis- 
 cursiveness, such development may at any moment take 
 any turn ; but it is by no means often that he allows it 
 to take this one. On the contrary, he is not seldom 
 almost as oratorical as Bolingbroke. 
 
 It has, I have no doubt, occurred to other students its connection 
 of elaborate rhythmical prose that curiously large pro- Wlth dream - 
 portions of the most famous examples of it are concerned 
 with dreams ; and I should not suppose that many of 
 them have failed to anticipate the following suggestion of 
 the reason. Dreams themselves are nothing if not 
 rhythmical ; their singular fashion of progression (it is 
 matter of commonest remark) floats the dreamer over the 
 most irrational and impossible transitions and junctures 
 (or rather breaches) of incident and subject, without jolt 
 or jar. They thus combine of their own nature and to 
 the invariable experience of those who are fortunate enough 
 to have much to do with them the greatest possible 
 variety with the least possible disturbance. Now this 
 combination, as we have been faithfully putting forth, is 
 the very soul the quintessence, the constituting form 
 and idea of harmonious prose. Unfortunately it is not 
 every one who has the faculty of producing this combi- 
 nation in words ; fortunately there are some who have. 
 We noticed how the dream-subject presented itself in 
 Moore ; we are seeing how it is almost indissolubly 
 connected with De Quincey's greatest performances ; it 
 will be found to be the same with Landor, with Kingsley, 
 with others. And, by a curious and convincing conversion, 
 we shall further discover that in certain great passages of 
 Ruskin, of Pater, and of yet others, which are not directly 
 
 1 It is worth noting, to his credit, that De Quincey, who follows Coleridge 
 so often (the " Rhetoric v. Eloquence " thimble-rigging itself seems to have 
 come from one of the innumerable sports of the Estesian brain), does not follow 
 him in the depreciation of Gibbon's style.
 
 312 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 connected with actual dreams in subject, the dream- 
 character impresses itself, all the same, on their style. 
 
 By combining the words " dream " and " fugue " in 
 one- instance, and by using the latter term not infrequently 
 in his critical and preceptist remarks upon the matter, De 
 Quincey has shown how thorough was his mastery of the 
 subject in theory as well as in practice. For the fugue 
 in the same way, as opposed to the tune, requires, I am 
 told, large variety with easy transition. But the fugue 
 part of the matter applies chiefly to the subject, and to 
 the general rhythmical, however intricate, connection. 
 Except in such uses of the same word as we traced in 
 Hooker and others, I doubt whether you can find much 1 
 recurrence of similar rhythmical motives of any bulk in 
 English prose, unless identical in actual wording, like De 
 Quincey's own Consul Romanus. But the qualities * of 
 pure sound that remain to be analysed and marshalled ; 
 the variety, the transition, by undulation and slide instead 
 of by breakage and jar, or at least severance and stop ; 
 and lastly the all-embracing progression of rhythm 
 these, though are by no means wholly independent of the 
 subject, are not primarily derived from it in origin, and 
 can be separated from it in result. 
 
 In the first long instance we shall take 2 there is a 
 certain peculiarity. This elaborate prose, for reasons not 
 very recondite, does not often take to the lighter vein. 
 In connection with what has just been said, it may be 
 noticed that dreams themselves are almost always serious : 
 the most pyramidally comic things occur in them, but 
 never present themselves lightly. 3 De Quincey, however, 
 has at least one passage which is not mere horseplay, 
 though it contains something of this comic enormity of 
 fact, and which is beautifully rhythmical. To a very 
 green modern taste it may be spoilt by the " sensibility " 
 
 1 I must emphasise "much." I have endeavoured occasionally to indicate 
 wider recurrences of foot- and group-motive, and I dare say any one who 
 follows me will find more. 
 
 2 From the earlier part of The English Mail Coach not the Vision of 
 Sudden Death, or the Dream-Fugue founded on it. 
 
 3 You wake laughing at them ; but you laugh at them because you wake.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 313 
 
 or " sentimentality " which came up first in France in the 
 Grand Monarch's time, was made European by Sterne and 
 caricatured by Mackenzie and the Germans, which is 
 flagrant (or diluvial) in Landor himself, and which was 
 finally turned out by Heine and Thackeray. But this 
 hardly affects the form. For the solution of the 
 " crocodile " the reader must go to the context. It is in 
 its origin one of the worst of De Quincey's " rigmarole " 
 foolings, but he subdues it, as a dream - motive, not 
 unworthily. 
 
 Out | of the darkness, | if I happen | to call back | the image | of 
 Fanny, | uprises | suddenly | from a gulf | of forty | years | a rose | 
 in June ; | or if I think | for a moment | of the rose | in June, | 
 uprises | the heavenly | face | of Fanny. | One | after the other, | 
 like | the antiphonies | in the choral | service, | rise | Fanny | and 
 the rose in June ; | then | back again | the rose in June | and Fanny. | 
 Then come | both | together, | as in a chorus, | roses | and 
 Fannies, | Fannies | and roses, | without end, | thick | as blossoms | 
 in Paradise. | Then conies | a venerable | crocodile | in a royal | 
 livery | of scarlet | and gold | with sixteen | capes ; | and the 
 crocodile | is driving | four-in-hand | from the box | of the Bath | 
 mail. | And suddenly | we | upon the mail | are pulled up | by a 
 mighty | dial | sculptured | with the hours | that mingle [ with the 
 heavens | and the heavenly | host. | Then | all at once | we are 
 arrived | at Marlborough | Forest, | amongst the lovely | house- 
 holds | of the roe-deer ; | the deer | and their fawns | retire | into 
 the dewy | thickets ; | the thickets | are rich | with roses ; | once 
 again | the roses | call up | the sweet | countenance | of Fanny ; | 
 and she, | being | the granddaughter | of a crocodile, | awakens | a 
 dreadful | legendary | host | of semi- 1 legendary | animals | 
 griffins, | dragons, | basilisks, | sphinxes | till at length | the whole | 
 vision | of fighting | images I crowds | into one | towering I
 
 3 i4 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 armorial | shield, | a vast | emblazonry | of human | charities | and 
 human | loveliness | that have perished, | but quartered | heraldic- 
 ally | with | unutterable | and demoniac | natures, | whilst over all | 
 rises, | as a surmounting | crest, | one | fair | female | hand | with the 
 forefinger | pointing, | in sweet | sorrowful | admonition, | upwards | 
 to heaven, | where is sculptured | the eternal | writing | which pro- 
 claims | the frailty | of earth | and her children. 
 
 Here, not only is the composition, both in dream and 
 description, extremely well done, but the rhythmical 
 setting is consummate and almost unique. Only that 
 ever unlucky word " female " jars seriously ; though he had 
 doubtless better have avoided the too close juxtaposition of 
 " chorus " and " choral." The always-to-be-wanted-and- 
 welcomed variety is present in quite extraordinary 
 measure, and the truth of the Dionysian doctrine has 
 hardly ever been better demonstrated than in the bold 
 use of 
 
 Roses and Fannies, 
 
 Fannies and roses, 
 
 which, from the difference of the supporting clauses on 
 each side, and the possibility of treating each apparently 
 dactylic-trochaic syzygy as differently arranged in itself, 
 does not violate the conditions of prose harmony in 
 the least. 
 
 The skill with which a " blank " 
 
 Amongst the lovely households of the deer 
 
 is avoided by the specification of " roe " is notable ; the 
 clause-items that follow are all harmonious in themselves, 
 and all harmonise together ; and the more pedestrian and 
 oratorical close warranted in these conditions by the 
 contrasting seriousness of the sense has still so'mething 
 that differentiates it from the usual eighteenth-century 
 tone of even the best similar passages earlier. 1 
 
 The Dream-Fugue, with its motive of tragedy just 
 
 1 This passage is also a very good exploring ground for definite foot- and 
 foot-group motives.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 315 
 
 averted, is naturally of a different tone and texture from 
 this ; and it sometimes comes near the loadstone-rock of 
 bombast. But it seldom actually touches that rock, nor 
 ever clings to it ; and the mastery of the rhythming is 
 really wonderful. I should like, if I thought the reader 
 would stand it, to scan the whole of the eleven pages as 
 a pendant to the Browne magnum ; and I rather think 
 that a considerable portion ought to be given. But some 
 general remarks must in any case be afforded. The 
 special thing, noticeable once more, is the extraordinary 
 dexterity with which improper metrification is avoided. 
 I suppose in the overture (" to be given tumultuosissima- 
 mente"} he designedly overstepped, or at least trespassed 
 on, the line, and accordingly it seems to me much the 
 worst part of the whole. But elsewhere that touch which 
 we have observed above the awmetring by insertion or 
 omission as well as by juxtaposition of contrasted rhythm 
 is omnipresent, as well as the sleight of pause or 
 emphasis which prevents a blank or other verse line from 
 offending the ear by completed metre, though the incom- 
 plete suggestion contributes to the general harmony. 
 
 The second passage of this fugue that of the frigate The 
 and line-of-battle ship, and still more the fourth the agam 
 chariot-race with the news of Waterloo through the 
 Minster and its Campo Santo are the longest and most 
 sustained tours de force of this remarkable composition ; 
 and (except that the tumultuosissimamente is perhaps 
 rather too much present throughout) they are astonish- 
 ingly successful as diploma-pieces. But for exhibition of 
 the quieter but intenser magic of the style, they must, I 
 think, yield to not a few sentences, and even paragraphs, 
 from the Suspiria, besides that magnificent one already 
 quoted and analysed. Browne himself might have 
 written some of those which follow, and I do not know 
 that they are any the worse for not having been more 
 fully worked up. 
 
 Like God, | whose servants | they are, | they utter | their pleasure | 
 not by sounds | that perish j or by words | that go astray, | but by
 
 3i6 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 signs | in Heaven, | by changes | on Earth, | by pulses | on 
 secret | rivers, | heraldries | painted | on darkness, | and hiero|glyphics | 
 written | on the tablets | of the brain. 
 
 This is quite quiet ; but it is quietly consummate. 
 Let anybody duly consider the little causes of the rhythm ; 
 the contrasted structure of the members ; the appearance, 
 after no epithet for " heaven " or " earth," of " secret " 
 before " rivers " ; the fourfold repetition of " by " and its 
 sudden dropping at " heraldries " ; the procession in bulk 
 of " heraldries " and " hieroglyphics " the dactyl to the 
 dochmiac and of the simple trochee " darkness " to the 
 paeon plus anapaest of " on the tablets of the brain " ; and 
 he will find that they are scarcely fortuitous. 
 
 The often dwelt-on sentence may be the finest, but 'the 
 three sisters are not so unequally parted, despite the 
 touches of sensiblerie with their almost invariable, and very 
 curious, vulgarising of rhythmical effect. 
 
 The eldest | of the three | is named | Mater Lachrymarum, | 
 Our Lady | of Tears. | She it is | that night and day | raves | and 
 moans, | calling | for vanished | faces. | She stood | in Rama, | when 
 a voice | was heard | of lamentation | Rachel | weeping | for her 
 children | and refusing | to be comforted. | She it was | that stood | 
 in Bethlehem | on the night | when Herod's | sword | swept | its 
 nurseries | of innocents ; | and the little | feet | were stiffened | for 
 
 ever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, 
 woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in 
 Heaven^ 
 
 Her eyes | are sweet | and subtle, | wild and sleepy, | by turns : 
 oftentimes | rising | to the clouds, | oftentimes | challenging | the 
 heavens. | She wears | a diadem | round | her head. | And I 
 knew | by childish | memories | that she could go | abroad | upon 
 
 1 If only he had stopped at " ever " ! or had compressed the following 
 gush into "so often heard tottering overhead" after "feet."
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 317 
 
 the winds | when she heard | the sobbing | of litanies, | or the 
 thundering | of organs, | and when she beheld | the mustering | of 
 summer | clouds. 1 
 
 But then it goes off into ordinary stuff about blind 
 beggars and their daughters ; while the reader will have 
 already noticed how hurtfully superfluous is the earlier 
 italicised passage. But the remainder is admirable. The 
 rhythm is mainly undulatory a common but by no means 
 universal mode and great play is made by lengthening 
 or shortening of clause-ends " tears," " faces," " com- 
 forted " ; " litanies," " organs," " clouds." 
 
 The second sister, our Lady of Sighs, who is the Sibylla 
 Palmifera of the great sentence, has not only nothing else 
 so palmary in her description, but nothing of the absolutely 
 first class. But, on the contrary, the third has an entire 
 paragraph, all but an entire page, which is, for rhythmical 
 maestria, hardly inferior to anything of the same length 
 in our literature : 
 
 But the third | sister, | who is also | the youngest ! | . . . 
 Hush ! | whisper | while we talk | of her. | Her kingdom | is not | 
 large, | or else | no flesh | could live ; | but within | that kingdom | 
 all power | is hers. | Her head, | turreted | like that | of Cybele, | 
 rises | almost | beyond | the reach | of sight. | She droops not ; | 
 and her eyes, | rising | so high, | might be hidden | by distance. | 
 But being | what they are, | they cannot | be hidden ; | through the 
 treble | veil | of crape | that she wears, | the fierce | light | of a 
 blazing | misery | that rests not | for matins | or vespers, | for noon [ 
 of day | or noon | of night, | for ebbing | or for flowing | tide, | 
 may be read | from the very | ground. | She | is the defier | of 
 God. | She also | is the mother | of lunacies, | and the suggestress | 
 
 1 Few better examples of the diminuendo can be found than this dochmiac, 
 pseon, amphibrach, monosyllable five, four, three, one. A dissyllabic foot 
 might be inserted, but is rendered unnecessary to some extent by what has 
 been often noticed the trochaic suggestion of the amphibrach.
 
 318 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 of suicides. | Deep | lie the roots | of her power ; | but narrow | is 
 the nation | that she rules. | For she | can approach | only | those | 
 in whom | a profound | nature | has been upheaved | by central | 
 convulsions, | in whom | the heart | trembles and | the brain | rocks | 
 under | conspiracies | of tempest | from without, | and tempest | 
 from within. | Madonna | moves | with uncertain | steps ; | fast | or 
 slow, | but still | with tragic | grace. | Our Lady | of Sighs j 
 creeps | timidly | and stealthily. | But this youngest | sister | moves 
 with | incalculable | motions, | bounding | and [as ?] with a tiger's j 
 leaps. | She carries | no key ; | for, though coming | rarely | 
 among men, | she storms | all doors | at which | she is permitted | to 
 enter | at all. | And her name | is Mater \ Tenebrarum | 'Our 
 Lady | of Darkness. 
 
 There is here hardly a fault in rhythm or sound ; if 
 there be any they are very small. Some might prefer 
 " concealed," " obscured," " masked " even, for the first 
 " hidden," and " earthquake " or some other word for the 
 first " tempest." " A s with " might be a little better than 
 " and with." But this is nothing. One dominant of the 
 rhythm is certainly from our point of view l Ionic a 
 minore, or its double, third paeon : " But the third sis-" ; 
 " who is also " ; " and her eyes, ris ing so high, might " ; 
 " or for vespers " ; " or for flowing " ; " the defier " ; " is 
 the nation " ; and so on. But the actual feet are kept 
 apart (only once come two together), and the syllable 
 that intervenes (" sis-ter ") between the first two occur- 
 rences just breaks the metre while suggesting the rhythm 
 in the due prose style. Once you can make a blank, but 
 otherwise complete, octosyllabic distich 
 
 For noon of day, or noon of night, 
 For ebbing or for flowing tide ; 
 
 1 I have not "given a handle" by opening the scansion anapsestically. 
 This is necessitated by "sis-ter." But the cross-scansion or "counterpoint- 
 ing" of sections is even more important in prose- than in verse-" prosody."
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 319 
 
 and once or twice also l something like a blank decasyllabic. 
 But in prose you would never read either that way ; it 
 falls naturally as divided above, and so, once more, breaks 
 metre while keeping rhythm, and allowing a sort of aura 
 of metre itself to remain. And the Ionics scarcely do 
 more than rise now and then, like bubbles in mineral 
 spring- water, through the varied yet always harmonically 
 adjusted foot -combinations. I do not believe that the 
 piece can be beaten, as a concerted piece, from the purely 
 artistic-rhythmical point of view, though of course you 
 might raise any amount of cavil at it from others. 
 
 Some, not merely of " the general." have a preference, 
 I believe, for the opening of Savannah-la- Mar. It is 
 fine, but seems to me to infringe, more than that last quoted, 
 on poetic diction-arrangement, and therefore, beautiful as 
 it is, to be slightly inferior. But it shall be duly scanned 
 and given : 
 
 God smote | Savannah-la-Mar, | and in one night | removed her, | 
 with all | her towers | standing | and population | sleeping, | from 
 the steadfast | foundations | of the shore | to the coral | floors | of 
 ocean. | And God said, | " Pompeii | did I bury | and conceal | from 
 men | through seventeen | centuries ; | this city | \ will bury, | but 
 not conceal. | She shall be | a monument | to men | of my | 
 mysterious | anger, | set | in azure j light | through generations | to 
 come ; | for I will | enshrine her | in a crystal | dome | of my tropic | 
 seas. | This city, | therefore, | like a mighty | galleon [ with all | her 
 apparel | mounted, | streamers flying, | and tackling | perfect, | seems 
 floating | upon the noiseless | depths | of ocean ; | and oftentimes | 
 in glassy | calms, | through the translucent | atmosphere | of water | 
 that now | stretches | like an air-woven | awning | above | the silent 
 encampment, | mariners | from every | clime | look down | into her 
 courts | and her palaces, | count her gates, | and number | the spires | 
 
 1 " Her kingdom is not large or else no flesh 
 Could live."
 
 320 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 The Auto- 
 biography. 
 De Quincey's 
 relation to 
 poetry. 
 
 of her churches. She is one | ample | cemetery ; | and has been | 
 many | a year. | But in the mighty | calms | that brood | for weeks | 
 over tropic | latitudes | she fascinates | the eye | with a Fata | 
 Morgana | revelation | as of human | life | still | subsisting | in 
 submarine | asylums, | sacred | from the storms | that torment | our 
 upper air. | 
 
 There are a few, but not many, or very striking, 
 attempts in the same vein scattered among the earlier 
 chapters of the Autobiography ; but the greater part of that 
 interesting (if most labyrinthine) rigmarole is written in 
 simple narrative fashion. It contains, however, one 
 curious passage, which is not without bearing on De 
 Quincey's general practice in elaborate prose a passage 
 in which, while frankly acknowledging doubts whether 
 his natural vocation lay towards poetry, he continues : 
 " Well indeed I knew, and I know, that had I chosen to 
 enlist among the soi-disant poets of the day amongst 
 those, I mean, who, by mere force of talent and mimetic 
 skill, contrive to sustain the part of a poet, in a scenical 
 sense and with a scenical effect I also could have won 
 such laurels as are gained by such merit," with more to 
 the same effect, covered indeed by Wordsworthian pre- 
 texts about spontaneity and the like, but simply amounting 
 to the " sour grapes," the " I could an I would," etc., 
 which De Quincey's own relentless psychology would 
 have been the first to unmask in another person. Enough 
 has been given to vindicate his true position, and it may 
 be repeated, with no unfairness, that in his case what might 
 (but I think never would) have made fair, and more than 
 fair, poetry in another, was diverted to make not many 
 but great, and on the whole original, examples of rhythmed 
 prose. 
 
 And certainly it was well so ; for we have generally 
 had in England, thank Heaven ! plenty of good poets, 
 and do not want doubtful ones ; while we had, in De 
 Quincey's time, constant and pressing need of an instaura- 
 tion of ornate prose-writing. Whether he was actually
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 321 
 
 the man who " fished the murex up," or took the hint from 
 that everlasting murex-finder, though not always murex- 
 user, S. T. C., I have said that I do not know ; that I do 
 not believe it possible to be certain ; and that I do not care. 
 Between him and Landor the prize certainly lies ; for 
 though the connections between De Quincey and Wilson 
 (still with a joint throw-back to Coleridge) were early and 
 intimate, I do not think that " Christopher " was at all 
 likely to be the discoverer. At any rate, in the examples 
 given, and in others, we have what had practically been 
 unknown in English since Thomas Burnet the muse 
 Polyhymnia busying herself once more with prose. She 
 has been fairly busy ever since ; and very busy, at 
 increasing speeds, for the last seventy years, and again for 
 the last forty. She has lately, after the unfortunate 
 fashion of the day, turned her business into companies, 
 with very limited individual liability ; and the shareholders 
 sometimes regard the early pioneers in the business, De 
 Quincey perhaps more particularly, as not merely effete 
 and rococo personages, but impudent interlopers, diverting 
 the attention of the public from " us youth." Of these 
 we may have briefly to reason now and again ; with them, 
 never. Here is a re-discovered art ; a lamp dug out of a 
 tomb, found burning, and used to rekindle other lamps 
 long disused and unlit ; a " British shell " (as poor Collins, 
 putting immortal poetry in a mortal, and most deservedly 
 mortal lingo, has it) which, catching from older examples 
 the undying melody of the ocean, revives it for fresh sets 
 of willing ears. Let anybody who will, cavil ; let us bow 
 the knee and hear. 1 
 
 1 If I have quoted and analysed nothing from the voluminous supplements 
 to the older editions of De Quincey, published by Professor Masson (Works 
 of De Quincey, 14 vols., 1889-90); Mr. Hogg, Uncollected Works of De 
 Quincey (2 vols., 1890); and Dr. Japp, Posthumous Works of De Quincey 
 (2 vols., 1891), it is from no want of original acquaintance with them at the 
 time of their appearance, or failure to renew that acquaintance for this special 
 purpose. They contain hardly anything suitable to it, except a pretty posi- 
 tive confirmation of what might be expected, in the absence from the additional 
 fragments of the Suspiria of anything like the elaboration of the completed 
 work. Incidentally, the pieces in English hexameter bad even of its bad 
 kind such as Anna Louisa (Posthumous Works, i. 94-99) show how essen- 
 tially De Quincey was a master of prose rhythm, and of that only. 
 
 Y
 
 322 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Wilson. The Nodes Ambrosianae> and the other works of their 
 author, have, for many years, been so little popular, and 
 the trend of modern criticism has been so much against 
 Wilson, that I dare say I shall be found fault with for 
 admitting him at all. But a critic who goes by popularity 
 does not deserve to exist ; and a person who, not going 
 by popularity, cannot see Christopher North's great, 
 though greatly flawed, merits may be a critic, but is 
 himself a hopelessly flawed one. Whether he was a 
 pupil or whether (for the status pupillaris is not one in 
 which one can imagine Christopher, at least consciously, 
 sojourning) he was merely a fellow-initiate with De Quincey, 
 it is certain that the defects of the latter are greatly 
 magnified and multiplied in him, and the merits much 
 more fitfully present. A finer taste might have left some 
 things of De Quincey's out altogether, and have omitted 
 more from their actual places ; but it is difficult to 
 reconcile the existence of any taste at all with the mere 
 writing let alone the allocation of many passages of 
 Christopher. De Quincey cannot always sustain himself at 
 the required height ; but it is the exception when Wilson 
 does not almost immediately drop from any point that 
 he may have for a moment reached. De Quincey does, 
 as a rule, recognise the great principle " Red ink for 
 ornament, and black for use." Wilson splashes and blots 
 his carmine about with the least, or with no, provocation. 
 Yet I do not see how the following passage can be left 
 out, though I shall not think it necessary to give another : 
 
 There | it was, | on a little | river | island, | that once, | whether 
 sleeping | or waking | we know not, | we saw | celebrated | a 
 Fairy's | Funeral. | First | we heard | small pipes | playing | as if 
 no bigger | than hollow | rushes | that whisper | to the night winds ; | 
 and more piteous | than aught | that trills | from earthly | instrument | 
 was the scarce | audible | dirge. | It seemed | to float | over the 
 stream, | every | foam-bell | emitting | a plaintive | note, | till the 
 airy | anthem | came | floating j over our couch, | and then |
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 323 
 
 alighted | without | footsteps | among the heather. | The pattering | 
 of little | feet | was then heard | as if living | creatures | were 
 arranging | themselves | in order, j and then | there was nothing | 
 but a more ordered | hymn. | The harmony | was like the melting | 
 of musical | dewdrops, | and sang, | without | words, | of sorrow | 
 and death. We opened | our eyes : | or rather, | sight came to them | 
 when closed, | and dream I was vision. | Hundreds | of creatures I 
 no taller | than the crest | of the lapwing, | and all | hanging down | 
 their veiled | heads, | stood | in a circle | on a green | plot | among 
 the rocks ; | and in the midst | was a bier, | framed, | as it seemed, | 
 of flowers | unknown | among the Highland | hills ; | and on the 
 bier | a Fairy J lying | with uncovered | face, | pale | as the lily, | 
 motionless | as the snow. | The dirge | grew fainter | and fainter, | 
 and then | died quite away ; | when two | of the creatures | came 
 from the circle | and took | their station, | one | at the head | and 
 the other | at the foot | of the bier. | They sang | alternate | 
 measures, | not louder | than the twittering | of the awakened | wood- 
 lark | before | it goes | up the dewy | air, | but dolorous | and full of | 
 the desolation | of death. | The flower-bier | stirred ; | for the spot | 
 on which it lay | sank | slowly | down, | and in a few | moments | the 
 greensward | was smooth | as ever | the very dews | glittering | 
 above | the buried | Fairy. | A cloud | passed over | the moon, | 
 and, with a choral | lament, | the funeral | troop | sailed | duskily | 
 away, | heard | afar off, | so still | was the midnight | solitude | of 
 the glen. | Then | the disenthralled | Orchy | began | to rejoice | as 
 before | through all | her streams | and falls ; | and, at the sudden | 
 leaping | of the waters | and outbursting | of the moon, | we awoke. | 
 
 There are some obvious blemishes here. The editorial 
 " we " jars throughout the idea of a committee or com- 
 mission seeing dreams, sleeping in a sort of Great Bed of
 
 324 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Ware on the moors, and simultaneously opening their 
 eyes, jeopardises the whole thing. " Than aught that 
 trills from earthly instrument " is not only blank verse, 1 
 not only poetic diction, but poetic lingo. " Order " and 
 " ordered," though probably a mere oversight, make an 
 unlucky one. One or two other knots may one find in 
 the reed ; but it is a reed for all that, and one of great 
 smoothness and beauty, waving and flowering by its own 
 river in no unlovely fashion, and capable of giving no 
 unlovely sound. When it is remembered that there are 
 hundreds of passages like it (though more " knotty ") scat- 
 tered for thirty years in writings which had a much larger 
 circulation than most of De Quincey's, and were collected 
 long before his, the importance of Wilson as an influence 
 and pattern will surely not require much more argument. 
 But it is part of our business to note that though this 
 passage from the Recreations is continued in almost as 
 high a key, the mode changes to something much more 
 like the oratorical : Burke, not Browne or Taylor, is once 
 more the pattern. 2 In fact, all these pioneers of polyphonic 
 prose are apt, and naturally enough apt, to slip into the 
 harangue, and in so doing to revert to the old alterna- 
 tion of antithesis and balance, instead of the continuous 
 meander of true rhythmical prose that is not oratory. 
 Landor-. But probably the majority of readers at the present 
 
 da >"> if thev take an y interes t at all in this matter, will 
 " think long " till they come to Landor. For my own 
 part, I should not, as I have already remarked, take much 
 account of the comparative unpopularity of De Quincey, 
 and the almost superlative unpopularity of Wilson, at 
 this moment. Times go wrong, and they go right again ; 
 and it is the business of the critic to correct if he can, 
 and if not, to neglect, their aberration. But there is not 
 the slightest question (putting the mere present -moment 
 quite aside) as to Landor's eminence, earliness, and 
 intrinsic interest in this respect. Whatever controversy 
 
 1 Salvable, however : see scansion. 
 
 2 Please observe that this is said of the (not-quoted) continuation, not of 
 the passage itself.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 325 
 
 there may be about his critical and intellectual power ; 
 however abysmal may be the gulf between those who 
 consider him a real and choice humourist, and those 
 who discern in him only a ghastly minus quantity of 
 the humorous ; whether it is, or is not, blasphemy to 
 call his tenderness the tenderness of a more refined 
 Mr. Tupman, and his high - breeding the deportment 
 of a nobler Mr. Turveydrop the magnificence of his 
 more than occasional phrase, and the beauty of his 
 frequent concerted pieces of prose harmony, stand out of, 
 and far above, all reasonable dispute. And with him, 
 too, we have the intensely interesting addition of the fact 
 that he was a poet, and no mean or minor poet either ; 
 whereas (as we have seen) De Quincey was not a poet 
 at all ; and (as it was unnecessary to say till this moment) 
 Wilson, though he wrote a good deal of verse, was a 
 minor poet almost to minimity. In fact, the conjunction 
 had never been seen since Greville and Donne in the 
 earlier seventeenth century ; for in Browne and Taylor 
 the poetic faculty was not much more prominent than in 
 Wilson himself. Nay, since the revival of polyphony in 
 prose, although the brocard that good poets are good 
 prose writers has generally held, 1 practice in two harmonies, 
 at full stretch of both, has been the exception rather than 
 the rule. Among Landor's own contemporaries, Shelley, 
 an exquisite prose writer, is, as we have seen, rather 
 severe in his rhythm. Among his successors, Ruskin 
 and Pater prove the rule in the other way : the one in 
 his failure, the other in his abstinence. Swinburne and 
 William Morris go, indeed, with Landor ; but under 
 restrictions, which we shall have to consider when we 
 come to them. 
 
 Of Landor, however, it may be said that he was not The relations 
 only master utriusque linguae, but master of both, in a and his-ose 
 somewhat curious and a very interesting way. We 
 never (as we so often do with poets as different as, for 
 instance, Shelley and Dryden) feel that the prose writer, 
 if he had been writing in verse, would have been vastly 
 
 1 Even Nietzsche does not turn this valuation topsy-turvy.
 
 326 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 more lavish, not merely of positive metre, as he was 
 bound to be, and of poetic diction, as he was entitled to 
 be, but of such rhythmical devices as are common to 
 poetry and the most elaborate prose. Whether, in the 
 poet, we sometimes feel that the contubernium of the 
 prose-writer has slightly chilled and stiffened the poetry, 
 is one of the innumerable controversial questions about 
 Landor, but, fortunately, one which need merely be 
 stated, not discussed or answered here. It is with the 
 prose that we have to do ; and I should not touch on 
 the verse at all, if it were not the case that in no English 
 writer known to me are prose and verse so close together, 
 and that a study of the verse is almost necessary is 
 certainly very helpful as a preliminary to the study of 
 the prose. Its results need only be communicated here 
 to the reader, in so far as they affect estimate of that 
 prose itself. 
 
 His critical His critical or preceptist deliverances on the subject 
 f *ke re l a ti ns f tne two, and on ornate prose, are, 
 however, necessary texts. Landor's " classicism " is 
 tolerably common or neutral ground ; and that it was 
 classicism with a strong Romantic dash is ground on 
 which it is scarcely necessary to walk with sword very 
 loose in the sheath, and cloak ready at an instant to be 
 rolled round the dagger arm. The unwary reader may 
 be at first startled when he finds the declaration, 1 " No 
 writer of florid prose was ever more than a secondary 
 poet." But he should take in connection with it the 
 much better known self-description, " Poetry was always 
 my amusement ; prose my study and business." He is 
 probably with Chatham rather than with Chesterfield, 
 when he makes the latter say that " cadence " is " trifling," 
 and the former respond, " I am not sure that it is ; for 
 an orderly and sweet sentence, by gaining our ear, 
 
 1 Almost all, but not all, the following extracts will be found in Sir Sidney 
 Colvin's excellent " Golden Treasury " Selections. I had made rather a 
 special study of Forster's edition before those Selections appeared, and I have 
 not failed to re-explore it. But Sir Sidney is as good as Jack Horner at 
 plum-pulling ; and I think it will seldom be necessary to refer readers 
 (unless they are wise enough to make the expedition of their own accord) to 
 the recesses of that most Brobdingnagian or Gargantuan pie.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 327 
 
 conciliates our affections." There are, scattered about 
 the Conversations, many other expressions which, put 
 as they are in the mouths of the most diverse speakers, 
 are pretty certainly authoritative in a punning sense, 
 not to mention that, though Landor thought himself 
 " dramatic," and perhaps really tried to elude identifica- 
 tions in the vast masquerade of these Conversations, his 
 own voice is never mistakable, whatever the cut of the 
 mask or the colour of the domino from which it proceeds. 
 Thus Archdeacon Hare, while promulgating the 
 orthodox classical doctrine that proper words in proper 
 places leave nothing to be desiderated, admits words 
 " beyond what is requisite to express the meaning," if 
 they are " peculiarly beautiful in themselves or strikingly 
 harmonious," a frank or permit than which hardly any- 
 thing more can be desired by the most florid or flam- 
 boyant colourist and tone-monger. Diogenes may talk 
 like Sprat, 1 and Barrow may advise us only to " say 
 things plainly " ; but both speak in character and ad hoc, 
 while Pollio the severe Pollio confesses that he loves 
 " a nobility and amplitude of style." Home Tooke 
 demands (it was early !) " variety of cadence," and Andrew 
 Marvell goes to the full length of saying that prose " may 
 be infinitely varied in modulation " nay, that it is " only 
 an extension of metres, an amplification of harmonies of 
 which even the best and most varied poetry admits but 
 few." I feel little doubt that this last sentence thoroughly 
 expresses Lander's opinion. As far as prose is concerned, 
 he could have quoted (but he did not like quotation) the 
 passages from the ancients which we have cited at the 
 opening of this book. As far as poetry went, I think 
 he speaks pro domo sua to some extent. It is perfectly 
 true that poetry at large cannot admit some harmonies 
 which prose welcomes, just as prose refuses all, in the 
 completed sense, that poetry admits. But that " poetry 
 admits few harmonies" may be true of Lander's, but is 
 not true of poetry itself. More especially in English 
 poetry the bounty of its harmonies is as boundless as 
 1 V. sup. p. 228.
 
 328 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 the sea, though (as Juliet full well knew in her case) it 
 may, and should, be bounded by the land of prose. 
 Results in a These are no mere random " preliminary observations " : 
 
 prose grand th e y are intended to lead those readers who may not 
 already have anticipated it to a definite grasp of Lander's 
 position in the department of elaborate prose-writing. It 
 is quite clear that he is aiming at and, in scattered 
 observations l through various mouthpieces, defining as 
 much as it was in his nature to define a sort of prose 
 " Grand Style," which was to unite magnificence with 
 a certain simplicity, severity with a not more than 
 appropriate opulence. Elsewhere he approves the 
 " colour " of Gibbon, being unquestionably right in doing 
 so. I should think he vacillated, or at least oscillated, 
 a little between the classical and the romantic poles f of 
 his curiously constituted taste, as to what the ancients 
 called frigidity. 2 In fact (snatching once more at what- 
 ever mantlet I can get hold of to shield me from the 
 charge of blasphemy), I should say that Landor has a 
 certain frigidity of a kind, mixed and peculiar to himself, 
 uniting both the ancient and the modern conceptions of 
 the fault. But at his best he is absolutely successful, 
 and so curiously charming that we should go to our 
 specimens. I cannot help it if the best of the best are 
 dreams ; and I have said something of that head already. 
 Besides, are not dreams "the best of the best" in all 
 things, and the " best of the best," dreams ? 
 
 An exceedingly characteristic piece is the following : 
 
 Specimens. At this | she smiled | faintly | and briefly, | and began | to break 
 
 off | some | of the more glossy | leaves ; | and we | who stood | 
 around her | were ready | to take them | and place them | in her 
 
 1 The reader may look up, if he likes, those in " Aristoteles and Callis- 
 thenes" (Works, ii. 184) on the dactyl as "the bindweed of prose," etc. ; 
 or Chatham's, in the dialogue with Chesterfield, above cited, on congrega- 
 tions of short syllables (iii. 146) (where, however, Landor's most Landorian 
 and unreasonable prejudice against Plato makes him forget the difference 
 between Greek and English). 
 
 2 It is not very different from the " turgidity " the charge of which (see 
 "Conversations with Hare") was evidently a sore subject with him.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 329 
 
 hair, | when suddenly | she held them | tighter | and let her hand | 
 drop. | On her lover's | asking her | why | she hesitated, | she 
 blushed deeply, | and said, | " Phoroneus | told me | I look best | in 
 myrtle." | 
 
 Innocent | and simple | and most sweet, | I remember, | was her 
 voice ; | and when | she had spoken | the traces of it | were re- 
 maining j on her lips. | Her beautiful j throat | itself | changed 
 colour ; | it seemed | to undulate ; | and the roseate | predomin- 
 ated | in its pearly | hue. | Phoroneus | had been | her admirer ; | 
 she gave | the preference | to Critolaus ; | yet the name | of 
 Phoroneus | had, | at that moment, | greater | effect | upon him | 
 than the re | collection 1 | of his | defeat. 
 
 Thelymnia | recovered herself | sooner. | We ran | wherever | 
 we saw | myrtles, | and there were many | about, | and she took | a 
 part | of her coronal | from every | one of us, | smiling | upon each ; | 
 but it was only | of Critolaus | that she asked | if he thought | that 
 myrtle | became her best. | " Phoroneus," | answered he, | not with- 
 out | melancholy, | " is infallible | as Paris." | There was something | 
 in the tint | of the tender | sprays | resembling | that of the hair | 
 they encircled ; | the blossoms, too, | were white | as her forehead. | 
 She reminded me | of those ancient | fables | which represent | the 
 favourites | of the Gods | as turning | into plants ; | so accordant | 
 was her beauty | with the flowers | and foliage | she had chosen | to 
 adorn it. | 
 
 Now Momus and Zoilus need not find themselves 
 absolutely baulked here. In one of the prettiest and 
 
 1 The reader may observe that I now seldom split words in scanning, 
 but I certainly think it necessary here. At the same time, the passage has 
 places, of which this is one, sermoni pedestriori propiora ; and the more prosaic 
 prose, as has been repeatedly pointed out, is tolerant of sections of six, and 
 indeed more syllables. "Than the recollection" in one foot -batch is 
 quite possible.
 
 330 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 most closely observed passages " undulate," " rose/," and 
 " predominate " are too near. One misses the beautiful 
 English word " rosial," which lasted up to the middle of 
 the seventeenth century, though a " brootle and savidge " 
 editor of Landor's time actually changed it, in Pharonnida, 
 to " roseate." " Him " and " his " at the end of the same 
 paragraph are ambiguous. 1 But these are mere beauty- 
 spots. The piece may, to some tastes, have a little of its 
 author's occasional approach to mawkishness of sentiment ; 
 but its execution is very nearly perfect. The extreme 
 quietness of Landor the music and motion as of the 
 brooklet stealing through little pebbles (to use the old 
 image) must strike any fit reader. Some of his man- 
 nerisms, particularly that of the monosyllabic close, are 
 noticeable, and the insistence of the Ionic a minore towards 
 the end of the piece might seem if the notation were 
 given without the words dangerously " rocking-horsy " ; 
 but it is entirely saved by those words themselves. If 
 you compare it with De Quincey, there is somewhat less 
 intensity and somewhat less volume of sound ; but the 
 music is something sweeter and something more subtle, 
 though altogether in a minor key. 2 
 
 The famous " Dream of Euthymedes " the Allegory 
 of Love, Hope, and Fear which follows this, is not only 
 beautiful, but is a still more remarkable example of quiet 
 symphony and polyphony. Unfortunately it is very long, 
 and scarcely divisible ; so I shall substitute for it another 
 well-known dream, that of Boccaccio, which is perhaps 
 Landor's most commonly accepted " diploma-piece," and 
 which has the advantage of forming a much closer 
 pendant to some things of De Quincey's greatest, while it 
 at least equally displays the difference of handling and 
 
 1 This is not a mere grammaticaster's quibble. Any ambiguity of sense 
 any necessity to ask yourself "What does this mean?" "to whom does this 
 apply?" etc. distracts the attention from the music. 
 
 2 The long sequence of amphibrachs towards the beginning (around her | 
 
 were ready, etc.) is rather unusual elsewhere, but I think characteristic. It 
 violates no law ; for the amphibrach, as I have tried to show in my work on 
 Prosody, is not exactly a citizen of English verse, though it has the fullest 
 civic rights in prose.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 331 
 
 fingering between the two masters. We shall, I hope, 
 find in it ground for more strictly critical consideration 
 of the merits and defects of the two than the crude 
 placing as " best " and " second-best " in which some 
 critics have indulged to De Quincey's disadvantage, and 
 in which I shall certainly not attempt to <c bring the 
 balance true " by depreciating Landor. 1 
 
 What a moment | of agony | was this | to me. | Could I | be 
 certain | how long | might be her absence ? | She went ; | I was 
 following ; | she made | a sign to me | to turn back. | I | disobeyed 
 her | only an instant ; | yet my sense | of disobedience, 2 | increasing | 
 my feebleness | and confusion, 2 | made me | lose sight of her. | In 
 the next | moment | she was again j at my side | with the cup | 
 quite full. | I stood | motionless ; | I feared | my breath | might 
 shake | the water | over. | I looked her | in the face | for her 
 commands | and to see it | to see it | so calm, | so beneficent, | so 
 beautiful ! | I was forgetting | what I had prayed for | when she 
 lowered | her head, | tasted | of the cup, | and gave it me. | I 
 drank ; | and suddenly | sprang forth | before me | many | groves, | 
 and palaces, | and gardens, | and their statues, | and their avenues, | 
 and their labyrinths | of alaternus | and bay, | and alcoves | of 
 citron, | and watchful | loopholes | in the retirements | of im- 
 
 1 He is perhaps the palmary instance of something that has been indicated 
 in the last paragraph of the Preface to this book. The whole of this chapter 
 would not be too much for a discussion of all the characteristics of his style ; 
 but such a discussion would be as wholly out of place. If any one thinks 
 that, though not an idle and offensive "placing," yet something of a dis- 
 tinction, should be attempted here between the three masters who have been 
 noticed, it may be shortly done. The afnaprla of De Quincey, which be- 
 comes something worse in Wilson, is a tendency to rant and rococo : that 
 of Landor a tendency to "prunes and prisms." But in the two greater the 
 ' ' frailty " never accomplishes a tragedy, and seldom outgoes the indulgence 
 accorded by Longinus, and by all his children the good critics, to an absence 
 of faultlessness. 
 
 2 Objection may be taken to my sometimes, perhaps usually, taking ' ' -ience, '' 
 "-ion," etc., as monosyllabic. The Quarterly was no doubt ignorantly 
 wrong in scolding Keats for making them dissyllables ; but the other value is 
 certainly commoner in modern English, especially if it be prose.
 
 332 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 penetra|ble ; pomegranate. | Farther off, | just below | where the 
 fountain | slipt away | from its marble | hall | and guardian | gods, | 
 arose from their beds | of moss, [ and drosera, | and darkest | grass | 
 the sisterhood | of oleanders, | fond | of tantalising, | with their 
 bosomed | flowers | and their moist | and pouting | blossoms, | the 
 little | shy | rivulet, | and of covering | its face | with all | the 
 colours | of the dawn. | My Dream | expanded | and moved 
 forward. | I trod | again | the dust | of Posilippo, | soft | as the 
 feathers | in the wings | of Sleep. I emerged | on Baia ; | I | 
 crossed | her innumerable arches ; | I loitered | in the breezy | 
 sunshine | of her mole ; | I trusted | the faithful | seclusion | of her 
 caverns, | the keepers | of so many | secrets; | and I reposed |*on 
 the buoyancy | of her tepid | sea. | Then Naples, | and her theatres, | 
 and her churches, | and grottoes, | and dells, | and forts, | and 
 promontories | rushed forward | in confusion, | now | among soft | 
 whispers, | now among sweetest | sounds, | and subsided, | and 
 sank, | and disappeared. | Yet a memory | seemed | to come fresh | 
 from every one ; | each | had time | enough | for its tale, | for its 
 pleasure, | for its reflection, | for its pang. | As I mounted | with 
 silent | steps, | the narrow | staircase | of the old | palace, | how 
 distinctly | did I feel | against the palm | of my hand | the coldness | 
 of the smooth | stone-work, | and the greater | of the cramps of iron | 
 in it. 
 
 Here, once more, is no absolute " faultlessness " 
 indeed Momus and Zoilus might have even easier game 
 with this, and I do not know that the very genius and 
 generosity of Longinus himself could make all the faults 
 into beauty-spots. Landor has been specially compli- 
 mented on his freedom from "the fault of breaking up 
 prose into the fixed and recurrent rhythm of verse." I 
 am not clear myself, long as has been my practice
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 333 
 
 in prosodic manipulation, how you can apply this 
 compliment to 
 
 I trod again the dust of Posilippo, 
 
 Soft as the feathers in the wings of Sleep. 
 
 It is, unluckily, a single sentence ; it cannot fall back on 
 buttresses, before and after, of the context so as to merge 
 itself in them ; and even the rhetorical counter-cadence 
 of the second line, " Soft | as the feathers in the wings 
 of Sleep," is one frequent in blank verse itself. It is so 
 beautiful that Exciseman Gill himself could hardly fire a 
 pistol or make a grab at it ; but I fear it is a little 
 contraband. " Greater " again, without " coldness " repeated 
 or some equivalent inserted, is questionable, and a hearer 
 of the piece might be pardoned a moment's puzzlement 
 not conducive to enjoyment as to whether the iron 
 cramps did not grate (in some unusual derivative of that 
 word) on the hand. While from the point of view of 
 " The Blessed Meaning," somebody might ask whether 
 there is any real opposition, or sufficient difference, between 
 " soft whispers " and " sweetest sounds." For it hath 
 been held by them of old time that it would be rather 
 difficult to get a sweeter sound than one kind of " soft 
 whisper." 
 
 But are we Momus ? Are we Zoilus ? Forbid it, 
 Heaven ! though the first was a kind of sort of God, and 
 the latter has been at least the tutelary saint of a very 
 large section of the most admired critics. There may be 
 things indeed there are as beautiful as that in English 
 prose ; there is none more beautiful ; while it is at the 
 same time abundantly characteristic. The short clauses 
 or sub-sentences already noticeable in the extract first 
 given, shorn of copulas and conjunctions adversative, 
 appear at once. Many, if not most, writers would have 
 written " and I was following," " but she made," " and 
 though I disobeyed," etc. It would not have made the 
 sentence unmusical, but it would have made a weaker 
 and sloppier music. The monosyllabic endings " full " 
 backed up by two precedent long monosyllables, " dawn,"
 
 334 -A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 " sleep," " mole," " sea " recur likewise. The extension 
 and rescission of foot and foot-closing word, cunningly 
 connected with meaning as well as with measure, can 
 seldom be found exemplified anywhere better than in 
 " Each had time enough for its tale, for its pleasure, for 
 its reflection, for its pang anapaest, paeon, dochmiac, 
 anapaest again ; with the closing words of the feet 
 long monosyllable, trochee, amphibrach, and recurring 
 long monosyllable. The Ionic makes its presence felt 
 throughout, sometimes explicitly, sometimes in an " under- 
 hum," derived from the marriage of two adjacent feet. 
 But it is rather more of a seasoning, and rather less of a 
 solid, than in the other piece. 1 
 
 But let us take some pieces of a different character, 
 reserving the right to return to others nearer to this. 
 Here is a little bit of description, very cunningly rhythmdd. 
 And if any one objects to the inversion and ellipsis of 
 " pleasant " as too poetic, let him remember that in the 
 very first English prose-writers who tried to make prose 
 ornate, such as Bishop Fisher, the means is resorted to. 
 
 Look then | around thee | freely, | perplexed | no longer. | 
 Pleasant | is this level | eminence, | surrounded | by broom | and 
 myrtle, | and crisp-leaved | beech | and broad | dark pine | above. | 
 Pleasant | the short | slender | grass, | bent | by insects | as they | 
 
 v ^ ^ ~ ^- - s_ >-, s_- ^ ~ 
 
 alight on it | or climb along it, | and shining | up | into our eyes, | 
 interrupted | by tall | sisterhoods | of grey | lavender, | and by dark- 
 eyed | cistus, | and by lightsome | citisus, | and by little troops | of 
 serpolet | running | in disorder | here and there. 
 
 The insidious and irrepressible heroic omnibus rhyth- 
 mis insurgens crops up here again in 
 
 
 
 And crisp-leaved beech and broad dark pine above. 
 But here you can throw " and crisp-leaved beech " back 
 
 1 Observe, too, the effect, after the unusual run of long-foot paeons and 
 dochmiacs "and their statues," etc., of the iamb, with its strong mono- 
 syllabic latter half " and bay," as a tonic contrast.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 335 
 
 to the preceding rhythm group (" surrounded by broom 
 and myrtle, and crisp-leaved beech "), while " and broad 
 dark pine above," thanks to the almost molossian com- 
 bination or group of three separate long monosyllables, 
 also escapes the suggestion. " Tall sz'sterhoods of gr^y 
 lavender " is a cunning and consummate instance of 
 vowel-sound contrast ; while " cistus " and " citisus," with 
 their respective epithets, give undoubtedly a bold but 
 successful try at nearly, but not quite, exact consonance. 1 
 There are several favourite passages in the " ^Esop 
 and Rhodope " ; but the most frequently quoted that 
 describing the sale of the child by her famished father 
 derives part of its charm from a set and intentional 
 puerility which would render elaborate rhythm unsuitable. 
 Another, and one of the most perfect of all, I postpone. 
 And I think that elsewhere Landor has a little undergone 
 the charge of being too definitely poetical, if not in form, 
 at any rate in phrase. 
 
 Pleasant | is yonder | beanfield | seen | over the high | papyrus | 
 when it waves | and bends ; | deep-laden | with the sweet | heaviness j 
 of its odour [ is the listless | air | that palpitates | dizzily | above it ; 
 but Death | is lurking | for the slumberer | beneath j its blossoms 
 
 is beautiful but (I am content myself to undergo the 
 charge of hypercriticism) it seems to me too definitely 
 stichic it is not rhythmical prose so much as loosely 
 metred verse. It is classable with Blake and Whitman, 
 not with Taylor and Browne. And it is obvious that that 
 ambidexterity with the two harmonies which has been 
 credited to Landor would be likely to lead to this some- 
 times. On the other hand, a piece of extraordinary 
 beauty (not, I think, given by Sir Sidney Colvin), but 
 standing, like some of De Quincey's noted above, in most 
 interesting proximity to the standard style itself, is this 
 from " Brooke and Sidney." 
 
 1 It should be noticed here, as well as in the last extract, that Landor 
 makes great play with the xenon the unfamiliar but well-sounding word 
 " alaternus," "drosera," "serpolet"
 
 336 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Ay, my friend, | there is a greater | difference | both in the 
 stages | of life | and in the seasons | of the year | than in the | con- 
 ditions | of men ; | yet the healthy | pass | through the seasons | 
 from the clement | to the inclement, j not only | unreluctantly, | but 
 rejoicingly, | knowing | that the worst | will soon | finish | and the 
 best | begin | anew ; | and we | are desirous | of pushing | forward | 
 into every | stage | of life | excepting | that | alone | which ought | 
 to allure | us most | as opening | to us | the Via Sacra | along 
 which | we move | in triumph | to our eternal | country. | We labour | 
 to get through | the moments | of our life | as we would | to get 
 through | a crowd. | Such | is our impatience, | such | our hatred 
 of | procrastination | in everything | but the amendment | of our 
 practices | and the adornment | of our nature, | one would imagine | 
 we were dragging | Time | along | by force | and not he us. | We 
 may | in some measure | frame | our minds | for the reception | of 
 happiness | for more | or for less ; | we should, however, | well | con- 
 sider | to what port | we are steering | in search of it, | and that 
 even | in the richest | its quantity | is but too | exhaustible. | It is 
 easier | to alter | the modes | and qualities | of it | than to increase | 
 its stores. | There is | a sickliness | in the firmest | of us | which 
 induceth us | to change | our side, | though reposing | ever | so 
 softly ; | yet, | wittingly | or unwittingly, | we turn | again j soon | 
 into our old | position. | Afterward | when we have fixed, | as we 
 imagine, | on the object | most | desirable, | we start | extravagantly ; | 
 and blinded by | the rapidity | of our course | toward | the treasure | 
 we would seize | and dwell with, | we find | another hand | upon the 
 lock | . . . the hand | of one | standing | in the shade . . . | 'tis 
 Death ! 
 
 Here, on the contrary, is another l which is of the first 
 
 1 From "Mahomet and Sergius."
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 337 
 
 interest because it is eighteenth century in substance, 
 but eighteenth century saturated with the new tone. If 
 any one will compare it with one of the De Quincey pieces 
 or with its author's own " Dream of Boccaccio " above, he 
 will see at once what I mean. 
 
 Delightful | is it | to battle [ in the moonsea | on the sands | and 
 to listen | to tales | of genii | in the tent ; | but then | in Arabia | 
 the anxious j heart | is thrown | into fierce | and desperate | com- 
 motion | by the accursed | veil | that separates | beauty [ from us. 
 
 Here | we never | see the blade | of that | sweet herbage | rise | 
 day after day | into light and loveliness, | never | see the blossom | 
 expand ; j but receive it | unselected, | unsolicited, | and unwon. | 
 Happy | the land | where the youthful | are without | veils, | the 
 aged | without | suspicion ; | where the antelope | may look | to 
 what resting-place | she listeth, | and bend | her slender | foot | to 
 the fountain | that most | invites her. 
 
 Odoriferous 1 | gales! | whether of Deban | orDafar, | if ye bring | 
 only fragrance | with you, | carry it | to the thoughtless | and light- 
 hearted ! | carry it [ to the drinker J of wine, | to the feaster | and 
 the dancer | at the feast. | If ye never | have played | about [ the 
 beloved | of my youth, | if ye bring me | no intelligence | of her,| 
 pass on ! | away with you ! 
 
 There is much in that which Addison, which Johnson, 
 which even Burke, could not, or certainly would not, have 
 given ; and yet somehow " the bones of it," as the familiar 
 phrase goes, are not foreign to those of the " Vision of 
 Mirza " and the more ambitious parts of Rasselas, still less 
 to the flights of Burke. As I scan it I feel that sense of 
 superfluity though not of incongruity of which I have 
 spoken before. The hinges of its rhythm are things like 
 
 1 I have pointed out elsewhere (Hist. Pros. iii. 410) that this word is bad 
 in English verse of any kind. In prose it must, I think, take the above 
 scansion, but I think it should be avoided there also. 
 
 Z
 
 338 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 the position of " on the ranks " and " in the tent," where 
 the clauses swing backwards and forwards on them ; 
 rhetorical emphasis, like " unselected, unsolicited, and 
 unwon," where, though there is the foot contrast, it hurries, 
 neglecting itself, to the mere stress of " unwon" There 
 is altogether too much elocution about the piece ; it 
 suggests the declaimer, stooping and rising and throwing 
 his hands about and advancing to the edge or retiring to 
 the back of the rostrum, raising and lowering his voice, 
 and running over long strings of almost slurred syllables, 
 till he pounces on and explodes the chosen one. It has 
 the rhythm that such rhetoric requires, but then we must 
 take rhetoric not in its highest sense. 
 
 Compare the following. It, too, is descriptive ; it is 
 passionate ; and it ends like the last, with a direct rhetorical 
 address, this time to a person. But it neither trespasses 
 on the region of half-metred verse, nor has it the limita- 
 tions of the oratorical balance and adaptation to " delivery." 
 If not of the most exquisite, it is that almost more 
 valuable if less delightful thing for us a specimen 
 eminently characteristic of the author. 
 
 So say | all fathers, | so say | all husbands. | Look | at any | old 
 mansion-house | and let | the sun | shine | as gloriously | as it may | 
 on the golden vanes | or the arms | recently | quartered | over the 
 gateway | or the emblazoned | window | and on the happy | pair | 
 that haply | is toying at it. Nevertheless | thou mayst say | of a 
 certainty | that the same | fabric | hath seen | much sorrow | within | 
 its chambers | and heard | many | wailings ; | and each time | this 
 was | the heaviest | stroke | of all. | Funerals | have passed | along | 
 through the stout-hearted | knights | upon the wainscot | and the 
 laughing | nymphs | upon the arras. | Old servants | have shaken | 
 their heads | as if somebody | had deceived them | when they found | 
 that beauty | and nobility | could perish. 
 
 Edmund ! | the things | that are too true | pass by us | as if |
 
 339 
 
 they were not | true | at all ; | and when | they have singled | us 
 out | then only | do they strike us. | Thou and I | must go too. 
 Perhaps | the next year | may blow us | away [ with its fallen | leaves. 
 
 That is very quiet and not in the least in the bravura 
 kind. But not the rhythmical value of a single syllable 
 is lost ; and the music is heard all through, not in bursts 
 and silences, or in alternations of melody and recitative. 
 There are numerous trochaic endings that the trochee 
 among its manifold and curious qualities has a peculiar 
 note of wailing should be noticed and it will be good to 
 contrast with the antithesis just noted of " on the sands " 
 and " in the tent " that, so unantithetical, of " upon the 
 wainscot " and " upon the arras." 
 
 Of citations from Landor there could be no end if 
 Pleasure were dictatress, but Duty, that insufficiently 
 engaging but peremptory daughter of the great Voice, 
 fixes a limit. Let us conclude with two short passages 
 of extraordinary beauty one distinguished by absolute 
 liberation from the style of marked balance ; the other 
 showing a certain inclination towards that style, but more 
 away from it : 
 
 There is a gloom | in deep love | as in deep | water ; | there is a 
 silence | in it | which suspends | the foot, | and the folded | arms | 
 and the dejected | head | are the images j it reflects. | No voice | 
 shakes | its surface ; | the Muses | themselves | approach it | with a 
 tardy | and a timid | step, | and with a low | and tremulous | and 
 melancholy | song. 
 
 Here the image, beautiful as it is, may have a little of 
 that conventional appropriation of special features and 
 gestures to special emotions in which eighteenth-century 
 aestheticians revelled till they sometimes became ridiculous. 
 But the rhythm is simply perfect. I should put it beside 
 the passage of the eyes of the Mater Suspiriorum as 
 unsurpassed since the renaissance of numerous prose. 
 The Ionic, as usual, is not a little responsible for its
 
 340 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 motive, but it is greatly varied ; and in the exquisite last 
 clause (" and with a low and tremulous and melancholy 
 song ") it is not present at all. 
 
 The other (the reserved one from JEsop and Rhodope) 
 is rather longer and more complex, and there is absolutely 
 no possibility of Mephistopheles intruding his cock's- 
 feather ; but it is a leetle more rhetorical : 
 
 Laodameia | died ; | Helen | died ; | Leda, | the beloved | of 
 Jupiter, | went before. | ft is better | to repose | in the earth | be- 
 times | than to sit up late ; * | better | than to cling | pertinaciously | 
 to what | we feel crumbling | under us, | and to protract | an in- 
 evit|able i fall. | We may enjoy | the present | while we are | 
 insensible | of infirmity | and decay ; | but the present, | lijce a 
 note | in music, | is nothing | but as it | appertains | to what is past | 
 and to what | is to come. | There are no fields | of amaranth | on 
 this side | of the grave ; | there are no voices, | O Rhodope, | that 
 are not | soon mute, | however | tuneful ; | there is no name, | with 
 whatever | emphasis | of passionate | love | repeated, | of which the 
 echo | is not faint | at last. 
 
 Beyond these great -in -little descants on the two 
 master -themes of literature, Love and Death, it is 
 probably unnecessary to go ; and here, as with the other, 
 it does not seem indispensable to make much detailed 
 comment. 2 The scansion should speak for itself to all 
 who are able to hear it ; and those who cannot are 
 
 1 It is not disagreeable to remember that he who wrote this was himself to 
 "sit up late" far beyond the usual bed-time, to congratulate himself on having 
 had time to "warm both hands before the fire of life." Even putting his 
 " dramatic " element aside, there is no real inconsistency in the two 
 expressions : they are the motives of the two sides of that shield of mood, 
 which, if we could not turn it, would be but half a protection to us. 
 
 2 When we draw, or at least attempt, general conclusions, it will be 
 permissible to return to these perhaps. But meanwhile I may suggest 
 attention to a small point. Elsewhere Landor, with his usual precision (oh, 
 call it not pedantry !), prefers the form " Helena " as more classical. But 
 here the three final a's of the names would be importunate, and he admits the 
 English shortening.
 
 341 
 
 certainly not likely to have reached, save in a casual and 
 disgusted dip, the 34ist page of this book. 
 
 On the work of these three masters who, let it be Some general 
 remembered, were all writing, though all the pieces cited observatlons - 
 from them were not written, if not actually by 1820, by a 
 period very little later, and perhaps in some cases earlier 
 as well as on that of Coleridge, which is actually older 
 than the century, a few general observations may be 
 permissible, especially as we purpose nothing more of the 
 nature of an " Interchapter " before the " Conclusion " 
 itself. That there is something, in every example which 
 has been given, markedly different from any prose that 
 we have seen, since the third quarter of the seventeenth 
 century at latest, few will, I think, deny ; though whether 
 the change is an improvement or not is, of course, an 
 entirely open question. Of the nature of that change 
 itself it would be possible to say many things ; but a 
 good many of these also would be doubtfully relevant or 
 certainly not so. Whether to reverse and embroider the 
 application of Johnson's metaphor on Dryden they found 
 English prose stucco and left it like the stones of St. 
 Mark, or whether they found it like the Parthenon at 
 Athens and left it like the Pavilion at Brighton, we are 
 not here to decide. But in the rhythmical view 
 though, once more, the " for-better-for-worse " remains a 
 matter of taste the fact of the change is unquestionable, 
 and the nature of it is our proper business for observations 
 and considerations. 
 
 The most important of these is something which has The four kinds 
 been frequently glanced at, but which it is perhaps by this relation 1 to '" 
 time possible and desirable to set forth in a more explicit prose, 
 and orderly fashion. The principle from which this book 
 starts, and which, as Dante says, 1 " we do not argue about 
 but take for granted," is that formulated in the quotation 
 from Quintilian on the title-page the omnipresence, in 
 speech and writing alike, of at least the materials of rhythm, 
 contrasted in a fashion which something like the communis 
 
 1 Unamquamque doctrinam oportet non probare, sed suum aperire subjectum 
 (De viilg. eloq. \. i. ).
 
 342 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 sensus of Europe has agreed, until recently at any rate, to 
 call " long " and " short." These contrasted values may 
 be treated with such slovenliness that anything like a 
 distinct and harmonious rhythm disappears ; but the 
 materials of it remain in almost any possible articulation, 
 and in almost any possible juxtaposition of written words. 
 It assumes some structure and arrangement even in the 
 ordinary conversation of educated and well-bred persons ; 
 and literature can hardly exist without it But, in 
 literature, the character and complexity of its structure 
 assumes forms the difference of which, for our present 
 purpose especially, may be conveniently reduced to four 
 their order (for the same reasons of convenience) being 
 in a sense reversed, so that we may proceed from the most 
 elaborate downward and not vice versa. These forms or 
 groups of forms are : 
 
 I. Poetry or metre. 
 
 II. Unmetrical or only partially metrical poetry, which, 
 however, retains the arrangement of " verse," or division 
 into sections not identical but corresponding with one 
 another, definitely separated by a considerable pause, 
 which is not determined merely by the sense. 
 
 III. Fully but strictly rhythmical prose. 
 
 IV. Prose in which rhythm, though present, is sub- 
 ordinated to other considerations. 1 
 
 i. Non-prosaic With the first metre or poetry proper we have 
 poetry 1 nothing to do here except in so far as it is probably the 
 oldest form of literature, and therefore of literate rhythm, 
 and in so far likewise as it forms a useful contrast, and 
 even as it were a sort of garde-fou in our enquiries. In it 
 the rhythm is always arranged correspondingly, though 
 sometimes in a very intricate correspondence, with the 
 answering parts at considerable distances one from 
 another ; and though large substitution of equivalent 
 rhythmical units is in some cases permitted. In other 
 words, the principle of sameness is that which is at the 
 
 1 It does not seem necessary to make a special division for the prose 
 which employs arbitrary mechanical divisions, not rhythmical or quasi-metrical 
 in character, but for rhetorical effect, like that of Sterne, Lamb, or Carlyle, in 
 their different ways.
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 343 
 
 bottom of it, though this sameness may be, and in all the 
 very best poetry always is, allied with as much variety as 
 is consistent with its preservation. And one main, if not all 
 but autocratic and automatic, means of securing this is the 
 division into " lines " or " verses," which, in their recurrence, 
 bring out this identity in diversity. 
 
 The second division is small in its contents, com- n. Hybrid 
 paratively recent in its appearance as regards most ve 
 eminent and modern European literatures, and perhaps 
 not, in the general opinion, absolutely sure of a valid 
 position, but still logically entitled to demand a place 
 with the other three. It arises when the writer, desirous 
 of retaining a mechanical division of his word-groups 
 somewhat similar to that of verse, and usually intending 
 to retain also much rhythm and even something like metre, 
 rejects the principle of actual recurrence and correspond- 
 ence in length, quantitative equivalence and the like, 
 while generally also retaining a good deal of specially 
 poetic diction. This in a more or less original form that 
 of " parallelism " appears to be of secular existence in 
 Oriental poetry. With a strong cant or tilt towards 
 metre itself, it, or something very like it, exists in the older 
 Teutonic poetry. And by an apparently direct result of the 
 union of Hebrew and Teutonic influences in the sixteenth- 
 century translations of the Bible pushed further by the 
 individual predilections and achievements of three English- 
 speaking persons of talent, which on two occasions 
 amounted to genius it has had some very remarkable 
 examples in the last two centuries. These are Macpherson's 
 Ossian, which influenced all Europe, and produced a kind 
 of prose-verse even in French language of all European 
 languages most apparently ill-suited to it ; Blake's " Pro- 
 phetic " books, which have been imitated, though never 
 successfully ; and the peculiar manner, of which almost as 
 much may be said, of Walt Whitman. If, in some character- 
 istics, this medium is certainly not verse, in others it is 
 as certainly not prose ; but it will scarcely be deemed 
 criminal if we devote at least a short Appendix to it. 
 
 It is necessary, however (and this necessity has by no
 
 344 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 in. Pure means always been recognised), to distinguish it most 
 rhthmed bly c3 - r ^ u ^Y fr m tne P ure but highly rhythmical prose which 
 has been the subject of this chapter ; which will, to some 
 extent, figure in the next, and which may absorb the whole 
 of yet another before we have finished. This prose does 
 not require, and at its best ought not to suffer, distribution 
 into snippets. It bears, as prose should, no other 
 mechanical groupings than those of clause, sentence, and 
 paragraph ; and its sentences should possess reasonable 
 continuity of rhythm throughout the whole of the para- 
 graph, the close of which, and that only, is the place of 
 breaking-off. This prose, however, is fully, and in every 
 syllable, susceptible of quantification and consequent foot- 
 scansion ; the full necessary character of all speech and 
 writing (vide motto) being thus loyally recognised and 
 brought out. But this scansion is arranged on a principle 
 totally different, and indeed opposed, when compared 
 with that of poetry. Instead of sameness, equivalence, 
 and recurrence, the central idea turns on difference, 
 inequality, and variety. And though a certain amount of 
 correspondence is introduced by the necessary presence of 
 the identical quantity-combinations called feet, these are 
 to be so arranged that they will not constitute metre. 
 Fragments of different metres melted or welded rather 
 than dovetailed or mosaicked into the whole can hardly 
 be avoided, and indeed will positively improve it ; but if 
 they emerge and " stick out " it is doomed. Its great law 
 is that every syllable shall, as in poetry, have recognis- 
 able rhythmical value, and be capable of entering into 
 rhythmical transactions with its neighbours, but that 
 these transactions shall always stop short, or steer clear, 
 of admitting the recurrent combinations proper to metre, 
 iv. Prose in The enormous bulk of prose, though in gradations 
 differing extremely from one another, may be arranged 
 downward from this, according to the amount of attention 
 which the writer has paid to rhythm as such ; the 
 principles of it which he has adopted ; and the success 
 with which he has carried these principles out. We have 
 seen that even some of the masterpieces of De Quincey
 
 ix REVIVAL OF RHYTHMICAL ELABORATION 345 
 
 and Landor show a certain tendency to sink from the 
 polyphonic and symphonic music of the highest kind 
 to the antithetic groups, oratorical or other, of the standard 
 style. It is, at first sight, curious, though not perhaps 
 really surprising, 1 that hardly anything of the same sort 
 is to be found in the great symphonists of the seventeenth 
 century. We have done, however, no despite to this style, 
 which, in its highest examples, is satisfying if not exactly 
 delectable, or, at least, transporting ; and which is un- 
 doubtedly the best for the general purposes of prose. 
 But it has been pointed out that, in all but its very best 
 examples, though a not unpleasant rhythmical effect may 
 be got out of the clause-pairs or batches taken together, 
 the rhythmical appeal dwindles through clause, and word- 
 group, and word, and syllable, and letter, till it sometimes 
 very nearly vanishes. Although in good English delivery, 
 as in good English writing, the principle of general 
 atonic equality, diversified with crashes and bursts of 
 emphasis, never prevails as it does in French, some 
 progress is made in this direction. The foot-division, 
 inseparable from rhythm and scarcely capable of extension 
 beyond the fifth syllable, becomes merged in long section- 
 sweeps, which are hardly analysable. And this, increasing 
 as you go lower, constitutes the main difference between 
 the whole of this Fourth class and the fully rhythmed 
 Third. 2 
 
 Thus rhythmical prose, in its perfection, is distinguished 
 from poetry by subtle but easily recognisable differences 
 of diction, arrangement, and the like, but most of all, and 
 most essentially, by the absence of definite and ostentatious 
 correspondence in rhythmical-metrical character, and of 
 equivalent or definitely corresponding " lines." It is 
 
 1 The fact is simply that this style was not yet discovered generally, though 
 there is something much like it, especially in Jonson. Extravagant and often 
 caricatured balance, as in Lyly, and even before him in Ascham, was common ; 
 but Dryden had not yet come. 
 
 2 It would require, of course, a very elaborate system of sub-classification 
 to take in all the varieties. Some very distinguished and delightful writers, 
 such as Goldsmith, would, in fact, have to be "species by themselves," like 
 Walton above (p. 216) and Lamb below (p. 362). But I do not think that, 
 in a book on the present scale, I am bound to provide excursus of this kind.
 
 346 A HISTORY Ob ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CH. ix 
 
 separated from the various hybrids of the Ossianic, 
 Blakite, or Whitmanian kind in the same way, though 
 not to the same degree, in more respects than one 
 especially in the absence of even irregular stichic division. 
 It obeys to the full that universal law of prose which 
 dictates continuous and uninterrupted flow, not merely to 
 the close of the sentence, but (with a difference of course) 
 to the close of the paragraph. Yet it retains, in a greater 
 degree perhaps than some at least of these hybrids, the 
 rhythmical valuation of every word and syllable ; and by 
 this retention, as well as by the intense variety of its 
 rhythm, it is further distinguished from the lower kinds of 
 prose proper. 
 
 The work of all the writers with whom this chapter 
 has been more specially busy lasted till well into the 
 second half of the nineteenth century, Wilson surviving 
 the dividing line for nearly a lustrum, De Quincey for 
 nearly a decade, and Landor until the century had all but 
 entered upon its last third. But their position as pioneers 
 is quite unaffected by this ; and it will not prevent us, any 
 more than the fact that Mr. Ruskin's work had begun 
 long before even Wilson died, from making an arrange- 
 ment of the remaining subjects, convenient in practice and 
 not really repugnant to chronology.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, l82O-l86o 
 
 The coexistence of different styles in 1820 Momentary return to 
 Landor Comparative merits The " standard " still prevalent, 
 but with a tendency to degradation Definition of " slovenli- 
 ness" Return to examples Coleridge again Jeffrey Note 
 on italics Chalmers Note on Irving Hazlitt Lamb Leigh 
 Hunt Carlyle Macaulay The novelists : Miss Austen and 
 Peacock Lord Beaconsfield Dickens Thackeray Newman. 
 
 THE space devoted, in the last chapter, to the farthest The coexist- 
 developments of rhythmical prose up to date should, Afferent styles 
 of course, misguide no one as to the existence of many in 1820. 
 other kinds during the lifetime of the authors there chiefly 
 discussed ; or even as to the practice, actually there 
 noticed, of these same writers in different styles. By far 
 the larger part of Landor's voluminous prose is, like the 
 larger part by far of De Quincey's, written in a variety of 
 the " standard " style ; and it may even be said that, for 
 the moment, few took up the new method. 
 
 It may possibly amuse some readers to repeat an ex- Momentary 
 perience which I made, just before writing these words, in 
 re-reading the Conversations straight through. At the 
 distance of a bare half-dozen pages (Works, ii. 171-177) 
 the two following short passages specially caught my eye. 
 Here is the first : 
 
 On perceiving the countryman, she [a tigress suckling her young~\ 
 drew up her feet gently, and squared her mouth, and rounded her 
 eyes, slumberous with content ; and they looked, he said, like sea- 
 grottoes, obscurely green, interminably deep, at once awaking fear 
 and stilling and compressing it. 
 
 347
 
 348 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 The other is this : 
 
 Where priests have much influence the gods have little ; and 
 where they are numerous and wealthy, the population is scanty and 
 miserably poor. War may be, and certainly is, destructive ; but 
 war, as thou well knowest, if it cuts off boughs and branches, yet 
 withers not the trunk. 
 
 Comparative Here Momus may suggest that " and compressing " is 
 otiose in meaning and not exactly an improvement in 
 rhythm ; and Zoilus may say that " as thou well knowest " 
 is superfluous and out of keeping. The Judicious Critic will 
 prefer to draw attention to the polar difference between 
 the colour, the tone, and the consequent rhythmical effect 
 of the two, both of them, by the way, occurring in Greek 
 conversations, in both of which Xenophon actually figures. 
 The first has, in its small compass, every characteristic of 
 the new mode exact and subtle observation of " {he 
 streaks of the tulip," careful expression of it in specially 
 selected and coloured words, and arrangement of those 
 words in harmonies, every note of which requires valuation 
 in order to get the full effect. The other, though there 
 is a " figure " in it, appeals to the intellect only ; and 
 therefore contents itself with the old balanced and counter- 
 parted arrangement, where the clauses zigzag in parallels 
 like the bars of a double rule. I do no despite to this 
 " standard style " ; as I have again and again observed, I 
 think it ought to be kept in nine out of ten, if not for 
 ninety-nine out of a hundred, instances ; and I differ as 
 strongly as possible with the notion of some, if not most, 
 of our younger critics, that every prose writer should aim 
 at flourish and arabesque, at the mot rayonnant and the 
 epithet fetched from Tarshish, golden or ivoirine, peacockish 
 or perhaps apish, as the case may be. I do not want the 
 concert of the plain of Dura as a constant accompaniment 
 to my daily food of prose. But I certainly would not 
 spare to interpose these things whenever there is time and 
 temper to enjoy them ; and I consider them, though 
 not (as some do vainly talk) a greater delight to the senses 
 of the mind than poetry itself, one hardly less. 
 
 The vast majority of writers for nearly a couple of
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 349 
 
 generations showed themselves to be of no very different The 
 opinion in practice as to one-half of this, though probably 
 
 few of them would have assented to the other in theory. 
 An eccentric or two, such as Lamb earlier and Carlyle 
 later, excepted, not merely Southey but the vast majority 
 of English prose-men from 1800 to 1840 at least aimed 
 at the standard style. Most people did the same from 
 1840 to 1860, though a new prophet of rhythm in excelsis 
 like Ruskin might gain a few followers. And the com- 
 parison of the Life of Schiller with Carlyle's own later 
 work shows it is indeed a commonplace of style-criticism 
 that Carlyle himself might conceivably never have written 
 in any other. For a time the elaborate rhythm is as a 
 voice sounded in the desert. 
 
 But this standard style itself though, in the hands not 
 merely of Southey but of younger men like Lockhart, it 
 produced work of all but the highest excellence, of the 
 very highest perhaps in its own class though in those of 
 others, especially of Newman, it took to itself something 
 of the fuller rhythms, and became a thing of incomparable 
 idiosyncrasy and beauty was yet necessarily subject to 
 that mysterious law of disease and degradation which is 
 observable everywhere in the young gazelle, in the " piece 
 of bread, Particularly large and wide," and therefore also 
 in prose. Once more the phenomenon which the Byzantine 
 patriarch had formulated in the ninth century repeated 
 itself in the nineteenth, and the clear, plain, simple style 
 " fell to flatness and meanness." 
 
 How early this degradation took place, and exactly but with a 
 what its character was, are points on which difference of tendency to 
 
 11 -4. ui i T a j u j-rr / r de g radatlon - 
 
 opinion will inevitably arise. 1 find such difference (of 
 
 the friendliest kind as before, and without any Athanasian 
 certainty on my own part that he is wrong and I am 
 right) between myself and Sir Henry Craik. In fact, this 
 disagreement is only a sort of corollary of the other, 
 formerly noted, as to Johnson. Sir Henry thinks that 
 eighteenth -century prose (not merely Johnson's, but in 
 general) was " stately," but that " before that century had 
 passed the tradition of stateliness had waned," and that
 
 350 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 prose passed, with the nineteenth, into a tripartite degenera- 
 tion of sham formality (such as that of Jeffrey and even 
 Macaulay), fantastic ornament (such as that of De Quincey 
 and Landor), and archaic or antique phraseology (such as 
 that of Lamb or Carlyle). But he does not lay much 
 stress on a fourth " corruption," as Aristotle would say, 
 that of slovenliness. Now I should myself (as indeed the 
 reader will partly anticipate from what has been said 
 already) not merely exempt De Quincey, Landor, Lamb, 
 and Carlyle from all taint of corruption of any kind, but 
 put the " standard style " of the first generation, at least, 
 of the nineteenth century, as a style general, and for 
 purposes of all work and every day, far above that of any 
 writer of the eighteenth, with perhaps the exception of 
 Berkeley. I should put down the " stilts," the pedantic 
 mannerisms, as, if not a damnosa hereditas from Johnson 
 himself, at any rate a misuse of his goods, of which some 
 prodigal sons like Hawkesworth earlier, and Mackintosh 
 later, were guilty long before the eighteenth ended. And 
 I should put the great sin of the early nineteenth as 
 " slovenliness," from which, though I do not specially 
 admire average eighteenth-century prose, I admit that it 
 was mostly free. 
 
 Definition of It is, however, very necessary to define this word with 
 "sioyenh- SO me care : for, like other words of its class, if not of most 
 
 ness. ' 
 
 classes, it is commonly used with the greatest looseness. 
 Half-educated critics have a constant tendency to confuse 
 idiom with solecism, and " bad grammar " with breaches 
 of the rules of grammar-books which have no authority at 
 all. They shy at words with which they are themselves 
 unfamiliar, without considering whether these words are 
 correctly formed, whether they supply a single designation 
 for something that would otherwise require a cumbrous 
 periphrasis, whether they add colour and tone to the com- 
 position, whether they increase that stock of not exact 
 but pretty close synonyms which is the greatest treasure 
 and glory of the English language. But these things, 
 and many others that are commonly objected to as 
 " slovenly," are, necessarily at least, nothing of the kind.
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 351 
 
 Slovenliness is something quite different. It may be said 
 generally to require ignorance, carelessness, and bad taste, 
 in about equal proportions, but exercised usually in the 
 sequence just given. The sloven does not know the good, 
 does not care whether what he chooses is good or bad, 
 and is inclined by his nature to the latter. But the 
 neologist must know not a little and take some pains ; 
 the parenthetic writer must be thoughtful, and anxious to 
 express his full thought. Even slang need not be slovenly 
 if it is employed, not out of slothful complaisance, but to 
 give force, colour, and idiosyncrasy. True slovenliness has 
 myriad forms ; but it may generally be traced to a habit 
 of writing, not in the writer's own way, but with tags and 
 catchwords and commonplaces picked out of the common 
 gutter, and huddled together regardless of the principles 
 of real (not book) grammar, of the proper sequence of 
 thought, of the usage of the best writers, and of the general 
 tendency and constitution of English. And in this respect, 
 I think, the average nineteenth-century writer, at least 
 for two-thirds of the century, was more peccant than his 
 father, grandfather, or great-grandfather of the eighteenth. 
 But it may be said, " What has all this to do with 
 rhythm ? " Why, a good deal. I shall scarcely be 
 charged with having made a Baal or a Juggernaut of 
 meaning, or of being a martinet as to vocabulary and 
 grammar. But unless due (not undue) attention is paid 
 to all these things, the mind has not the serenity which 
 is necessary to the enjoyment of the harmony of prose. 
 The "added charm of metre" may sometimes disguise 
 nonsense ; but, for my part, since " numerous prose " be- 
 came common, I find nonsense in it (which is necessarily 
 more common likewise) more disgusting than ever ; and 
 a really bad piece of really bad English will poison any 
 fountain from Bandusia to Eunoe itself. " Reliable " is, as 
 far as sound goes, a perfectly good second paeon, fit, pro 
 tanto, to appear anywhere ; but its illegitimate formation l 
 
 1 Of course I know its defenders and their defences. But, except in mere 
 
 "It is loathsome and worthless in eveiy sense, 
 And loathsome it will be a hundred years hence."
 
 352 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 and its vulgar society would make it as a flesh-fly 
 in opobalsamum, even though the sentence in which it 
 appeared were as beautiful as those two singled out above 
 from the Suspiria and the Conversations. " And which " 
 in its numerous correct uses 1 may appear as a spondee, 
 an iamb, or perhaps sometimes a pyrrhic, or as constitut- 
 ing longer feet which require such syllables, and be 
 welcome anywhere in any sentence, plain or splendid. 
 But misused, it spoils the beauty of what might otherwise 
 be a triumph of Mercury and Apollo working together. 
 " Dilapidated " is in itself a positively fine dochmiac, fit for 
 the greatest occasions : yet we saw what an unlucky taint 
 of association made it do in a fine passage one in close 
 neighbourhood to the finest. " Individual " is good, and 
 indeed necessary, in more than one sense ; as misused for 
 " person " it is a silly abomination. 
 
 Now in this respect I should, as I have already said, 
 heartily agree with Sir Henry Craik that nineteenth- 
 century (or at least early nineteenth-century) prose is 
 inferior to eighteenth, and that part at least of the reason 
 is that there is so much more of it, that it has been so 
 much more hastily written, and that the education of the 
 persons writing it has been progressively deteriorating. 
 But something must perhaps be added as to the character 
 of the best examples of these plain styles. They all 
 look easy enough ; but either they are terribly hard, or 
 they require some special gift that very few people possess. 
 What style has fewer ostensible tricks, involves less 
 recourse to recondite materials, than Dryden's ? Who has 
 equalled it ? For an entire century some most perhaps 
 of the cleverest writers of English tried to write like 
 Addison. How did they succeed ? But this later 
 " standard style " is the most puzzling of all. Southey's 
 was and is the object of an admiration which has. never, 
 in competent persons, been affected by private grudges, 
 political differences, dislike of what is called his Pharisaism, 
 want of interest in his subjects, any one of the innumer- 
 able extra-literary agencies which affect judgment. Have 
 
 1 Much more numerous than the grammar-books seem to think, by the way.
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 353 
 
 you ever tried to analyse it ? I have, again and again, 
 and have failed completely to get any closer than gener- 
 alities, mostly negative. You can see easily enough what 
 he does not do ; you can appreciate the result of what he 
 does ; but the rest " goes out into mystery." 
 
 It is, however, necessary, and should be not unprofit- Return to 
 able, to take examples of the principal prose-writers of a exam P les - 
 general kind who established themselves as craftsmasters, 
 before the influence of De Quincey and Landor, re- 
 inforced by the mighty flood of Mr. Ruskin's prose 
 picture-symphonies, drew, and swept along with it or 
 before it, almost all those writers who aimed at elaborate 
 prose. They will be selected partly because of their 
 undoubted greatness, partly because some have thought 
 them great, chiefly because they illustrate the standard 
 style in various ways. They will show it, now maintain- 
 ing its position, now degenerating into rhetoric without 
 rhetorical beauty, now attaining that beauty either by 
 sheer expertness in the use of its own means or (a new 
 thing to which especial attention may be invited) by play- 
 ing the Israelite to the purely rhythmical style's Egyptian, 
 and borrowing jewels of silver and jewels of gold, here 
 and there, to adorn a body which is in general character 
 and constitution only moderately rhythmical. Some of 
 them will be only partially scanned, or not scanned at all, 
 so as to bring out, as it were by illustration or diagram, 
 these differences of character to the eye as well as to 
 the ear. 
 
 We may start, by a partial retrogression, with a Coleridge 
 passage from Coleridge where, it will be seen, he has got agam- 
 rid of the " Surinam toad " character, and has remembered 
 something of his earlier cunning l and inspiration as 
 shown in the Anima Poetae fragments. But, as will also 
 be seen at once, it lies, in scheme of rhythmical com- 
 position, between the purely polyphonic and the style of 
 oratorical balance. The scanned and unscanned parts, on 
 
 1 That he did not remember more was perhaps due to that "blighting 
 commonsense " which has been surprisingly discovered, in him and other 
 nineteenth-century writers, as opposed to the " imaginative understanding" 
 of the twentieth. 
 
 2 A
 
 354 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 the principle just mentioned, should show this better than 
 comment in detail. There are fragments of definite har- 
 monic quality in the passages left unscanned, and I have 
 italicised them for the reader to scan, if he likes. But the 
 general principle of their context is not much beyond 
 the standard balance and the occasional emphasis of 
 the end. 1 
 
 The first range of hills that encircles the scanty vale of human 
 life is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its 
 ridges | the common | sun | is born | and departs. | From them | 
 
 the stars | rise, | and touching them | they vanish. By the many, 
 even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but 
 imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by 
 mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have 
 courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these 
 vapours appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which 
 none may intrude with impunity j and now all aglow with colours 
 not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness 
 
 and power. But in all ages | there have been a few, | who, | 
 measuring | and sounding | the rivers | of the vale | at the feet | of 
 their furthest | inaccessible | falls, | have learned | that the sources | 
 must be far | higher | and far inward ; | a few, | who, even | in the 
 
 Note on 1 In printing this extract from Coleridge, I have ventured on a slight 
 
 italics. infidelity to the text which I trust this note will excuse. He seems to have 
 italicised (at any rate the printed text does so) the words "its," "them," 
 " them " in the second sentence. It was a common habit with him, and it was, 
 perhaps, caught from him by De Quincey, whose employment of the italic in 
 his most ambitious passages is copious. Now, with some diffidence, I am still 
 bold enough to think this wrong. I do not, as some lofty persons do, despise 
 the italic altogether as a " refuge of the forcible feeble," or as feminine and 
 indeed governessy. I think that it is quite admissible, and very useful, in 
 what De Quincey himself called " the literature of knowledge " in exposition, 
 in argument, and the like. It undoubtedly assists not so very feeble folk who 
 read, and I am by no means sure that it indicates feebleness in those who 
 write. At any rate, I think it is legitimate for me and for my house a 
 convenient porter's knot for those who do porter's work, a pointing-stick for 
 those who serve the blackboard. But in the higher realms of the "literature 
 of power " italics seem to me out of place and annoying, and, in deliberately 
 and elaborate rhythmical prose, not merely a superfluity, but a confession of 
 failure or, least, of self -diffidence. The rhythm, if it is real, will supply the 
 required emphasis unfailingly, while the italic signpost (and something more) 
 tfz><?r-emphasises (non de me fabula), and invites that sovereign mistake of 
 paying too much attention to a single syllable which we have so often noticed.
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 355 
 
 level | streams, | have detected | elements, | which neither | the vale 
 itself | nor the surrounding | mountains | contained | or could 
 
 supply. | How and whence to these thoughts, these strong prob- 
 abilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally 
 supervene, can be learnt only by the fact. 
 
 On the other hand, the next piece to be given, from Jeffrey. 
 Jeffrey, is wholly " standard," but a standard of the less 
 harmonious kind, snip-snappy, and what has been repre- 
 hensibly denominated "clatteraceous," not a little resembling 
 the manner of Jeffrey's most celebrated contributor. 
 Rhythmical, no less than logical, criticism puts a very 
 low value on the obvious trick of " less this than that ; 
 less that than t'other " ; and, to borrow its own way of 
 writing, though the passage cannot be pronounced to be 
 without affectation, it may certainly be said to be without 
 any eminent grace. 
 
 Of his style, it has been usual to speak with great, and, we think, 
 exaggerated praise. It is less mellow than Dryden's, less elegant 
 than Pope's or Addison's, less noble than Lord Bolingbroke's, and 
 utterly without the glow and loftiness which belonged to our earlier 
 masters. It is radically a low and homely style, without grace and 
 without affectation, and chiefly remarkable for a great choice and 
 profusion of common words and expressions. Other writers who 
 have used a plain and direct style have been for the most part 
 jejune and limited in their diction, and generally give us an 
 impression of the poverty as well as the lameness of their language ; 
 but Swift, without ever trespassing into figured or poetical expressions, 
 or ever employing a word that can be called fine or pedantic, has 
 a prodigious variety of good set phrases always at his command, 
 and displays a sort of homely richness, like the plenty of an old English 
 dinner, or the wardrobe of a wealthy burgess. This taste for the 
 plain and substantial was fatal to his poetry, which subsists not on 
 such elements ; but was in the highest degree favourable to the 
 effect of his humour, very much of which depends on the imposing 
 gravity with which it is delivered, and on the various turns and 
 heightenings it may receive from a rapidly shifting and always 
 appropriate expression. 
 
 If the words used above seem too harsh, let a few 
 others of explanation, which, without retracting or 
 hedging, may soften the apparent injustice, be added
 
 356 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 before we pass to an example decidedly less favourable 
 still, which will itself, to some extent, rehabilitate by 
 comparison this Little Master of " the narrow English." 
 We have nothing to do with the substance of the criticism, 
 though those who insist on the indissolubleness of form 
 and meaning might make not a bad innings out of that. 
 The point to which I wish to draw attention is the 
 fatiguing and monotonous zigzag of advance and retreat 
 the omnipresence and almost omnipotence of the " but," 
 which enables the writer, as if with the see -saw of a 
 folding-machine, to supply himself with constant parallel 
 pairs of measured-off deliverances. The sentences do 
 not indeed jar ; the meaning is clearly enough conveyed : 
 nobody can call it bad English. If you take an English 
 composition-book or an American " Manual of Rhetoric," 
 I daresay you will not be able to find a fault in it with 
 the help of the most exacting of either class. But it has 
 no juice, no sap, no unction, and therefore (with a rapid 
 but not illegitimate shift of category), it has no rhythm 
 beyond mere pendulum work. 
 
 Yet, as was said above, Jeffrey by no means gave the 
 worst examples of this style. Read the following : 
 
 The elements of Euclid, gentlemen, have raised for their author 
 a deathless monument of fame. For two thousand years they have 
 maintained their superiority in the schools, and been received as 
 the most appropriate introduction to geometry. It is one of the 
 few books which elevate our respect for the genius of antiquity. It 
 has survived the wreck of ages. It had its days of adversity and 
 disgrace in the dark period of ignorance and superstition, when 
 everything valuable in the literature of antiquity was buried in the 
 dust and solitude of cloisters, and the still voice of truth was 
 drowned in the jargon of a loud and disputatious theology. But 
 it has been destined to reappear in all its ancient splendour. We 
 ascribe not, indeed, so high a character to it because of its antiquity ; 
 but why be carried away by the rashness of innovation ? why pour 
 an indiscriminate contempt on systems and opinions because they 
 are old ? Truth is confined to no age and to no country. Its 
 voice has been heard in the Temple of Egypt, as well as in the 
 European University. It has darted its light athwart the gloom of 
 antiquity, as well as given a new splendour to the illumination of 
 modern times. We have witnessed the feuds of political innovation 
 the cruelty and murder which have marked the progress of its
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 357 
 
 destructive career. Let us also tremble at the heedless spirit of 
 reform which the confidence of a misguided enthusiasm may attempt 
 in the principles and investigations of philosophy. What would 
 have been the present degradation of science had the spirit of each 
 generation been that of contempt for the labours and investigations 
 of its ancestry ? Science would exist in a state of perpetual infancy. 
 Its abortive tendencies to improvement would expire with the short- 
 lived labours of individuals, and the extinction of every new race 
 would again involve the world in the gloom of ignorance. Let us 
 tremble to think that it would require the production of a new 
 miracle to restore the forgotten discoveries of Newton. 
 
 Now that is the work of Thomas Chalmers, who, Chalmers, 
 though now a good deal forgotten everywhere, even in 
 Scotland, and never much read by Englishmen in the 
 narrow sense, has often had high praise, and was, for 
 instance, regarded by my late friend and predecessor, 
 Professor Masson, as worthy of mention, even with the 
 greatest of all his Christian namesakes with Browne 
 himself, as a master of ornate style. To me, I confess, 
 it seems a mere beating of the pan, or kettle, or caldron, 
 or pot, with a beater of material as dull as the object 
 beaten is dissonant. The general sense -effect goes 
 perilously near to that burlesque danger of the style 
 which Sydney Smith brought out so admirably in respect 
 to Mackintosh ; l and I say this with no failure to honour 
 Euclid, whom, in dead opposition, I believe, to modern 
 views, I regard as supplying, with his native Greek, the 
 two best subjects for a boy's education. Nor am I 
 thinking of its " piffle " about " dark periods of ignorance 
 and superstition," any more than I am bribed by its 
 " trembling at the heedless spirit of reform." My point 
 is the idle and mechanical tick-tack of its antithesis, the 
 wooden clatter of its stump-ended and staccato clause- 
 balance. Johnson without his sinews and marrow ; 
 Gibbon without his undulating harmony ; Burke with his 
 store of phrase and image and argument withered like 
 the herbs that they sell in paper bags these are what 
 it makes me think of. And its general manner is what 
 Sir Henry Craik (though I do not know that he would 
 agree with me in my selection of example) has, to my 
 
 1 V. sup. p. 271.
 
 358 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 thinking, justly called " the worthless husks of a formal 
 literary tradition." 1 
 
 Haziitt. Hazlitt is, I believe, often thought of he has, at any 
 rate, sometimes been described as a rather careless 
 
 Note on l There is no doubt that Chalmers's "assistant," Edward Irving, caught 
 Irving, a great deal of this pompous style from his chief. He informed, or inflated, 
 it, of course, with something more ; and his effect as an orator has the 
 weightiest vouchers. In fact, I could add that of my own father, who as a 
 young man had heard Irving preach, to the printed testimonies of the greatest 
 men of letters of 1820-1830. But when one reads him, the case is altered. 
 I need hardly comment much on the following mingle-mangle of bad blank 
 verse, bad sham Burke, bungled Biblical phrase, tags of hackneyed quotation, 
 clumsily peppered 'eths, and everywhere cheap and vulgar rhetoric, profaning 
 the Immensities : 
 
 " Imagination cowers her wing, unable || to fetch the compass of the ideal 
 scene. || The great white throne descending out of Heaven, || guarded and 
 begirt with the principalities and powers thereof, || the awful presence at 
 whose sight the Heavens || and the earth flee away, and no place for them is 
 found, the shaking of the mother elements of nature || and the commotiom of 
 the hoary deep || to render up their long-dissolved dead, 1| the rushing to- 
 gether || of quickened men upon all the winds of Heaven || down to the 
 centre || where the Judge sitteth on his blazing throne. || To give form and 
 figure and utterance to the mere circumstantial pomp of such a scene no 
 imagination availeth. || Nor doth the understanding labour less. || 
 
 ' ' The Archangel with the trump of God, riding sublime in the midst of 
 Heaven, and sending through the widest dominions of death and the grave 
 that sharp summons which divideth the solid earth, and || rings through the 
 caverns of the hollow deep, || piercing the dull cold ear of death and the 
 grave with the knell of their departed reign, || the reign of death, the sprout- 
 ing of the grave || with the vitality of the reign || of life, the second birth of 
 living things, || the reunion of body and soul, the one from unconscious sleep, 
 the other from apprehensive and unquiet abodes, the congregation of all 
 generations over whom the stream of time hath swept this outstretches my 
 understanding no less than the material imagery confuses my imagination. || 
 And when I bring the picture to my heart || its feelings are overwhelmed ; 
 when I fancy this quick and conscious frame one instant reawakened, the 
 next reinvested, the next summoned || before the face of the Almighty Judge, || 
 now begotten, now sifted through every secret corner, my poor soul possessed 
 with the memory of its misdeeds, submitted to the scorching eye of my 
 Maker, my fate depending upon his lips, my everlasting changeless fate, I 
 shriek [shrink ?] and shiver with mortal apprehension ; and when I fancy the 
 myriads || of men all standing thus explored and known, || I seem to hear 
 their shiverings like the aspen leaves in the still evenings of autumn. || Pale 
 fear possesseth every countenance, || and blank conviction every quaking 
 heart. || They stand like men upon the perilous edge || of battle, wjthholden 
 from speech and pinched for breath through excess of struggling emotions 
 shame, remorse, mortal apprehension, and trembling hope. " 
 
 One must needs mutter, Tuba minim spargens somtni, and the rest, for 
 some time, to reconsecrate the sullied magnificence of the scene. But, from 
 our special side, remember to compare this blank verse with Ruskin's ; note 
 the failure to make any symphony even of such rhythmical fragments as there 
 are, and own the terrible possibilities of ornate style blundered and 
 caricatured.
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 359 
 
 writer ; and it is certainly improbable that he ever 
 revised much. His often -mentioned and sometimes 
 reviled habit of quotation, moreover, to some extent 
 justifies Landor's, in other respects, excessive objection 
 to quotation generally, after a fashion which may not 
 have struck those who have not accustomed themselves 
 to the rhythmical point of view. 1 But much of his more 
 general and abstract criticism (such as most of his survey 
 of poetry in general) is an admirable " standard " example, 
 sinewy, not inharmonious, and altogether a fit vehicle for 
 that, in some ways, unmatched critical faculty of his. And 
 he also and often wrote in the more elaborately imagina- 
 tive and rhythmical way, as in these two famous passages, 
 the description of his haunts at Winterslow in the 
 " Farewell to Essay-writing," and the curious indignant 
 agony lost love forcing truth and praise from present 
 hatred of the reference to Coleridge which closes the 
 English Poets, as " Poetry in General " had opened it. 
 
 In this hope, while " fields are dark and ways are mire," I follow 
 the same direction to a neighbouring wood, where, having gained the 
 dry, level greensward, I can see way for a mile before me, closed in 
 on each side by copsewood, and ending in a point of light more or 
 
 less brilliant, as the day is bright or cloudy. What a walk | is this | 
 to me ! J I have no need | of book | or companion | the days, | the 
 hours, | the thoughts | of my youth | are at my side, | and blend | 
 with the air | that fans | my cheek. | Here | I can saunter | for 
 hours, | bending | my eye | forward, | stopping | and turning | to 
 look back, | thinking | to strike off | into some [ less trodden | path, | 
 yet hesitating | to quit | the one | I am in, | afraid | to snap | the 
 brittle | threads | of memory. | I remark | the shining | trunks | 
 and slender | branches | of the birch trees, | waving j in the idle | 
 breeze ; | or a pheasant | springs up | on whirring | wing ; | or I 
 recall | the spot | where I once found | a wood-pigeon | at the foot | 
 
 1 Because it is almost certain that (unless it is chosen with special attention 
 to the point, which can seldom be possible) the rhythm of the quotation will 
 be different from that of the context.
 
 360 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 of a tree | weltering | in its gore, | and think | how many | seasons | 
 have flown | since " it left its little life in air." | Dates, | names, | 
 faces | come back | to what purpose ? | Or why | think of them | 
 now ? | Or rather | why | not think of them | oftener ? | We walk | 
 through life | as through | a narrow | path, | with a thin | curtain | 
 drawn | around it ; | behind | are ranged | rich portraits, | airy harps | 
 are strung | yet we will not | stretch forth | our hands | and lift 
 aside | the veil, | to catch | the glimpses of the one | or sweep | 
 the chords | of the other. | As | in a theatre | when the old- 
 fashioned | green curtain | drew up, | groups of figures, | fantastic j 
 dresses, | laughing | faces, | rich banquets, | stately columns, | 
 
 gleaming vistas | appeared beyond ; | so | we have only | at *any 
 
 ~ ^ ^ _^ 
 
 time | to " peep through the blanket of the past," | to possess our- 
 selves | at once [ of all | that has regaled | our senses, | that is 
 stored up | in our memory, | that has struck | our fancy, | that has 
 pierced | our hearts : | yet to all this | we are | indifferent, | in- 
 sensible, | and seem intent | only | on the present | vexation, | the 
 future | disappointment. 
 
 But I may say of him here, that he is the only person I ever 
 knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the 
 only person from whom I ever learnt anything. There is only 
 one thing he could learn from me in return, but that he has not. 
 
 He was the first | poet | I ever | knew. | His genius | at that 
 time | had angelic | wings, | and fed | on manna. | He talked on | 
 for ever. | His thoughts [ did not seem | to come | with labour | 
 and effort, | but as if borne | on the gusts | of genius, \ and as 
 if | the wings of his | imagination | lifted him } from off | his feet. | 
 His voice | rolled [ on the ear | like the pealing | organ, | and its 
 sound | alone | was the music | of thought. | His mind | was 
 clothed | with wings ; | and raised | on them, | he lifted | philosophy |
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1830-1860 361 
 
 to heaven. | In his descriptions, | you then saw | the progress | of 
 human | happiness | and liberty | in bright | and never-ending | 
 succession, | like the steps | of Jacob's | Ladder, | with airy | shapes | 
 ascending | and descending, | and with the voice | of God | at the 
 top | of the ladder. | And shall I, | who heard him | then, | listen 
 to him | now ? | Not I ! . . . | That spell | is broken ; that time | 
 is gone for ever ; | that voice | is heard | no more ; | but still | the 
 recollection | comes rushing by | with thoughts | of long-past years, | 
 and rings | in my ears | with never- 1 dying | sound. 
 
 Neither of these is faultless. The first is not improved, 
 on the principle given above, by the quotations, or by 
 the hackneyed, though not definitely quoted, " weltering 
 in its gore." " We walk through life as through a narrow 
 path " is a too definite blank verse opening a new period, 
 and so unmistakable. In the second, the repetition of 
 " genius " in the early lines had been better avoided, and 
 the juxtaposition of " years " and " ears " towards the end 
 is a most unlucky oversight or why should we not say 
 " over-sound " ? But, on the whole, they make a singularly 
 beautiful pair, and I think it is not fanciful to discern a 
 rather curious similarity in the general principles of their 
 rhythm. It will be noticed in my scansion, that, though 
 paeons and dochmiacs are not banished, shorter feet 
 distinctly predominate, and there is a great deal of 
 simple iamb, trochee, and spondee. Not merely the 
 blank verse, but divers other intrinsically and separately 
 metrical fragments may be discerned, such as the opening 
 What a walk | is this | to me ! 
 
 which has a strange Browningesque ring about it, as if 
 James Lee's wife, on landing at Weymouth or South- 
 ampton from the deck of the Brittany steamer, where we 
 last hear her speak, had gone on to Wiltshire and con- 
 tinued the poem there in no different key. 1 But you will 
 
 1 That of 
 
 " Oh ! | what a dawn | of day ! 
 How the March | sun feels | like May," etc.
 
 362 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 never find these tags of rhythm illicitly joining themselves 
 to others and making actual metre : the prose dominant 
 reigns supreme. I do not think Hazlitt was consciously 
 aiming at anything like De Quincey's or Landor's style. 
 In 1818 indeed, when the Coleridge piece was written, 
 he could know nothing of either but Landor's verse. 
 But to whatsoever he aspired, he attained this. 
 Lamb. When we come to Lamb, we come to one of the 
 exceptions. That he could have written paragraphs 
 that he did write sentences exquisitely rhythmical, is 
 certain. But it was scarcely ever his humour to do the 
 first, and not often to do the second. His faithful and 
 constant following of the Elizabethans in the wide sense 
 (to say that he was not " a sedulous ape " of Browne and 
 Burton and Fuller is, I think, a mistake) must, to some 
 extent, have interfered with any such production, by 
 distracting his view. But the very certainty and success 
 with which he assimilated the products of this imitation, 
 and combined them with that of others, especially Sterne, 
 proved this still more. His style is a perfectly achieved 
 conglomerate, the particles conglomerated being percept- 
 ible, but indissolubly united, and in fact unified, by the 
 mortar of his own idiosyncrasy. Yet in actual continuity 
 of sound, as distinguished from sense, the whole is too 
 much broken up to achieve the highest rhythmical results. 
 They are, it may be said, not wanted ; and I heartily 
 agree. But there are some excellent people who, when 
 you say that something is not somewhere, resent the 
 statement, as if " and it ought to be " were implied. 
 The uniquely broken bits of Lamb's composition would 
 be ill exchanged for fresh examples of a continuous 
 harmony which we can find elsewhere. In the middle 
 style, moreover that which aims at and achieves con- 
 cinnity of rhythm without going higher, he was,' in his 
 less fantastic moods, an absolutely consummate master. 
 There is nobody like him (unless it be Goldsmith) between 
 Addison and Thackeray, and I do not myself care to 
 place the four in order of merit. 
 Leigh Hunt. Leigh Hunt, on the other hand much Lamb's inferior
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1830-1860 363 
 
 in this way, and incapable of the other ; not able any- 
 where to reach the excellence of Hazlitt's rarer moods as 
 exemplified above, or the serried vigour of his more 
 ordinary argumentative passages ; here, as in all ways, a 
 slightly vulgarised companion to both of them neverthe- 
 less was no contemptible master of this middle style, and 
 could at times go beyond it. The following version of 
 the " Daughter of Hippocrates " story, though scarcely 
 worth scanning, except at the close, is worth reading 
 throughout, with attention to rhythm, to show how near 
 it approaches to the test ; and it has the additional 
 interest of contrasting with Mandeville's version, 1 at the 
 very beginning of English prose in the full sense of the 
 term. It has further to be said, in Hunt's favour, that 
 though he was certainly, in a sense, what he has been 
 called, " the father of all such as penny-a-line" he never 
 descended to the slovenliness of which, with tawdriness as 
 a twin-daughter, penny-a-lining may too justly be said to 
 have been the parent. His prose is even free from the 
 flaccidity and the running-at-the-mouth which too often 
 distinguish his verse ; and if he did not always write as 
 he writes in the following passage, your ear may expect 
 something not very far inferior in a reasonably continued 
 reading of him. 
 
 In the time of the Norman reign in Sicily, a vessel bound from 
 that island for Smyrna was driven by a westerly wind upon the 
 island of Cos. The crew did not know where they were, though 
 they had often visited the island ; for the trading towns lay in other 
 quarters, and they saw nothing before them but woods and solitudes. 
 They found, however, a comfortable harbour ; and the wind having 
 fallen in the night, they went on shore next morning for water. 
 The country proved as solitary as they thought it ; which was the 
 more extraordinary, inasmuch as it was very luxuriant, full of wild 
 figs and grapes, with a rich uneven ground, and stocked with goats 
 and other animals, who fled whenever they appeared. The bees 
 were remarkably numerous ; so that the wild honey, fruits, and 
 delicious water, especially one spring which fell into a beautiful 
 marble basin, made them more and more wonder, at every step, 
 that they could see no human inhabitants. 
 
 Thus idling about and wondering, stretching themselves now and 
 
 1 V. sup. pp. 64, 65.
 
 364 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 then among the wild thyme and grass, and now getting up to look 
 at some specially fertile place which another called them to see, 
 and which they thought might be turned to fine trading purpose, 
 they came upon a mound covered with trees, which looked into a 
 flat, wide lawn of rank grass, with a house at the end of it. They 
 crept nearer towards the house along the mound, still continuing 
 among the trees, for fear they were trespassing at last upon some- 
 body's property. It had a large garden wall at the back, as much 
 covered with ivy as if it had been built of it. Fruit-trees looked 
 over the wall with an unpruned thickness ; and neither at the back 
 nor front of the house were there any signs of humanity. It was an 
 ancient marble building, where glass was not to be expected in the 
 windows ; but it was much dilapidated, and the grass grew up over the 
 
 steps. They listened | again | and again ; | but nothing | was to 
 be heard | like a sound | of men ; | nor scarcely j of anything | else. | 
 There was an intense | noonday | silence. | Only | the hares | made 
 a rustling | noise | as they ran | about the long | hiding | grass. | 
 The house | looked | like the tomb | of human | nature | amidst | 
 the vitality [ of earth. 
 
 Cariyie. There are few authors to whom it is more interesting 
 to apply the tests and methods of our present enquiry 
 than to the two chief prose writers of the mid-nineteenth 
 century, Carlyle and Macaulay. It is true that the 
 changes of popular taste and interest, which have perhaps 
 made such an enquiry less unpalatable in itself to readers 
 than it would have been then, have also ousted both from 
 their old pride of place, and so have made it less interest- 
 ing as applying to them. But once more, these changes, 
 except as matter of record, are as nothing to history. 
 
 The contrast still almost startling even to those to 
 whom it has long been familiar between Carlyle's 
 original style and his characteristic one has already been 
 referred to, but it must necessarily be dealt with again, by 
 illustration as well as by discussion, in the present place. 
 In the first of the following extracts which was also the 
 first passage of the first original book that Carlyle 
 published there is absolutely nothing, in genus or 
 species, to distinguish it from that standard style of 
 which we have said so much ; and the indiscernibility
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 365 
 
 applies to rhythm. It avoids, with excellent success, the 
 extremes, of dulness and of clatter, to which that style 
 is liable ; it is not so very far below the best, such as 
 Southey's own, in that respect. But it presents no 
 specially musical characteristics ; it does not invite scan- 
 ning, or defy it, or make terms with it. It is written ev 
 x/aXot? \6yois (to adopt one proposed sense of that dis- 
 puted Aristotelianism) in simple prose if anything ever 
 was. 
 
 Among the writers of the concluding part of the last century 
 there is none more deserving of our notice than Friedrich Schiller. 
 Distinguished alike for the splendour of his intellectual faculties, 
 and the elevation of his tastes and feelings, he has left behind 
 him in his works a noble emblem of these great qualities ; and the 
 reputation which he thus enjoys, and has merited, excites our 
 attention the more, on considering the circumstances under which 
 it was acquired. Schiller had peculiar difficulties to strive with, 
 and his success has likewise been peculiar. Much of his life was 
 deformed by inquietude and disease, and it terminated at middle 
 age ; he composed in a language then scarcely settled into form, 
 or admitted to a rank among the cultivated languages of Europe ; 
 yet his writings are remarkable for their extent and variety as well 
 as their intrinsic excellence ; and his own countrymen are not his 
 only, or perhaps his principal, admirers. It is difficult to collect or 
 interpret the general voice ; but the world, no less than Germany, 
 seems already to have dignified him with the reputation of a classic ; 
 to have enrolled him among that select number whose works belong 
 not wholly to any age or nation, but who, having instructed their 
 own contemporaries, are claimed as instructors by the great family 
 of mankind, and set apart for many centuries from the common 
 oblivion which soon overtakes the mass of authors, as it does the 
 mass of other men. 
 
 A few years and this " tame villatic fowl " becomes a 
 kind of roc. 
 
 Often | also | could I see | the black Tempest | marching | in 
 anger | through the Distance ; | round | some Schreckhorn, | as yet 
 grim-blue, | would the eddying | vapour | gather, | and there | 
 tumultuously | eddy, | and flow down | like a mad | witch's | hair ; | 
 till, | after a space, | it vanished, | and in the clear | sunbeam, | 
 your Schreckhorn | stood smiling | grim-white, | for the vapour |
 
 366 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 has held snow. | How | thou fermentest and | elaboratest, | in thy 
 great | fermenting-vat | and laboratory l | of an Atmosphere, | of a 
 World, | 6 Nature ! | Or what is Nature ? | Ha ! | why | do f not 
 name thee | God ? | Art not thou | the " Living | Garment | of God " ? | 
 O Heavens, | is it in | very deed, | He, | then, | that ever | speaks | 
 through thee ; | that lives | and loves | in thee, | that lives | and 
 loves | in me ? 
 
 Fore-shadows, | call them | rather | fore -splendours, | of that 
 Truth, | and Beginning | of Truths, | fell | mysteriously | over | my 
 soul. | Sweeter than Dayspring | to the shipwrecked | in Nova 
 Zembla ; | ah, | like the mother's | voice | to her little | child | that 
 strays | bewildered, | weeping, | in unknown | tumults ; | like spft | 
 streamings | of celestial | music | to my too | exasperated | heart, | 
 came that | Evangel. | The Universe | is not dead | and de- | 
 moniacal, | a charnel house | with spectres ; | but godlike | and 
 my Father's ! 
 
 How sharp and strange if the reader has read these 
 two passages in sequence, and either as things actually 
 unfamiliar or with that temporary suspension of familiarity 
 which is possible and almost necessary for the critic 
 must the contrast between them have been ! The psilotes, 
 the " bareness " (in quite a decent and respectable sense) 
 of the first is, in the second, clothed and broken, varied 
 and accidented, and finished with colour ; being, by dint 
 of these very changes, changed further from a bead-roll of 
 not inharmoniously but evenly flowing syllables into 
 symphonised rhythms irregularly, indeed, and only 
 eccentrically symphonic, but at any rate polyphonic in 
 almost the highest degree. Only once, at the close of 
 the first paragraph, does blank verse proffer a too officious 
 and obvious aid to the transformation. And, just before 
 
 1 The cluster of shorts here (for even " lab" is a " long" of the shortest) 
 seems to require a "sixer."
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 367 
 
 it, the same dangerous reinforcement is deftly refused ; for 
 though 
 
 Or what is Nature ? Ha ! why do I not 
 
 suggests actual verse, the following words 
 Name thee God ? 
 
 throw the suggestion out 1 immediately. By cunningly 
 inserted epithets which arrest attention to particular 
 syllabic values, by poetic inversions like " tumultuously 
 eddy," poetic synthesis of words in themselves indifferently 
 poetic and prosaic like " mad witch's hair," the whole 
 thing becomes rhythmical, and forces the rhythm, broken 
 and irregular as it may be, upon the ear. 
 
 It was no wonder that bewildered contemporaries 
 called this " prose run mad," that it seemed to them like 
 the witch's hair itself. Yet some of them, such as the 
 youthful Thackeray, could rally at once from the shock 
 and perceive the beauty. 2 The next generation, more 
 fortunate, hardly felt the shock at all. 
 
 In Sartor itself, and in The French Revolution, the 
 method is seen at its height ; nor perhaps ever afterwards 
 (except in Latter-day Pamphlets] did he repeat the dose 
 in equal strength. For pleasure one might well repro- 
 duce and analyse all the famous things the Bastille, the 
 tragic agony of the Varennes disaster, the Tenth of 
 August, the trial and death of the king, the retribution of 
 Robespierre, a dozen others ; but space forbids, nor does 
 system require. 3 His own method, quite infinite in 
 variety of application, is comparatively simple in principle, 
 though, as in other cases, uncommonly few people (I hardly 
 know any except Patrick Alexander, though Trollope's in 
 The Warden is not bad) have succeeded in doing more in 
 the way of imitation than burlesque of it. It is at first 
 
 1 It might return as that of an octosyllabic couplet ; but not naturally. 
 
 2 " The real beauty which lurks among all these odd words and twisted 
 sentences." Times review of The French Re-volution ("Oxford" edition of 
 Thackeray's Works, vol. i. p. 72). 
 
 3 Here, more perhaps than anywhere else, there may excusably be 
 repetition of the warning that the rhythm of the authors selected cannot 
 possibly be exhibited in anything like completeness. To do so with Carlyle 
 would require a monograph double the length of this chapter.
 
 368 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 sight a direct negation of the general principle of con- 
 summate rhythmical prose, which is the avoidance of 
 breach or jaggedness. Carlyle's, on the contrary, seems 
 to be a sort of ruined mosaic, a piece of cloisonne 
 enamel with the metal partitions wrenched, twisted, or 
 wholly wanting. Yet when you have got the key-note of 
 it, you find not merely that individual rhythm-fragments * 
 are constantly of extreme beauty, but that, in some 
 incomprehensible manner, they are united together by a 
 master harmony that overspreads, underlies, pervades the 
 apparent jangle. Every now and then, he will con- 
 descend to interpose somewhat clearer evidence, for a 
 sentence or two, of pure prose tune ; but the method on 
 the whole is essentially Wagnerian, and a man might be 
 excused for saying when he first heard Tannhauser, " How 
 remarkably like Carlyle ! " 
 
 Later and even earlier in his Essays, where he had 
 to consult the prejudices of editors and the feelings of 
 readers, to some extent at any rate he adopted a mode, 
 mixed in yet another sense, which may be not badly 
 illustrated by the following passage, and as to which I 
 have adopted the plan of partial scansion, to contrast 
 with the unscanned Schiller and the wholly scanned 
 Teufelsdrockh. Here there is, on one side, a sort of 
 menstruum, or general carrying basis, of standard plain- 
 ness, while on the other you get a kind of business-like 
 item-arranged cataloguing which reminds you, with a 
 contrast as striking as the resemblance, of Macaulay. 
 But in each case the whole is shot or spangled with 
 picturesque and musical phrase, which makes it a thing 
 as different from Macaulay's as from that of a merely 
 " standardised " practitioner of the better class. 
 
 Illustration of this might be multiplied almost end- 
 lessly, but the following may suffice : 
 
 For you fare | along, | on some narrow | roadway, | through 
 
 1 They often show something like what is called in verse catalexis, and 
 require an unusual allowance of monosyllabic or half-feet. While even by 
 these I do not think that in his case the splitting of words, so often mentioned, 
 is to be avoided.
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 369 
 
 stony | labyrinths ; | having | over your head, | on this hand, j huge | 
 rock- 1 mountains, j and under your feet, | on that, | the roar | of 
 mountain | cataracts, | horror | of bottomless | chasms ; | the very 
 winds | and echoes j howling on you | in an almost | preternatural | 
 
 manner. Towering rock barriers rise sky-high before you, and 
 behind you, and around you ; intricate the outgate ! The roadway 
 is narrow, footing none of the best. Sharp turns there are, where 
 it will behove you to mind your paces ; one false step, and you 
 will need no second ; in the gloomy jaws of the abyss you vanish, 
 and the spectral winds howl requiem. Somewhat better are the 
 suspension bridges, made of bamboo and leather, though they swing 
 like see-saws ; men are stationed with lassos, to gin you dexterously, 
 and fish you up from the torrent, if you trip there. 
 
 Through this kind of country did San Martin march ; straight 
 towards San lago, to fight the Spaniards and deliver Chile. For 
 ammunition waggons he had sorras, sledges, canoe-shaped boxes, 
 made of dried bull's hide. His cannons were carried on the back 
 of mules, each cannon on two mules judiciously harnessed ; on the 
 packsaddle of your foremost mule there rested with firm girths a 
 long strong pole ; the other end of which, forked end, we suppose, 
 rested, with like girths, on the packsaddle of the hindmost mule ; 
 your cannon was slung with leathern straps on this pole, and so 
 travelled, swaying and dangling, yet moderately secure. In the 
 knapsack of each soldier was eight days' provender, dried beef 
 ground into snuff powder, with a modicum of pepper, and some 
 slight seasoning of biscuit or maize meal ; store of onions, of garlic, 
 was not wanting ; Paraguay tea could be boiled at eventide, by fire 
 
 of scrub bushes, or almost of rock lichens or dried mule dung. No 
 farther | baggage | was permitted ; | each soldier | lay | at night | 
 wrapped | in his poncho, | with his knapsack | for pillow, | under | 
 the canopy | of heaven ; | lullabied | by hard | travail, | and sunk | 
 soon enough | into steady | nose-melody, | into | the foolishest | rough 
 
 colt dance | of unima|ginable Dreams, j Had he not left much 
 behind him in the Pampas mother, mistress, what not ; and was 
 
 like to find somewhat if he ever got across to Chile living ? What 
 an entity, | one | of those night | leaguers | of San Martin ; | all | 
 steacfily | snoring | there | in the heart | of the Andes, | under | the 
 
 eternal | stars ! | Way-worn sentries with difficulty keep themselves 
 awake ; tired mules chew barley rations, or doze on three legs ; the 
 
 2 B
 
 370 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 feeble watch-fire will hardly kindle a cigar ; Canopus | and the 
 Southern | Cross | glitter | down, | and all | snores | steadily | begirt | 
 by granite | deserts, | looked on | by the constellations | in that 
 manner ! | 
 
 Here " roar of mountain cataracts, horrors of bottomless 
 chasms" arranges its contrasting foot-values mono- 
 syllable, amphibrach, dactyl-cretic ; trochee, paeon, mono- 
 syllable, trochee as delicately as if it were De Quincey 
 or Landor, Taylor or Browne. 1 But presto ! and the very 
 woods and echoes howl at you " in an almost preter- 
 natural manner " possibly, but certainly in a very easy 
 conversational style. With a true dream-contradiction, 
 the not-in-the-least-astonished soldiers find themselves 
 " all steadily snoring in the heart of the Andes, under, the 
 eternal stars," and in the same way these stars themselves, 
 Canopus and the Southern Cross, find themselves chosen 
 from all the host of Heaven to glitter down on the 
 intrusive and incongruous " snorers," because of the 
 desirable combination of amphibrach, third paeon, and 
 monosyllable. 
 
 Macauiay. There is hardly a point in the whole range of possible 
 literary criticism where the contrast between Carlyle and 
 Macauiay is not amusing ; but on most of these points 
 this contrast is so obvious, not to say glaring, that it 
 needs very little comment in detail. In our department, 
 perhaps because that department has had so few workers 
 in it hitherto, a slight examination may not be profitless. 
 That, on first and undiscriminating hearing, the two are 
 extraordinarily different needs no impressing ; that before 
 long a certain community in difference the love of short 
 and abruptly separated clauses and sentences will 
 appear, needs hardly more. But this does not* take us 
 very far. 
 
 Macauiay had, in fact, two styles, which he sometimes 
 
 1 How interesting it is to think that there are persons " with ttuo ears 
 erect, and bearing the outward semblance of men," who would take this for 
 a hexameter !
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 371 
 
 mixed, but also sometimes kept apart. The one was 
 what he is most celebrated for, the true " Tom's snipsnap," 
 illustrated in the second of the following extracts. It 
 seems sometimes as if the writer has joined a secret and 
 yet open society the principle of which was to use no 
 stops but full ones, with an occasional and grudging 
 comma. The sentences come out like cartridges from a 
 magazine, or packets of something unwholesome from one 
 of the hideous erections on station-platforms. Sometimes 
 the character is, as here, emphasised to the point of 
 ludicrousness by arithmetical details (compare the passage 
 from Carlyle, not dissimilar in subject, above given). 
 These sentences, or sentencelets, are not exactly in- 
 harmonious in themselves, but they do not attempt 
 harmony. You rush to the end of them, and it is the 
 end-words alone that, on the old principle, (v. sup. on 
 Hurd and Addison) seem to have received some care 
 from the writer as to their rhythm. 
 
 The place | was worthy | of such | a trial. | It was the great | 
 hall | of William | Rufus, | the hall | which had resounded | with 
 acclamations | at the inauguration | of thirty | kings, | the hall | which 
 had witnessed | the just | sentence | of Bacon | and the just | 
 absolution | of Somers, | the hall | where the eloquence | of Strafford | 
 had for a moment | awed | and melted | a victorious | party | inflamed | 
 with just | resentment, | the hall | where Charles | had confronted | 
 the High Court | of Justice | with the placid | courage which has 
 
 half | redeemed | his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was 
 wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets 
 were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and ermine, 
 were marshalled by the heralds under Garter-King-at-arms. The 
 judges in their vestments of state attended to give advice on points 
 of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords, three-fourths of the 
 Upper House as the Upper House then was, walked in solemn order 
 from their usual place of assembling to the tribunal. The junior 
 baron present led the way, George Eliott, Lord Heathfield, recently 
 ennobled for his memorable defence of Gibraltar against the fleets 
 and armies of France and Spain. The long procession was closed 
 by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl- Marshal of the realm, by the great
 
 372 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons of the King. Last of all 
 came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and noble 
 bearing. The gray old walls were hung with scarlet. The long 
 galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited 
 the fears or the emulation of an orator. There were gathered 
 together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous 
 empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the repre- 
 sentatives of every science and of every art. There were seated 
 round the Queen the fair-haired young daughters of the house of 
 Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of great Kings and Common- 
 wealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country 
 in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her 
 majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the 
 imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire 
 thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against 
 Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of 
 freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There 
 were seen, side by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar 
 of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that <easel 
 which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many 
 writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble 
 matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark 
 and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of 
 erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded 
 with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, 
 
 and splendid. There | appeared | the voluptuous | charms | of her | 
 to whom the heir | of the throne | had in secret | plighted | his 
 
 faith. | There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, 
 the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and 
 music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the 
 
 members of that brilliant society which quoted, | criticised, | and 
 exchanged | repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs. 
 Montague. And there | the ladies | whose lips, | more persuasive | 
 than those | of Fox | himself, | had carried | the Westminster | 
 election j against palace | and treasury, | shone | round Georgiana, | 
 Duchess | of Devonshire. 1 
 
 1 Some points in this are too obvious for comment, except perhaps in a 
 note. The pivotal, or rather spring-board, effect of the repeated " there " 
 is of course the chief. I do not think "grenadiers" and "cavalry," even 
 
 with the full benefit of "grenadiers," an ideal pair of clause-tips in sound ; 
 but the picture to the eye the motionless rows of peaked caps and the 
 more restless figures of the horsemen no doubt determined the choice.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1830-1860 373 
 
 By this time July was far advanced ; and the state of the city 
 
 was, hour by hour, becoming more frightful. The number of the 
 inhabitants had been thinned more by famine and disease than by 
 the fire of the enemy. Yet that fire was sharper and more constant 
 
 than ever. One of the gates was beaten in ; one of the bastions 
 was laid in ruins ; but the breaches made by day were repaired by 
 night with indefatigable activity. Every attack was still repelled. But 
 the fighting men of the garrison were so much exhausted that they 
 could scarcely keep their legs. Several of them, in the act of striking 
 
 at the enemy, fell down from mere weakness. A very small quantity 
 
 of grain remained, and was doled out my mouthfuls. The stock of 
 salted hides was considerable, and by gnawing them the garrison 
 
 appeased the rage of hunger. Dogs, fattened on the blood of the 
 slain who lay unburied round the town, were luxuries which few 
 
 could afford to purchase. The price of a whelp's paw was five 
 
 shillings and sixpence. Nine horses were still alive, and but barely 
 alive. They were so lean that little meat was likely to be found 
 upon them. It was, however, determined to slaughter them for food. 
 The people perished so fast that it was impossible for the survivors 
 to perform the rights of sepulture. There was scarcely a cellar in 
 
 which some corpse was not decaying. Such was the extremity of 
 distress that the rats who came to feast in those hideous dens 
 
 were eagerly hunted and greedily devoured. A small fish, caught in 
 the river, was not to be purchased with money. The only price for 
 
 which such a treasure could be obtained was some handfuls of oat- 
 meal. Leprosies, such as strange and unwholesome diet engenders, 
 
 made existence a constant torment. The whole city was poisoned 
 by the stench exhaled from the bodies of the dead and of the half 
 dead. 
 
 First were rolled on shore barrels containing six thousand bushels 
 of meal. Then came great cheeses, casks of beef, flitches of bacon, 
 
 kegs of butter, sacks of pease and biscuit, ankers of brandy. Not 
 many hours before, half a pound of tallow and three quarters of a 
 pound of salted hide had been weighed out with niggardly care to 
 every fighting man. The ration which each now received was three 
 pounds of flour, two pounds of beef, and a pint of pease. It is easy 
 to imagine with what tears grace was said over the suppers of that 
 
 evening. There was little sleep on either side of the wall. The bon-
 
 374 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 fires shone bright along the whole circuit of the ramparts. The Irish 
 guns continued to roar all night, and all night the bells of the 
 rescued city made answer to the Irish guns with a peal of joyous 
 
 defiance. Through the three following days the batteries of the 
 enemy continued to play. But, on the third | night | flames | were 
 seen | arising | from the camp ; | and when the first | of August | 
 dawned, | a line | of smoking ruins | marked | the site | lately | occu- 
 pied by the huts | of the besiegers ; | and the citizens | saw | far off | 
 the long | column | of spikes | and standards | retreating | up the 
 left bank | of the Foyle | towards Strabane. 1 
 
 The rhythm of the first extract is as different as 
 possible from that of the second in the most obvious 
 characteristics ; less so, perhaps, on re-examination. <T he 
 writer is here, as often, evidently under the influence of 
 Gibbon. There is the same rotund allusiveness " the 
 historian of the Roman empire " has a double or treble 
 appropriateness and " the voluptuous charms of her to 
 whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his 
 faith " is Gibbon, almost premier choix t for " Mrs. Fitzher- 
 bert." The proper names, where used, are introduced with 
 special attention to sound, and the sentences are varied in 
 length, with special attention to sound likewise. It will 
 probably depend very much on individual taste whether 
 the full Gibbonian roll the flux and reflux of that 
 majestic wave that kept time with the revolutions of more 
 than a millennium is held to have been attained or not. 
 But at any rate here is good standard style, supercharged 
 in rhythm with something of reversion to Burke, and even 
 to Bolingbroke, for strongly rhetorical effect, not irreminis- 
 cent of Johnson himself, as in the phrases about the 
 pinchbeck Johnson, Dr. Parr, 2 but certainly reminding 
 
 1 I have thought it well to indicate Macaulay's fancy for trochaic endings. 
 He contrasts them, of course, with some monosyllables and other feet 
 generally, and avoids them at the paragraph close. But the staccato style 
 undoubtedly invites them, and so, in very modern work, gives a throw-back to 
 the most ancient. 
 
 2 Speaking of Parr, I have been reminded, and ought to have needed no 
 reminder, of the shorthand description of his style given by that piercer of
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 375 
 
 one most of the third raiser of style in the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
 I have elsewhere protested l against the undervaluation 
 of Macaulay's style, and may, therefore, claim freedom 
 from prejudice if I say that it cannot be ranked very high 
 from our present point of view. Even the old simple test 
 want of variety would suffice to condemn it ; for, with 
 the exception of the difference of its two kinds, noted 
 above, there is nothing to be hoped for, and nothing to be 
 found, but the monotonous tick-tack and snip-snap on the 
 one hand, and the not much less monotonous balance or 
 undulation (itself something of an amplification of this 
 snip-snap) on the other. For purposes of exposition, and 
 (less luckily) for purposes of persuasion with the ordinary 
 reader, it has exceedingly high qualifications. Wherever 
 dolus non latet in directions political and other ; wherever 
 it is desirable that a tolerably intelligent but not extra- 
 ordinarily acute or attentive reader should receive a fair 
 sweeping view of a multitude of more or less complicated 
 details, there is hardly any style which surpasses it " for 
 use." It may even give, to a somewhat blunt but not 
 quite deaf ear, a pleasure resembling, in prose, that which 
 the snip-snap or amplified couplets of the eighteenth 
 century used to give to ears of the same kind in verse. 
 Indeed, Macaulay stands to eighteenth-century verse (in 
 his prose, not his verse) much as Landor and De Quincey 
 and Ruskin do to nineteenth. But the din and clatter of 
 his method is certainly not what you want, when the ear 
 is voluptuously inclined and artistically trained. In the 
 great examples which have been given above, and will be 
 given below, nothing repeats anything else the individual 
 notes, and the polyphonic groupings of words and word- 
 batches, are as unlike as the productions of Nature ; while 
 Macaulay's are as like as the productions of machinery. 
 
 Those styles in which the somewhat toneless and The novelists 
 
 Miss Austen 
 
 windbags, "the Canon Schidnischmidt " : "And a great many other things and Peacock, 
 without a great many other things." It may go with a less-pointed remark 
 of my own on Jeffrey's (v. sup. p. 355). 
 
 1 Corrected Impressions (London, 1895), P- 9^.
 
 376 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 colourless rhythm of the standard is chequered and flushed 
 by a certain dose of the more elaborately rhythmical, 
 increase in number and interest as we go through the 
 century. Its favourite and characteristic production, the 
 novel, encourages them ; and the influence of the Time- 
 Spirit accentuates and enforces the encouragement. 
 Except in passages of description, or in addresses to the 
 reader, such as those to which the immeasurable short- 
 sightedness of certain critics objects in Thackeray, the 
 novelist can hardly exceed the rhythm of conversation, or 
 that of the graver or lighter standard style, without run- 
 ning the risk of being irksome to his readers, as a certain 
 famous French saying has it. Yet most great novelists 
 have had rhythmical complexions " favours " in the old 
 sense more or less their own, after fashions which sho ( uld 
 be very well known to their readers, but which would be 
 difficult to illustrate satisfactorily here, unless we could 
 give a chapter, and a very long one, to them. Thus Miss 
 Austen has that ironic " fingering " of the standard which 
 induces some deeply-to-be-commiserated persons to call 
 her " stilted " : 
 
 You would have told me that we seemed born for each other, or 
 some nonsense of that kind, which would have distressed me beyond 
 conception ; my cheeks would have been as red as your roses ; I 
 would not have had you by for the world 
 
 where the decent propriety of the expression, the manifest 
 hypocrisy of the speaker, and the ironic touches of the 
 artist, are all inextricably married together. Or one might 
 take that apex and coronal, or coronalled apex, of Peacock's 
 piercing crispness, the logic of Seithenyn on life and death : 
 
 They have not made it known to me ; for the best of all reasons, 
 that one can only know the truth. For if that which we think we 
 know is not truth, it is something which we do not know. A man 
 cannot know his own death. For while he knows anything he is 
 alive ; at least I never heard of a dead man who knew anything, or 
 pretended to know anything if he had so pretended, I should have 
 told him to his face that he was no dead man. 
 
 We cannot, of course, cast the net very widely for 
 examples, but Peacock himself, Disraeli, Dickens, and
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 377 
 
 Thackeray may perhaps suffice. The selection given from 
 Lord Beaconsfield will probably make it unnecessary to give 
 any from the first Lord Lytton, for if there was no love 
 lost between the two men, it was perhaps in part because 
 the two styles, at their most elaborate, were very close 
 together. And though the author of Coningsby and 
 Lothair had nothing like the range, and at no part of his 
 range anything like l the occasional ease and finish, of 
 the author of Pelham and Kenelm Chillingly, the needs of 
 the present occasion will, I think, be satisfied with the 
 proposed allotment. 
 
 That part of Peacock's writing which is most delectable 
 to true Peacockians may the shadow and the glitter of 
 body and tail never be less for them ! would serve us 
 little for illustration. The admirable crispness of its 
 dialogue, and the occasional sharp outline of its comment, 
 have rhythm of their own no doubt, as, it has been 
 remarked, everything has ; but it is scarcely of the kind 
 we are discussing, and is rather to be perceived than 
 analysed. This kind may be illustrated as follows : 
 
 Miss Susannah often wandered among the mountains alone, 
 even to some distance from the farm-house. Sometimes she 
 descended into the bottom of the dingles, to the black rocky beds 
 of the torrents, and dreamed away hours at the feet of the cataracts. 
 One spot in particular, from which she had at first shrunk with 
 terror, became by degrees her favourite haunt. A path turning 
 and returning at acute angles, led down a steep wood-covered slope 
 to the edge of a chasm, where a pool, or resting place of a torrent, 
 
 lay far below. A cataract fell in a single sheet into the pool ; the 
 pool | boiled | and bubbled | at the base | of the fall, | but through 
 the greater | part | of its extent | lay calm, | deep, | and black, | as 
 
 1 More especially he had nothing like the almost classical concentration, 
 and freedom from redundance, which Bulwer could display when he too 
 seldom chose, as in the magnificent ghost-story which is his Wandering 
 WilliJs Tale, and the recognition of which, like the recognition of that, used 
 to be an esoteric touchstone of criticism long before the vulgar knew of it. 
 But it so happens that this concerns us less than his "Corinthian " indulgences. 
 See remarks on Peacock in the text. (Examples or discussions of the second 
 great group of Victorian novelists, from the Brontes onward, will be found 
 later.)
 
 378 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 if | the cataract | had plunged | through it | to an un| imaginable | 
 
 depth | without | disturbing | its eternal | repose. At the opposite 
 extremity of the pool, the rocks almost met at their summits, the 
 trees of the opposite banks intermingled their leaves, and another 
 cataract plunged from the pool into a chasm on which the sunbeams 
 never gleamed. High above, on both sides, the steep woody slopes 
 of the dingle soared into the sky ; and from a fissure in the rock, 
 on which the little path terminated, a single gnarled and twisted oak 
 stretched itself over the pool, forming a fork with its boughs at a 
 short distance from the rock. Miss Susannah often sat on the 
 rock, with her feet resting on this tree : in time, she made her seat 
 on the tree itself, with her feet hanging over the abyss ; and at 
 length she accustomed herself to lie upon its trunk, with her side 
 on the mossy bole of the fork, and an arm round one of the branches. 
 From this position a portion of the sky and the woods was reflected 
 in the pool, which from its bank was but a mass of darkness. The 
 first time she reclined in this manner, her heart beat audibly ; in 
 time, she lay down as calmly as on the mountain heather : <the 
 perception of the sublime was probably heightened by an inter- 
 mingled sense of danger ; and perhaps that indifference to life, 
 which early disappointment forces upon sensitive minds, was 
 necessary to the first experiment. There was, in the novelty and 
 strangeness of the position, an excitement which never wholly 
 passed away, but which became gradually subordinate to the 
 influence, at once tranquillising and elevating, of the mingled eternity 
 of motion, sound, and solitude. 
 
 This is " standard " freed from over-rhetorical tendency, 
 and not intending rhythm greatly, but achieving it 
 sufficiently. 1 It is " medium-rhythmed." 
 
 If, on the contrary, any " gent," reversing the wishes 
 of him whom Mr. Punch's waiter so cruelly complied 
 with, wants, not the " lighter and drier vintage " of 
 Melincourt or Elphin, but a wine, not merely full of body, 
 but mousseux with rhetoric, he should surely be suited 
 here : 
 
 Lord Favoured by nature and by nature's God, we produced the 
 
 Beaconsfield. lyre of David ; we gave you Isaiah and Ezekiel ; they, are our 
 Olynthians, our Philippics. Favoured by nature we still remain ; 
 but in exact proportion as we have been favoured by nature we 
 have been persecuted by man. After a thousand struggles ; after 
 acts of heroic courage that Rome has never equalled ; deeds of 
 
 1 I think Macaulay had read Peacock, different as were their spirits, and I 
 could produce at least one unmistakable parallel passage.
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 379 
 
 divine patriotism that Athens and Sparta and Carthage have 
 never excelled ; we have endured fifteen hundred years of super- 
 natural slavery, during which every device that can degrade or 
 destroy man has been the destiny that we have sustained and 
 baffled. The Hebrew child has entered adolescence only to 
 learn that he was the pariah of that ungrateful Europe that owes 
 to him the best part of its laws, a fine portion of its literature, all 
 its religion. Great poets require a public ; we have been content 
 with the immortal melodies that we sung more than two thousand 
 years ago by the waters of Babylon and wept. They record our 
 triumphs ; they solace our affliction. Great orators are the 
 creatures of popular assemblies ; we were permitted only by 
 stealth to meet even in our temples. And as for great writers, 
 the catalogue is not blank. What are all the schoolmen, Aquinas 
 himself, to Maimonides ? And as for modern philosophy, all 
 springs from Spinoza. 
 
 But the passionate | and creative | genius, | that is the nearest | 
 link | to divinity, | and which no human | tyranny | can destroy, | 
 though | it can divert it ; | that should have stirred | the heart | of 
 nations | by its inspired | sympathy, | or governed | senates | by its 
 burning | eloquence ; | has found | a medium | for its expression, | 
 to which, | in spite of | your prejudices | and your evil | passions, | 
 you have been obliged | to bow. | The ear, | the voice, | the 
 fancy | teeming | with combinations, | the imagination 1 | fervent | 
 with picture | and emotion, | that came | from Caucasus, | and 
 which | we have preserved | unpolluted, | have endowed us | with 
 almost | the exclusive | privilege | of music ; | that science | of 
 harmonious | sounds, | which the ancients | recognised | as most | 
 divine, | and deified | in the person of | their most beautiful | 
 
 creation. I speak not of the past ; though were I to enter into 
 the history of the lords of melody, you would find it the annals of 
 Hebrew genius. But at this moment even, musical Europe is ours. 
 There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a single 
 capital, that is not crowded with our children under the feigned 
 names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your 
 posterity will some day disclaim with .shame and disgust. Almost 
 every great composer, skilled musician, almost every voice that 
 ravishes you with its transporting strains, springs from our tribes. 
 
 1 I think we must have one of the slurs more than once referred to here.
 
 380 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 The catalogue is too vast to enumerate ; too illustrious to dwell for 
 a moment on secondary names, however eminent. Enough for us 
 that the three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions 
 all nations at this moment yield, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, 
 are of Hebrew race ; and little do your men of fashion, your 
 muscadins of Paris, and your dandies of London, as they thrill into 
 raptures at the notes of a Pasta or a Grisi, little do they suspect 
 that they are offering their homage " to the sweet singers of Israel " ! 
 
 This is Burke, or perhaps Bolingbroke himself, by the 
 waters of Babylon not weeping, but exulting over the 
 " flat-nosed Franks " who colonised Lincolnshire and 
 Gal way and singing with all the opportunities of his 
 ampler organisation. I protest that the passage I have 
 scanned seems to me, though in bravura, a very fine 
 passage, and, according to its own mode, almost faultless 
 in rhythm. 1 The abundance of dochmiacs is, I think, 
 real, and very characteristic. 
 
 Dickens. It is obviously difficult to write about Dickens here 
 in any fashion that shall even really be adequate ; to 
 write about him in a manner which shall be satisfactory 
 to the various classes of his readers is still more obviously 
 impossible. A great deal of his work the vast majority 
 and the most delightful part beyond question neither 
 challenges, nor could properly admit, examination of our 
 sort. On the contrary, a majority, perhaps even larger, 
 of his attempts at rhetoric and prose-poetry, are certainly 
 not held to be successes by most good critics. The best 
 of the kind, and a really good one, has always seemed to 
 me to be the overture of the famous " Death of Steer- 
 forth " in David Copperfield : 
 
 It was a murky confusion here and there blotted with a 
 colour like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel of flying 
 clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater 
 heights in the clouds than there were depths below thern to the 
 bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the 
 wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance 
 of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. 
 There had been a wind all day ; and it was rising then, with an 
 
 1 The description of Jerusalem in Tancred should follow it, if I had more 
 room.
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 381 
 
 extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, 
 and the sky was more overcast, and blew hard. 
 
 But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely 
 overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, 
 harder and harder. It still increased, until our horses could 
 scarcely face the wind. Many times, in the dark part of the 
 night (it was then late in September, when the nights were not 
 short), the leaders turned about, | or came to a dead stop ; and we 
 were often | in serious apprehension that the coach | would be 
 blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain | came up before this storm, 
 like showers of steel ; | and, at those times, when there was any 
 shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a 
 sheer impossibility of continuing the struggle. 
 
 When the day broke, it blew harder and harder. I had been 
 in Yarmouth when the seamen said it blew great guns, but I had 
 never known the like of this, or anything approaching to it. We 
 came to Ipswich very late, having had to fight every inch of 
 ground since we were ten miles out of London ; and found | a 
 cluster of people in the market-place, | who had risen from their 
 beds in the night, | fearful of falling chimneys. Some of these, | 
 congregating about the inn-yard while we | changed horses, told us 
 of great sheets of lead | having been ripped off a high church-tower, | 
 and flung into a by-street, which they then | blocked up. Others 
 had to tell of country people, coming in from neighbouring villages, 
 who had seen great trees lying torn out of the earth, and whole 
 ricks scattered about the roads and fields. | Still there was no 
 abatement in the storm, | but it blew harder. 
 
 As we struggled on, | nearer and nearer to the sea, from which | 
 this mighty wind was blowing dead on shore, | its force became 
 more and more | terrific. *? Long before we saw the sea, its spray | 
 was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. | The water was 
 out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth ; 
 and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, | and had its stress of 
 little breakers setting | heavily towards us. When we came within | 
 sight of the sea, the waves \ on the horizon, | caught at intervals 
 above the rolling abyss, were | like glimpses of another shore with 
 towers | and buildings. When at last we got into | the town, the 
 people came out to their doors, | all aslant, and with streaming 
 hair, 1 \ making a wonder of the mail that had | come through such 
 a night. 
 
 If I have marked the numerous blank-verse fragments 
 here, it is with no Schadenfreude, and certainly out of 
 no unfairness. How difficult it is to keep blank verse 
 out of " numerous " prose, we have allowed fully, and 
 seen constantly, while we shall see more still. And that 
 
 1 Not blank verse, and a fine phrase.
 
 382 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Dickens, in his passages of the same class, was apt to 
 abuse it, is scarcely matter for serious discussion. In 
 this passage I hardly think that he can be fairly charged 
 with abusing it ; for, despite the numerous and, as has 
 been shown, not seldom consecutive examples, they are 
 often (if scarcely always) resolvable in reading into prose 
 rhythm proper. But, at the same time, it must be 
 confessed that the prevalence of merely iambic cadence, 
 which the presence of much blank verse almost necessarily 
 implies, though it is not incompatible with real rhythmical 
 beauty, argues, in every case but Mr. Ruskin's, if not 
 even in his (we shall consider this point, if we may), a 
 certain poverty in rhythmical resources, a no doubt 
 unconscious conviction that if you want to make prose 
 harmonious you must " dash and brew it " with the 
 methods of verse itself. And this, if not what Ascham, 
 in his ill-temper at something else, calls " a foul wrong 
 way," is certainly not the more excellent one. 
 
 Thackeray. When I say that I hardly know any master of English 
 prose-rhythm greater, in his way, than Thackeray, and 
 that I certainly do not know any one with so various 
 and pervasive a command, I may seem to provoke the 
 answer, " Oh ! you are, if not a maniac, at any rate a 
 maniaque. The obsession of Titmarsh blinds and deafens 
 you." Nevertheless, I say it ; and will maintain it. That 
 he seldom perhaps never tried diploma-pieces of the 
 most elaborate kind may, of course, be admitted ; the 
 cap-and-bells, which he never wholly laid aside for more 
 than a minute or two, forbade that. Yet the first of the 
 two long passages which I have selected is not in this way 
 far behind some may think that it is at least on a level 
 with the most greatly-intending scenes of description 
 that we have had or shall have ; and the second, as a 
 piece of reflection, will be hard to beat in sermon or essay, 
 history or tractate, from Raleigh to Newman. But the 
 most remarkable thing about Thackeray, in our connec- 
 tion a thing impossible fully to illustrate here, is his 
 mastery of that mixed style " shot with rhythm " which
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 383 
 
 has been noticed. Even in his earliest and most grotesque 
 extravaganzas you will rarely find a discordant sentence 
 the very vulgarisms and mis- spellings come like 
 solecisms from a pair of pretty lips and uttered in a 
 musical voice. 1 As there never was a much hastier writer, 
 it is clear that the man thought in rhythm that the 
 words, as they flowed from his pen, brought the harmony 
 with them. Even his blank verse and his couplets in 
 prose, never, I think, in any one instance unintentional, 
 but deliberately used for burlesque purposes, have a 
 diabolical quality and, as the wine merchants say, " breed " 
 about them, which some very respectable " poets " have 
 never achieved. 
 
 In the first passage there are two noteworthy sayings. 
 He tells you that "you can't put the thing down in 
 prose," and then he proceeds to do it. And further, he 
 opens the longer, and immeasurably the finer, passage of 
 the doing by the words : " Perhaps it is best for a man 
 of fancy to make his own description." He does not, 
 luckily, let this deprive us of his ; but I have taken the 
 hint so far as to let any " man of fancy " do his scansion 
 here for himself, as I do it for myself every time that I 
 read the piece. I can promise that not in one foot or one 
 syllable will it fail. There is, unavoidably, a blank verse 
 or two, but it will be found that in much the larger 
 number of cases the imminence of one is escamote with 
 extraordinary art. 
 
 There should have been a poet in our company to describe that 
 charming little bay of Glaucus, into which we entered on the 26th 
 of September, in the first steamboat that ever disturbed its beautiful 
 waters. You can't put down in prose that delicious episode of 
 natural poetry ; it ought to be done in a symphony, full of sweet 
 melodies and swelling harmonies ; or sung in a strain of clear 
 crystal iambics, such as Milnes knows how to write. A mere map, 
 drawn in words, gives the mind no notion of that exquisite nature. 
 What do mountains become in type, or rivers in Mr. Vizetelly's best 
 
 brevier ? Here lies | the sweet | bay | gleaming | peaceful | in the 
 
 1 And so, later, the abbreviations and familiarities lose all the bad effect 
 that they have in Augustan style.
 
 384 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 rosy | sunshine ; | green islands j dip | here and there | in its waters ; | 
 purple | mountains | swell | circling | round it ; | and towards them, | 
 rising | from the bay, | stretches | a rich | green | plain, | fruitful | 
 with herbs | and various | foliage, | in the midst | of which | the 
 
 white houses | twinkle. I can see a little minaret, and some spread- 
 ing palm trees ; but, beyond these, the description would answer as 
 well for Bantry Bay as for Makri. You could write so far, nay, 
 much more particularly and grandly, without seeing the place at all, 
 and after reading Beaufort's Caramania, which gives you not the 
 least notion of it. 
 
 Suppose the great hydrographer of the admiralty himself can't 
 describe it, who surveyed the place ; suppose Mr. Fellowes, who 
 discovered it afterwards suppose, I say, Sir John Fellowes, Knt., 
 can't do it (and I defy any man of imagination to get an impression 
 from his book) can you, vain man, hope to try ? The effect of the 
 artist, as I take it, ought to be, to produce upon his hearer's mind, 
 by his art, an effect something similar to that produced on his own 
 by the sight of the natural object. Only music, or the best poetry, 
 can do this. Keats's Ode to the Grecian Urn is the best description 
 I know of that sweet, old, silent ruin of Telmessus. After you have 
 once seen it, the remembrance remains with you, like a tune from 
 Mozart, which he seems to have caught out of heaven, and which 
 rings sweet harmony in your ears for ever after ! It's a benefit for 
 all after life ! You have but to shut your eyes, and think, and recall 
 it, and the delightful vision comes smiling back to your order ! the 
 divine air the delicious little pageant, which nature set before you 
 on this lucky day. 
 
 Here is the entry made in the note-book on the eventful day : 
 " In the morning steamed into the bay of Glaucus landed at Makri 
 cheerful old desolate village theatre by the beautiful seashore 
 great fertility, oleanders a palm-tree in the midst of the village, 
 spreading out like a Sultan's aigrette sculptured caverns, or tombs, 
 up the mountain camels over the bridge.' 
 
 Perhaps it is best for a man of fancy to make his own landscape 
 out of these materials : to group the couched camels under the 
 plane-trees ; the little crowd of wandering, ragged heathens come 
 down to the calm water, to behold the nearing steamer ; to fancy a 
 mountain, in the sides of which some scores of tombs are rudely 
 carved ; pillars and porticoes, and Doric entablatures. But it is of 
 the little theatre that he must make the most beautiful picture, a 
 charming little place of festival, lying out on the shore, and looking 
 over the sweet bay and the swelling purple islands. No theatre- 
 goer ever looked out on a fairer scene. It encourages poetry, idle- 
 ness, delicious sensual reverie. O Jones ! friend of my heart ! would 
 you not like to be a white-robed Greek, lolling languidly on the cool
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 385 
 
 benches here, and pouring compliments in the Ionic dialect into the 
 rosy ears of Neaera ? Instead of Jones, your name should be lonides ; 
 instead of a silk hat, you should wear a chaplet of roses in your hair : 
 you would not listen to the choruses they were singing on the stage, 
 for the voice of the fair one would be whispering a rendezvous for 
 the mesonuktiais horais, and my lonides would have no ear for aught 
 beside. Yonder, in the mountain, they would carve a Doric cave 
 temple, to receive your urn when all was done ; and you would be 
 accompanied thither by a dirge of the surviving lonidas. The caves 
 of the dead are empty now, however, and their place knows them 
 not any more among the festal haunts of the living. 
 
 Of the triumph of unobtrusive accompaniment that 
 follows, little need be said. The effect of the central 
 italicised molossus (not three monosyllables, which would 
 be too rhetorical) is wonderful ; and if, as I think, we 
 should allow a sort of slur in " post[ure]-making," it is 
 only like some interesting things in verse. 1 
 
 There came a day when the round of decorous pleasures and 
 solemn gaieties in which Mr. Joseph Sedley's family indulged was 
 interrupted by an event which happens in most houses. As you 
 ascend the staircase of your house from the drawing- towards the 
 bedroom floors, you may have remarked a little arch in the wall 
 right before you which at once gives light to the stair which leads 
 from the second story to the third, where the nursery and servants' 
 chambers commonly are, and serves for another purpose of utility, of 
 which the undertaker's men can give you a notion. They rest the 
 coffins upon that arch, or pass them through it so as not to disturb 
 in any unseemly manner the cold tenant slumbering within the black 
 arch. 
 
 That second-floor arch in a London house, looking up and down 
 the well of the staircase, and commanding the main thoroughfare by 
 which the inhabitants are passing ; by which the cook lurks down 
 before daylight to scour her pots and pans in the kitchen ; by which 
 the young master stealthily ascends, having left his boots in the hall, 
 
 and let himself in after dawn from a jolly night at the club ; down 
 which miss | comes rustling | in fresh ribbons | and spreading | 
 muslins, | brilliant | and beautiful, | and prepared | for conquest | 
 
 and the ball ; or master Tommy slides, preferring the banisters for 
 a mode of conveyance, and disdaining danger and the stair ; down 
 
 1 V. Hist. Pros. iii. 136. As is the four-syllable foot with slur in verse 
 where the trisyllable is the usual limit, so is the six-syllable with slur in prose 
 where the dochmiac takes the same regular place. 
 
 2 C
 
 386 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 which the mother is fondly carried smiling in her strong husband's 
 arms, as he steps steadily step by step, and followed by the monthly 
 nurse, on the day when the medical man has pronounced that the 
 charming patient may go down-stairs ; up which John lurks to bed, 
 yawning with a sputtering tallow candle, and to gather up before 
 sunrise the boots which are awaiting him in the passages ; that 
 stair, up or down which babies are carried, old people are helped, 
 guests are marshalled to the ball, the parson walks to the christen- 
 ing, the doctor to the sick-room, and the undertaker's men to the 
 upper floor ; what a memento of life, death, and vanity it is that 
 arch and stair if you choose to consider it, and sit on the landing, 
 looking up and down the well ! The doctor will come up to us for 
 
 the last time there, my friend in motley. The nurse | will look in | 
 at the curtains, | and you | take no notice ; | and then | she will fling 
 
 open | the windows | for a little, | and let in | the air. | Then they 
 will pull down all the front blinds of the house and live in the back 
 rooms ; then they will send for the lawyer and other men in black, 
 
 etc. Your comedy | and mine | will have been played | then, | and 
 we | shall be removed, | O Aowfar, \ from the trumpets, | and the 
 
 shouting, | and the post[ure]-making. | If we are gentlefolks they 
 will put hatchments over our late domicile, with gilt cherubim, and 
 mottoes stating that there is " Quiet in Heaven." Your son will new 
 furnish the house, or perhaps let it, and go into a more modern 
 quarter ; your name will be among the " Members Deceased," in the 
 lists of your clubs next year. However much you may be mourned, 
 your widow will like to have her weeds neatly made ; the cook will 
 send, or come up, to ask about dinner ; the survivors will soon bear 
 to look at your picture over the mantelpiece, which will presently be 
 deposed from the place of honour, to make way for the portrait of 
 the son who reigns. 
 
 In place of the impossible luxuriance of example above 
 referred to, let two or three specimens from a single novel, 
 Vanity Fair, not laboriously searched for, but noted in the 
 course of a casual re-reading, which was not undertaken 
 with a view to this book at all, and in which the reader 
 never thought of making any notes till it" suddenly 
 occurred to him to do so. The first has perhaps no 
 special beauty that the ordinary reader should desire it : 
 
 Recollections of the best ordained banquets will scarcely cheer 
 sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most becoming dresses and 
 brilliant ball triumphs will go a very little way to console faded
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 387 
 
 beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a certain period of existence, are 
 not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions ; 
 and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small 
 account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view about 
 which we all of us must some day or other be speculating. 
 
 This is an example (subtly " Titmarshized," of course) 
 of standard style ; and the most obvious rhythmical device 
 in it is a familiar one, of which we have seen many 
 examples, and which has been called telescoping or 
 lengthening out of parallel periods. But note how care- 
 fully at least how successfully this is done ! how the 
 elongation .comes naturally for the sense, as well as 
 happily for the sound. The closing words in the three 
 last members (" beauties," " divisions," speculating ") 
 lengthen in unison with the groups, and here, as not in 
 most other and almost all earlier cases, the full syllabic 
 values of the groups behind these closes come in. 1 
 
 Here is a magnificent, if short, passage from the part 
 of the book which some (though I confess I do not) put 
 highest as a minor whole : 
 
 She was wrapped | in a white | morning | dress, | her hair | 
 falling | on her shoulders | and her large eyes | fixed | and without 
 
 light By way of helping on the preparations for the departure, and 
 showing that she too could be useful at a moment so critical, this 
 poor soul had taken up a sash of George's from the drawers whereon 
 it lay and followed him to and fro, with the sash in her hand, looking 
 
 on mutely as the packing proceeded. She came out \ and stood \ 
 leaning \ at the wall, \ holding this sash \ against \ her bosom, \ from 
 which | the heavy \ net \ of crimson \ dropped \ like a large \ stain \ 
 of blood. 
 
 Ah ! how often during the last thirty or forty years 
 nay, if I may dare to say, even during the last ten, when, 
 as it has been finely observed, " the men who carry on 
 their shoulders the literature of the twentieth century 
 
 1 There are some, of course, to whom the parenthetic ' ' albeit uncertain " 
 will seem offensive. Nicht mir.
 
 388 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 know the magic of literature, the power to take a reader 
 out of himself and bring him nearer to the heart of the 
 world " how often have I seen these Atlantean psycha- 
 gogues, consciously or unconsciously, trying to follow and 
 beat those last few words in sound and picture trying 
 and, well, not quite succeeding. The most trivial 
 sentences in Thackeray show this magic, as it seems to 
 me, though not perhaps to the writer just quoted. 
 
 Take another and shorter not, I hope, impudently 
 short : 
 
 Becky | was always | good to him, | always | amused, | never | 
 angry. 
 
 Anybody can do that? The Atlantes of the 
 twentieth century could do it, in a posture vernacularly 
 well known, but for the peril of disturbing the literature 
 which they carry ? Perhaps ; but please find some- 
 thing like it for me before 1845, an d out f Thackeray, 
 if you will kindly do so. In him it is everywhere. 
 
 Newman. Let us conclude the examples of this chapter with a 
 passage from one of the greatest masters of quietly 
 exquisite prose that the world has ever seen. To my ear 
 there is also a curious community of note with the 
 passage above cited from Thackeray on the Ionian ruins : 
 
 Let us consider, | too, | how differently | young | and old | are 
 affected | by the words | of some classic | author, | such | as Homer] 
 or Horace. | Passages, | which to a boy | are but | rhetorical | com- 
 monplaces, | neither better | nor worse | than a hundred | others, | 
 which any | clever writer | might | supply, | which he gets | by heart | 
 and thinks | very fine, and imitates, | as he thinks, | successfully, | 
 in his own | flowing | versification, j at length | come home to him, | 
 when long years | have passed, | and he has had | experience | of 
 life, | and pierce him, as if | he had never | before | known them, | 
 with their sad I earnestness I and vivid I exactness. I Then he comes I
 
 x MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1820-1860 389 
 
 to understand | how | it is | that lines, | the birth | of some chance 
 morning | or evening | at an Ionian | festival, | or among | the 
 Sabine | hills, | have lasted | generation | after | generation, | for 
 thousands | of years | with a power | over the mind, | and a charm | 
 which the current | literature | of his own day, | with all j its obvious | 
 advantages, j is utterly | unable | to rival. | Perhaps | this is | the 
 reason of | the mediaeval | opinion | about Virgil, | as of a prophet | 
 or a magician ; | his single | words | and phrases, j his pathetic | 
 half- lines, | giving utterance, | as the voice | of Nature | herself, | 
 to that pain | and weariness, | yet hope | of better | things, | which 
 is | the experience | of her children | in every | time. | 
 
 Not one single collocation of words which, without absurd 
 straining of the natural reading, can be got into a blank 
 verse ; no spilth of epithets ; not one of the common 
 rhetorical devices to " get rhythm " : yet, as will be seen 
 from the scansion, an unbroken, unslurred l current of 
 harmony right through the piece, a harmony to which 
 every syllable supplies its quota. 
 
 In this quiet but wonderful piece, the method 2 of 
 which we may later find extended in a still more famous 
 example of Newman's great pupil and, in turn, deserter, 
 Froude, the possibilities of standard style, slightly but 
 marvellously " super-rhythmed," are seen almost at their 
 perfection. Froude, as we shall see, went further in the 
 direction of rhythmical ornament and elaboration ; indeed, 
 he may be said to have overstepped the strictly classical 
 character of the " standard " itself. But on this, and on 
 other wider considerations to be deduced from the other 
 constituents of this chapter, it should be sufficient to 
 
 1 The occasional valuations of " -ion," etc., as monosyllabic do not, of 
 course, in modern English constitute a real slur. 
 
 2 Pusey was, of course, as a writer, much inferior to Newman, but I have 
 wondered whether the younger man did not take something of his written 
 style from the delivery of that (slightly) elder, who was to him always 6 /j.tyas. 
 It had a crystalline purity of tone, and a faintly tremulous calmness of rhythm, 
 which, as I never "sat under" Newman himself, has always made me hear 
 the sentences of the fugitive Cardinal in the voice of the steadfast Canon.
 
 390 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CH. x 
 
 generalise in the Conclusion. We must now, if we may, 
 pass, in a chapter which can hardly be a short one, but 
 which must be kept down as far as possible, to the great 
 exponents, no longer living, of " numerous " and other 
 prose in the last sixty years of the nineteenth century.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY PROSE 
 
 1843 Modern Painters Influences on Ruskin's style His sub- 
 jects His practice in verse, and its marks on his prose 
 Kingsley : his pure Ruskinian prose His " song-shape " style 
 Charlotte Bronte " George Eliot " Mr. Froude Matthew 
 Arnold His peculiar system of repetition Examples, and 
 discussion of it Mansel A false answer corrected Pater 
 His quietism His apes: Mr. Frederick Myers Mr. Swinburne 
 The mixed influences in him Examples in great and little 
 William Morris " Wardour Street" or not? George 
 Meredith : his Meredithesity Stevenson. 
 
 APPRECIATIONS of the merit, as prose, of Mr. Ruskin's 1843 
 
 Modern 
 Painters. 
 
 prose-writing have differed, and, I doubt not, still do Modern 
 
 differ, though perhaps less than was once the case. But 
 I can hardly imagine any critic denying that the appear- 
 ance of the work of this " Graduate of Oxford " made 
 1843 an epoch for ever in the history of English prose 
 style. By that year Landor and De Quincey had long 
 written, and in it they were still writing copiously in the 
 more elaborate manners ; while for a less period, with 
 more violent opposition at first, but with much greater 
 influence, Carlyle had been revolutionising the medium in 
 ways partly akin, partly diverse. But most of the older 
 masters of the standard style were dead Southey died 
 in this very year or touching the close of their career ; 
 there was a great deal of slovenly writing about ; and 
 though men older than Ruskin such as the younger of 
 those treated in the last chapter were to write for twenty, 
 thirty, forty, or even fifty, years longer, Ruskin, young as 
 he was, was ahead of his own generation, such as
 
 392 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Matthew Arnold, Froude, Kingsley, while Mr. George 
 Meredith was a boy of fifteen. Whether he shows any 
 influence from the older prose harmonists who had begun 
 to write, as it were, like fairy parents over his cradle, I 
 must leave to some industrious person to expiscate or rum- 
 mage out ; for the haystack of Ruskinian autobiography 
 is not only mighty in bulk but scattered rather forbiddingly. 
 I should think that, with him, the main guidance was 
 partly that of the Time-Spirit itself, partly the result of 
 two special additions thereto in the individual case. 
 influences on We have seen how the determination away from 
 H\S subjects & generalities in description was the most powerful aid to 
 the development of the fuller harmony of prose the 
 writer's anxiety to be particular necessitating, by con- 
 scious or unconscious implication, attention to each word, 
 each syllable, and specially negativing the drab and Slab 
 indistinctness of the Middletonian buckram, and the 
 comelier, but still too uniform, broadcloth of the 
 " standard." But what even De Quincey, even Landor, 
 had been to the describers of the eighteenth century, 
 that and more also Mr. Ruskin set himself to be to them. 
 The Savernake forest, with its foreground of Fannies and 
 roses, the noble, almost Turneresque, landscape of Baiae 
 and Posilippo, are but sketches to the marvellous panorama 
 as of a Perseus flight from the Mediterranean to the 
 Arctic, or to the companion pictures of the square of St. 
 Mark and that cathedral close which is a sort of dream- 
 mixture of Canterbury and York, of Peterborough and 
 Salisbury, and a score of other minsters and minster- 
 precincts, from Durham to Exeter, and from Lincoln to 
 St. David's. Scenery and architecture, pictures and 
 living creatures, 1 crowded about that extraordinary brain 
 and hand, clamouring for reproduction in words and 
 getting it. Certainly, if, as some have it, it is enough to 
 be very full of your subject, there is no wonder that 
 Ruskin was polyphonic in style. Certainly, if, as others 
 hold, the style is the man before any subjects strike him, 
 
 1 The two Zoas as one might call them by a joint reminiscence of 
 Aristotle and Blake.
 
 xi RUSK IN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 393 
 
 he could be at no loss in showing that style for any 
 want of subjects afterwards. 
 
 There was, however, I think, another influence, more His practice in 
 doubtfully salutary, but pretty certainly operative. As verse> 
 one takes down from the shelf not, indeed, for the 
 first, but, it is to be feared, not for much more than the 
 second time a pair of mighty quartos, decently clad in 
 white vellum and green linen, sumptuously printed, with 
 lovely uncut margins, and cunningly embellished by not 
 a few most desirable drawings, one comforting suggestion 
 compensates the deplorable acknowledgment that here is 
 really as in another case there was once so falsely 
 asserted to be " very valueless verse." That suggestion 
 is that perhaps, or rather all but certainly, if Ruskin had 
 been a better poet he would have been a very inferior, 
 and beyond all question a much less prolific, prose- 
 writer. Now (thank Heaven ! once more, as in the case 
 of De Quincey), we have no lack of good poets, and 
 though this book does not exactly show a lack of good 
 prose -writers, we had a little more room for reinforce- 
 ment there. At any rate, it is excessively unlikely that 
 any possible poetic Ruskin could have been, in his vocation, 
 as good as the prose Ruskin we have got. So let us, for 
 once, be Panglossian. 
 
 It is, further, the most natural thing in the world that and its marks 
 this Drang nach Versen, when it found itself baffled and or 
 beaten off from actual verse, should have left unusual 
 formal traces on the prose in which it happily consoled 
 and lost itself. De Quincey, as has been said, evidently 
 had, despite his tell-tale boast of what he could have been 
 an he would, no real turn for actual poetry. Men as 
 different as Southey, Coleridge, Landor, Shelley, Moore, 
 could, with differing but real effect, use either harmony 
 as they pleased. Ruskin had the poetic velleity with not 
 a little of the poetic thought he is one of the chief 
 refutations of Wordsworth's astounding petitio principii 
 and he had something, too, of the mechanical accomplish- 
 ment, though nothing higher, of poetic form. Accordingly, 
 you will find in him more actual metre, and especially
 
 394 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 more actual blank verse, even allowing proportion for his 
 immense volume, than in any great prose writer known 
 to me. The fact is, of course, notorious (we shall see 
 abundant evidence of it even in the few short specimens 
 that we can afford), but it must be clear that we are not 
 entitled to neglect it, or to dismiss it with very brief 
 discussion, because it happens to be one of the few well- 
 known facts in a mostly pioneer enquiry. Nor is such 
 discussion obviated it is, in fact, made all the more 
 desirable by the fact that Ruskin's Setvorys his 
 astonishing blend of ingenuity and vigour actually 
 carries off, not merely occasional blank heroics, but whole 
 batches, and almost paragraphs of them, unnoticed or 
 half noticed, in the gorgeous flood of colour and the 
 infinite symphony of sound. 
 
 So ineluctable indeed was this tendency towards mejre 
 in Ruskin, that there are in him (and this has been much 
 less noticed than the blank verse) very frequent stanza- 
 arrangements such as may be found in avowed hybrids like 
 the styles of Ossian and of Blake's " Prophecies," but 
 hardly elsewhere, except by mere accident, till Ruskin 
 himself set the example. Every now and then, in these 
 formed or half-formed stanzas, there is actual rhyme, as in 
 a description of Rouen : 
 
 And the city lay 
 
 Under its guarding hills 
 One labyrinth of flight, 
 
 Its grey and fretted towers 
 Misty in their magnificence of height ; 
 
 where a very thinkable equivalent J for " their magnificence 
 of" will bring the thing metrically off. 
 
 Here is another, unrhymed, and saved in the first line 
 (not the last) by a sort of insertion which can easily be 
 ^inserted : 
 
 1 Such as 
 
 " Misty in topless height." 
 
 Of course the actual phrase is an instance of the escamotage, the clever 
 " conveyance," which passes off the metrical card as possibly prose-rhythmical.
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 395 
 
 And the [far-reaching] ridges [of pastoral mountain] succeed 
 each other 1 
 
 Like the long and sighing swell 
 Which moves over quiet waters, 
 From some far-off stormy sea. 
 
 The brain of his style seems to have been full of 
 these verse-matrices ; and inasmuch they are far more 
 difficult subjects, for smuggling on and off, than a blank 
 verse, it is simply astounding to see how the lava of his 
 volcanic expression digests and assimilates the casts from 
 them. 
 
 Of the blank verses by themselves it is unnecessary to 
 extract special examples : you can hardly open a page of 
 Ruskin when his prose has caught fire without finding 
 them ; and they can be abundantly indicated, as they 
 occur, in the specimens which we shall give with a more 
 general intent. And these, both for the special object 
 and the general, cannot be better headed than by the 
 famous and magnificent picture of the front of St. Mark's, 
 above referred to : 
 
 And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered 
 arches there rises a vision | out of the earth, and all the great square 
 seems | to have opened from it in a kind of awe, | that we may see 
 it far away ; a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into | 
 a long low pyramid of coloured light ; | a treasure-heap, it seems, 
 partly of gold, | and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed 
 beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and 
 beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber, and delicate as 
 ivory, | sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm | leaves and lilies, 
 and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering 
 among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of 
 buds and plumes ; | and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms | of 
 angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other | 
 across the gates, their figures indistinct | among the gleaming of the 
 golden ground | through the leaves beside them, interrupted and 
 dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of 
 Eden, when first | its gates were angel -guarded long ago. | And 
 round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated 
 
 1 Here it may be noticed that the first prose member supplies two verse- 
 lines of the required character : 
 
 "And the ridges of pastoral mountain," 
 or 
 
 "And the ridges succeed each other."
 
 396 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 stones, jasper | and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine | spotted 
 with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to 
 the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, " their bluest veins to kiss " | the 
 shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing | line after line of 
 azure undulation, | as a receding tide leaves the waved sand ; | their 
 capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and 
 drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning 
 and ending in the Cross ; and above them, in the broad archivolts, 
 a continuous chain of language and of life angels, and the signs 
 of heaven and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon 
 the earth ; and above these | another range of glittering pinnacles, | 
 mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers, | a confusion 
 of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are | seen 
 blazing in their breadth of golden strength, | and the St. Mark's 
 Lion, lifted | on a blue field covered with stars, until | at last, as if 
 in ecstacy, the crests | of the arches break into a marble foam, | and 
 toss themselves far into the blue sky | in flashes and wreaths of 
 sculptured spray, as if | the breakers on the Lido shore had been | 
 frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs | had inlaid them 
 with coral and amethyst. 1 j 
 
 Now, of course, it obviously may be said, and probably 
 has been said a hundred times, that this is illegitimate, a 
 " monstrous beauty," something that " you ought not to 
 like." Well ! this is the seventh vial-volume (I blush 
 for it) that I have opened in hope of pouring contempt and 
 destruction on the doctrine of monstrous beauties. It is 
 impossible that beauty should be monstrous ; and if I 
 met a monster that pretended to be one and was beauti- 
 ful, I should, like Prince Seithenyn, tell it to its beautiful 
 face that it was no monster. But is this beautiful ? 
 There of course we come to the old flaming walls of the 
 world of taste. I can only say that if it is not, I do not 
 know where beauty of prose is to be found. 
 
 But there is something more than this to be said 
 something more than mere personal preference to be 
 alleged, with or without the chance of finding oneself not 
 alone in it. After all, the dicta 2 of some pretty sane 
 and moderate authorities of the most classical character 
 of Dionysius and of Quintilian can be pleaded in 
 
 1 Eight almost impeccable "blanks" following each other; ten with the 
 brachycatalectic " and the St. Mark's " only interposed as a Shakespearian 
 fragment ; and thirteen with the not very alien intrusion of " a confusion . . . 
 horses are." 
 
 2 V. sup. title-page and pp. 1-8.
 
 xi RUSK IN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 397 
 
 favour of this merging and meeting of all sorts of metrical 
 music in the flood of rhythmical prose. And the other 
 methods by which the effect is attained are strict develop- 
 ments of those of masters so different and yet so authori- 
 tative as, for instance, Hooker and Gibbon. Vast as are 
 the sentence -paragraphs, long as is the central sweep 
 which the momentum of their manner enables them to 
 sustain, the principle of the flight, for all their flutter and 
 flash of gorgeous plumage, is not so very unlike the rise 
 and poise and sinking of the Ecclesiastical Polity ; while 
 the minor undulations of the composing clauses, for all 
 the splash and spray, " send on " the reader in a fashion 
 not so fundamentally different from the smoother and 
 sedater sweep of the Decline and Fall. 
 
 Here, too, one obvious feature of Ruskin's style the 
 way in which the enormous sentences are built up, tier on 
 tier, by clauses so admirably and distinctly cumulative 
 that no confusion whatever results may seem to belong 
 to other departments than ours. But, in reality, this 
 feature has almost infinite connection with, and influence 
 upon, the pure rhythm of the composition. And, in 
 particular, it helps, almost more than any other character- 
 istic, to perform that office of "carrying over" the im- 
 bedded or rather " inflooded " verse -fragments ; while 
 these, in their turn, eddy and undulate and foambell it 
 with their endless variety of form, and colour, and tone. 
 Not merely does the constant blank verse appear with 
 the frequency indicated by the straight division-mark, yet 
 for the most part justifying itself by different rhetorical 
 partition but it interarches and crosses itself with other 
 things distinct from it scraps and fragments of other 
 rhythms, single-lined, coupleted almost stanzaed after 
 the fashion noted above in the glorious welter 
 
 The crests of the arches break 
 
 Into a marble foam, 
 And toss themselves far \aloff\ 
 
 In flashes ... of sculptured spray 
 
 as you may feel inclined to vary it, or complete it, from 
 the actual material offered you.
 
 398 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 But let us take another passage somewhat shorter 
 and somewhat quieter and apply to it the old method 
 of continuous scansion to bring out the prose feet. The 
 reflective close of the " Jura Pine Forest," the earlier 
 portion of which has been as florid and as " blank-versy " 
 as the " St. Mark " itself, will do admirably : 
 
 It would | be difficult | to conceive | a scene | less dependent | 
 upon any | other | interest | than that | of its own | secluded | and 
 serious | beauty ; | but the writer | well | remembers | the sudden | 
 blankness | and chill | which were cast | upon it | when he en- 
 deavoured, | in order | more strictly | to arrive | at the sources | of 
 its | impressiveness, | to imagine it, | for a moment, | a scene | in 
 some | aboriginal | forest | of the New | Continent. | The flowers j 
 in an instant | lost | their light, | the river | its music ; | the hills | 
 became | oppressively | desolate ; | a heaviness | in the boughs | of 
 the darkened | forest | showed | how much | of their former | power j 
 had been dependent | upon a life | which was not | theirs, | how 
 much | of the glory of | the imperishable, 1 | or continually | re- 
 newed, | creation | is reflected | from things | more precious | in 
 their memories | than it, | in its | renewing. | Those ever- 1 spring- 
 ing | flowers | and ever- 1 flowing | streams | had been dyed | by the 
 deep | colours | of human | endurance, | valour, | and virtue ; | and 
 the crests | of the sable | hills j that rose | against | the evening | 
 sky | received | a deeper | worship, | because | their far | shadows | 
 fell eastward | over the iron | wall | of Joux, j and the four-square | 
 keep | of Granson. S.L.A. VI. i. 
 
 I do not say that you may not screw out some metrical 
 
 1 This is one of those strictly speaking six-syllabled feet which are prac- 
 tically and by delivery dochmiacs. And so is the next. But on my older 
 principle of not hesitating to split words I should have cut them and I have 
 
 no objection to cutting them now into three feet, "the imperish|able or 
 continually renewed."
 
 xi RUSK IN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 399 
 
 fragment here and there in this ; but they are certainly 
 few, and as certainly not prominent, while the quieter 
 flow of the passage would not help to disguise them if 
 they were. 
 
 How tempting it is to multiply longer and shorter 
 exemplifications from Ruskin need not be said. He will 
 sometimes give you quite short sentences, not really 
 metrical at all, somewhat stiff in their brocade of language, 
 but gorgeous for all that 
 
 Far above, in thunder-blue serration, stand the eternal edges of 
 the angry Apennine, dark with rolling impendence of volcanic cloud. 
 
 Here " eternal " to " Apennine " is a constructive 
 Alexandrine, and " rolling " to " cloud " a heroic. But no 
 human being with an ear and a tongue that obeys it 
 would ever dream of reading them as such. 
 
 Sometimes very often, of course his rhythms are 
 mainly Scriptural, as in that fine passage of Modern 
 Painters which ends : 
 
 He has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry ; 
 nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven. 
 
 And yet often again, at one period particularly, the 
 well-known influence of Carlyle brings about a mixture 
 of rhythms, very curious and interesting. It is well seen 
 in the contrast of the birthplaces and breedings of 
 Giorgione and Turner : 
 
 In hope and honour, lulled by flowing of wave l around their isles 
 of sacred sand, each with his name written and the cross graved at 
 his side, lay her dead. A wonderful piece of a world. Rather itself 
 a world. 
 
 Of things beautiful, besides men and women, dusty sunbeams up 
 and down the street in summer mornings ; deep-furrowed cabbage 
 leaves at the green-grocers' ; magnificence of oranges in wheel- 
 barrows round the corner ; and Thames shore within three minutes' 
 race. 
 
 But indeed it would be somewhat fatuous to pretend 
 
 1 The rhythmical effect of dropping articles, so constantly exhibited in 
 Carlyle himself, is one of the agreeable arcana minora of the subject. I 
 suppose the brain at once expects and misses them ; and so a little shock, 
 not disagreeable but distinctly perceptible, is produced.
 
 400 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 to say anything new about Ruskin. We drop here from 
 our mostly untrodden ways into a well-known diversorium, 
 and, without having any ascetic Antonian and Arnoldian 
 objection to such places, we need not play the superfluous 
 cicerone in them. He could not have been omitted 
 without something of affectation in the compiler of this 
 book, and something more of loss to the reader of it. 
 Nor, except the saturation with metre or metre's worth, 
 and the unique fashion in which this is carried off, is 
 there perhaps very much in him that requires close or 
 elaborate analysis. His immense volume, and its direction 
 to a whole encyclopaedia of subjects, may have prevented 
 any intense idiosyncrasy of style, and certainly diverted 
 his energies into a great many different channels of it. 
 You may find, besides the Biblical and Carlylian echoes 
 just noted, numerous passages of almost prae-" standard " ; 
 attempts, not, as a rule, very happy, at that humorous- 
 familiar which almost pointedly reduces rhythm to the 
 minimum ; several other varieties. And in the general 
 history which I am trying to write, it may be questioned 
 whether his position is not rather that of a fertile and 
 delightful producer, and, still more, an influence of almost 
 incalculable force and range, than that of an extremely 
 original deviser of new methods. His are no doubt the 
 methods of Coleridge in the Anima (which he did not 
 and could not know), of De Quincey and Landor and 
 Wilson (which he did), with a " much more also " added. 
 But they are still those methods. 
 
 Kingsley -. his Hardly any one was quicker to feel the widely extended 
 influence of Modern Painters than Charles Kingsley, and 
 in his very first novel, Yeast, we find this : 
 
 Launcelot sat and tried to catch perch, but Tregarva's words 
 haunted him. He lighted his cigar, and tried to think' earnestly 
 over the matter, but he had got into the wrong place for thinking. 
 All his thoughts, all his sympathies, were drowned in the rush and 
 whirl of the water. He forgot everything else in the mere animal 
 enjoyment of sight and sound. Like many young men at his crisis 
 of life, he had given himself up to the mere contemplation of nature 
 till he had become her slave ; and now a luscious scene, a singing
 
 xi R US KIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 401 
 
 bird, were enough to allure his mind away from the most earnest 
 and awful thoughts. He tried to think, but the river would not let 
 him. It thundered and spouted out behind him from the hatches, 
 and leapt madly past him, and caught his eyes in spite of him, and 
 swept them away down its dancing waves, and then let them go 
 again only to sweep them down again and again, till his brain felt a 
 delicious dizziness from the everlasting rush and the everlasting roar. 
 And then below, how it spread, | and writhed, and whirled into 
 transparent fans, | hissing and twining snakes, polished glass wreaths, | 
 huge crystal bells, which boiled up from the bottom, | and dived 
 again beneath long threads | of creamy foam, and swung round posts 
 and roots, | and rushed blackening under dark weed-fringed boughs, 
 and gnawed at the marly banks, | and shook the ever restless bul- 
 rushes, | till it was swept away and down over the white pebbles | 
 and olive weeds, in one broad rippling sheet | of molten silver, 
 towards l the distant sea. | Downwards it fleeted ever, and bore his 
 thoughts floating on its oily stream ; and the great trout, with their 
 yellow sides and peacock backs, lunged among the eddies, and the 
 silver grayling dimpled and wandered upon the shallows, and the 
 May-flies flickered and rustled round him like water fairies, with 
 their green gauzy wings ; the coot clanked musically among the 
 reeds ; the frogs hummed their ceaseless vesper monotone ; the king- 
 fisher darted from his hole in the bank like a blue | spark of electric 
 light ; the swallows' bills | snapped as they twined and hawked 
 above the pool ; | the swifts' wings whirred like musket balls, as 
 they | rushed screaming past his head ; and ever the river fleeted 
 by, bearing his eyes away down the current, till its wild eddies 
 began | to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun. 
 
 Here there is not only the beautiful bane of blank 
 verse, marked in some half-dozen instances (it has not 
 been thought necessary to scan the whole passage), but 
 interesting fragments, as in Ruskin himself, of other verse 
 measures : 
 
 And ev|er the rivjer fleet |ed by ... 
 
 And the May- [flies flick |ered and rus|tled . . . 
 
 Down | wards it fleet [ed ev|er . . . 
 
 But it is all melted and blended into thoroughly sound 
 prose, and here and there, as in 
 
 1 Taking this monosyllabically. But it is really a dissyllable in the place, 
 as, in fact, it is generally in good writers, and so duly trips up the blank- 
 verse run, and substitutes a grave prose rhythm. 
 
 2 D
 
 402 A HISTOR Y OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 It thundered and spouted [out] behind him, 
 
 you see the cunning skid inserted to prevent the whole 
 revolving in too verse-like a fashion. And I think it is 
 fair to Kingsley to add that if the reader will look care- 
 fully at the construction and contrasting of the clause 
 lengths in the sentence, " And then below . . . distant sea," 
 he will see more careful art in the disciple than in some 
 at least of the master's outpourings. 
 
 His "song- In Hypatia, and elsewhere, following his other master, 
 
 Carlyle, he too often adopted an excessively broken fashion 
 of rhythm, produced by mechanical means of rows of 
 points and so forth, which sometimes become a little 
 irritating. In The Heroes, in the Water-Babies, and else- 
 where, examples of prose harmony in the severer and 
 simpler, as well as in the more exuberant types of splen- 
 dour, abound. But his natural tendency was rather in 
 the direction of even further indulgence in quasi-metrical 
 rhythm. It is well known to students of prosodic effect 
 that there is hardly a single poet, not of the highest class, 
 who, in so small a body of poetic work, has shown such 
 various, such original, and such almost impeccable mastery 
 of metre as the author of Andromeda. But contrary to 
 a pretty general rule he did not wholly reserve for verse 
 his more tunable efforts. The famous passage at the close 
 of Westward Ho I was quite intentional, and he knew 
 that it was a doubtful experiment. I -suppose it is ; but 
 I cannot help thinking that if Mercury and Apollo sat in 
 banco and " broke " Kingsley for disregarding their bound- 
 ary laws as officer of either, they would agree to make 
 him Warden of the joint Marches next moment. The 
 thing is so curious, as well as so beautiful, that it may be 
 well to have it displayed in print, both as straightforward 
 prose and in its rhythmical-metrical stave-order. 
 
 Wondering, they set him down upon the heather, while the bees 
 hummed round them in the sun ; and Amyas felt for a hand of each, 
 and clasped it in his own hand, and began 
 
 "When you left me there upon the rock, lads, I looked away and 
 out to sea, to get one last snuff of the merry sea breeze, which will 
 never sail me again. And as I looked, I tell you truth, I could see
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 403 
 
 the water and the sky, as plain as ever I saw them, till I thought my 
 sight was come again. But soon I knew it was not so ; for I saw 
 more than man could see ; right over the ocean, as I live, and away 
 to the Spanish Main. And I saw Barbados, and Grenada, and all 
 the isles that we ever sailed by ; and La Guayra in Carraccas, and 
 the Silla, and the house beneath it where she lived. And I saw him 
 walking with her on the barbecu, and he loved her then. I saw 
 what I saw ; and he loved her ; and I say he loves her still. 
 
 " Then I saw the cliffs beneath me, and the Gull rock, and the 
 Shutter, and the Ledge ; I saw them, William Gary, and the weeds 
 beneath the merry blue sea. And I saw the grand old galleon, 
 Will ; she has righted with the sweeping of the tide. She lies in 
 fifteen fathoms, at the edge of the rocks, upon the sand ; and her 
 men are all lying around her, asleep until the judgment day." 
 
 Gary and Jack looked at him, and then at each other. His eyes 
 were clear, and bright, and full of meaning ; and yet they knew that 
 he was blind. His voice was shaping itself into a song. Was he 
 inspired ? Insane ? What was it ? And they listened with awe- 
 struck faces, as the giant pointed down into the blue depths far 
 below, and went on. 
 
 "And I saw him sitting in his cabin, like a valiant gentleman of 
 Spain ; and his officers were sitting round him with their swords 
 upon the table at the wine. And the prawns and the cray-fish, and 
 the rockling, they swam in and out above their heads ; but Don 
 Guzman he never heeded, but sat still, and drank his wine. Then 
 he took a locket from his bosom, and I heard him speak, Will, and 
 he said : ' Here's the picture of my fair and true lady ; drink to her, 
 senors, all.' Then he spoke to me, Will, and called me, right up 
 through the oar-weed and the sea : ' We have had a fair quarrel, 
 senor ; it is time to be friends once more. My wife and your brother 
 have forgiven me ; so your honour takes no stain.' And I answered, 
 ' We are friends, Don Guzman ; God has judged our quarrel, and 
 not we.' Then he said, ' I sinned, and I am punished.' And I 
 said, 'And, senor, so am I.' Then he held out his hand to me, 
 Gary ; and I stooped to take it, and awoke." 
 
 And I saw | Barbados, | and Grenada, and all the isles | that we 
 
 ever | sailed by ; 
 and La Guayra | in Carraccas, | and the Silla, j and the house | 
 
 beneath it | where she lived. 
 And I saw him | walking | with her | on the barbecu, ; and he loved 
 
 her | then. 
 I saw | what I saw ; | and he loved her ; ; and I say he | loves her j 
 
 still
 
 404 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Then I saw the | cliffs bejneath me, : and the Gull rock, I and the 
 Shutter, | and the Ledge ; 
 
 I saw them, | William, | Gary, : and the weeds | beneath the merry | 
 blue sea. 
 
 And I saw the | grand old | galleon, | Will ; ! she has righted j with 
 the sweeping | of the tide. 
 
 She lies in | fifteen | fathoms, : at the edge of | the rocks, upon the 
 sand ; 
 
 and her men are | all lying | around her, : asleep until | the judg- 
 ment | day. 
 
 And I saw him | sitting | in his cabin i like a valiant J gentleman | 
 
 of Spain ; 
 and his officers | were sitting | round him ; with their swords up [on 
 
 the table | at the wine. 
 And the prawns and | the cray-fish, | and the rockling, ; they swam 
 
 in | and out above | their heads ; 
 but Don Guzman | he never | heeded, i but sat still, and | drank his | 
 
 wine. 
 Then he took | a locket | from his bosom, and I heard him | speak, 
 
 Will, | and he said : 
 " Here's the picture | of my fair and | true lady ; \ drink to her, | 
 
 senors, | all." 
 Then he spoke to me, | Will, | and called me, right up | through 
 
 the oar-weed | and the sea : 
 " We have had | a fair quarrel, | senor ; : it is time | to be friends | 
 
 once more. 
 My wife | and your brother | have forgiven me ; : so your honour | 
 
 takes no I stain."
 
 xi R US KIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 405 
 
 And I answered, | " We are friends, | Don Guzman ; : God has 
 
 judged | our quarrel, | and not we." 
 Then he said, | " I sinned, | and I am punished." : And I said, | 
 
 "And, senor, | so am I." 
 
 The thing is, I say, most curious. It is not exactly 
 like anything that we have seen, though it is perhaps a 
 development, by a hand of far greater technical skill in 
 verse, of what we have seen in Mr. Ruskin. It is not 
 heavily blank-versed prose ; indeed, the prevailing rhythm 
 is trisyllabic or rather quadrisyllabic. 1 It is not in the 
 least like the long and comparatively equilibrated lines of 
 Blake's " Prophetic " books. There is no artificial stave 
 division as there is in Ossian, and (though of a very 
 different kind) in Leaves of Grass. It is, as its author 
 with perfect appositeness describes it, " prose shaped into 
 song," but with constant, and it would seem deliberate, 
 attention to the insertion, from short time to time, of 
 words that slightly break the regularity of the rhythm, 
 and remind you that, after all, it is not meant to be metre. 
 In its avoidance of too definitely poetic diction, in its 
 colloquial forms, and in this carefully adjusted " knapping " 
 of the rhythm, it seems to me, though undoubtedly a 
 dangerous, a successfully-brought-off experiment, and one 
 well suited for the purposes of romance occasionally. 
 But, as the late Professor Bain said of kissing in a phrase 
 which I may have quoted before (it is so delectable), " the 
 occasion should be adequate, and the actuality rare." 
 
 I made some remarks in the last chapter on the 
 difficulty of " sampling " the general rhythm of novelists ; 
 
 1 It is not, I hope, necessary to explain at any length my principle of 
 arrangement. It is that of lengthened staves with a strong Sigurd centre 
 pause (marked ; ) in fact, some of them are not unlike Sigurd lines, a quarter 
 of a century before date. In some cases, of course, these will easily adjust 
 themselves to ballad subdivision with generous anapaestic substitution : 
 ' ' But Don Guzman he never heeded, 
 But sat still and drank his wine." 
 
 Generally, however, the all-powerful and all-pervading Ionic a minors, or 
 third paeon, is the key-note ; and its continuance, beyond strict prose perfec- 
 tion, is the mother of the measure.
 
 406 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 and this necessarily proves harder as we get into the ever- 
 thickening press of those of the middle and later nine- 
 teenth century. Charlotte Bronte, both for her own 
 merits and for some estimates that have been held of her, 
 must have discussion and exemplification as a pendant to 
 Kingsley. Then, perhaps, one from each " George," to 
 give the sexes no advantage over each other, may suffice, 
 but, for reasons, the real George Mr. Meredith had 
 better be postponed. 
 
 charlotte With respect to the Brontes, one of the most 
 Bronte, competent critics I know, my friend Professor Vaughan, 
 while admitting that Emily's " prose lyrics " are rather 
 diffused than concentrated, claims for Charlotte, in the 
 closing passage of Villette, an " arrangement of words 
 supremely beautiful," and such as he would rather have 
 written than any but a very few passages in English ; 
 while he ranks with it Louis Moore's vision of the moon 
 in Shirley. For my part I should put the three 
 descriptions of the pictures in Jane Eyre (chap, xiii.) 
 above both of these as mere " beautiful arrangements of 
 words." * But (playing the ungrateful but necessary 
 part of Devil's Advocate) I should suggest that there is, 
 even in this last, something like a very definite evidence 
 of " pattern " from De Quincey in the Suspiria. While 
 as for Professor Vaughan's favourite, nothing can exceed 
 its pathos or its appropriateness in substance : but in style, 
 and especially in rhythm, I should say that it approaches 
 too near to the bastard poetic it is of our Second, not 
 our Third class (v. sup. p. 342). The truth, I think, is 
 that here, as elsewhere, that peculiar and rather specially 
 feminine crudity which accompanied all Charlotte's un- 
 questioned power and passion, as a sort of impotentia in 
 the true Latin sense, prevented, and would always have 
 prevented her, from achieving full mistress-ship in this 
 
 1 These are preceded by a shorter piece of the same kind (towards the 
 end of chap, xii.), which is, perhaps, even finer, but rather more blank - 
 versified ; and throughout Villette there is much of the same kind of "fine 
 writing," as Matthew Arnold calls it. in his severe, but not quite unjust, 
 remarks on the book.
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 407 
 
 direction. In the next generation a third- or fourth-rate 
 writer of the same sex, whose name it is unnecessary to 
 mention, pleaded (or rather prided herself upon the 
 notion) that " the burden of meaning lay too heavy on 
 a woman's soul " to let her command elaborately formal 
 metres. It is possible to apply this, quite differently, so 
 that it may be not pretentious nonsense, but only a 
 milder form of that " malediction of Eve " which even 
 the " benediction of Mary " has not fully removed in 
 any case known to me except in that of Miss Christina 
 Rossetti the removal being perhaps a fee to the model 
 of a certain " Girlhood " picture. It will, however, only 
 be fair to give Professor Vaughan's preferred piece 
 and mine : 
 
 The sun passes the equinox ; the days shorten ; the leaves grow 
 sere ; but he is coming. 
 
 Frosts appear at night. November has sent his fogs in advance ; 
 the wind takes its autumn moan ; but he is coming. 
 
 The skies hang full and dark ; a rack sails from the west ; the 
 clouds cast themselves into strange forms arches and broad 
 radiations ; there rise resplendent mornings glorious, royal, purple 
 as monarch in his state ; the heavens are one flame ; so wild are 
 they, they rival battle at its thickest so bloody, they shame victory 
 in her pride. I know some signs of the sky, I have noted them 
 ever since childhood. God watch that sail ! Oh, guard it ! 
 
 The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee " keening " 
 at every window ! It will rise it will swell it shrieks out long : 
 wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the 
 blast. The advancing hours make it strong ; by midnight all 
 sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm. 
 
 That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease 
 till the Atlantic was strewed with wrecks ; it did not lull till the 
 deeps had gorged their full of sustenance. Not till the destroying 
 angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work would he fold the 
 wings whose waft was thunder the tremor of whose plumes was 
 storm. 
 
 Peace, be still ! Oh, a thousand weepers praying in agony on 
 waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered not 
 uttered till, when the hush came, some could not feel it : till when 
 the sun returned his light was night to some. 
 
 Now for the other ; only adding to the observations 
 on both made above, that in the piece just quoted there is 
 a notable, and doubtless not unintended, lack of continuous
 
 408 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 rhythm ; it consists chiefly of short and mostly iambic 
 and trochaic fragments, which look like crumbled blank 
 verse. The large flowing movements of the greater 
 prose are absent from it. In what comes next there 
 is a nearer approach to them : 
 
 These pictures were in water-colours. The first represented 
 clouds, low, livid, rolling over a swollen sea. All the distance was 
 in eclipse, so, too, was the foreground, or rather, the nearest billows, 
 for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a 
 half-submerged mast, on which sat a -cormorant, dark and large, 
 with wings flecked with foam ; its beak held a gold bracelet, set 
 with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette 
 could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. 
 Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through 
 the green water : a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, 
 whence the bracelet had been washed or torn. 
 
 The second picture contained, for foreground, only the dim peak 
 of a hill with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. 
 Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at 
 twilight. Rising into the sky was a woman's shape to the bust, 
 portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The 
 dim forehead was crowned with a star ; the lineaments below were 
 seen as through the suffusion of vapour ; the eyes shone dark and 
 wild ; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by 
 storm or by electric travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like 
 moonlight ; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds 
 from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star. 
 
 The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar 
 winter sky ; a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, 
 close serried along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, 
 in the foreground, a head a colossal head, inclined towards the 
 iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the 
 forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a 
 sable veil ; a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye 
 hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, 
 alone were visible. Above the temples amidst wreathed turban 
 folds of black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as 
 cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a 
 more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was " the likeness of a Kingly 
 Crown" ; what it diademed was "the shape which shape had none." 
 
 "George " George Eliot's " later quasi - scientific jargon was 
 lot ' not so arrhythmic as it was in other ways inartistic ; 
 but it hardly needs exemplification here. One well- 
 known and justly favourite passage of the earlier and
 
 better time will show a more than ordinary deftness of 
 intensified rhythm-doses, here and there, in otherwise 
 ordinary style : 
 
 But the complete | torpor | came j at last : | the fingers | lost | 
 their tension, | the arms j unbent ; | then | the little head | fell 
 away | from the bosom, | and the blue eyes | opened | wide | on 
 
 the cold j starlight. At first there was a little peevish cry of 
 " mammy," and an effort to regain the pillowing arm and bosom ; 
 but mammy's ear was deaf, and the pillow seemed to be slipping 
 away backward. Suddenly, as the child rolled downward on its 
 mother's knees, all wet with snow, its eyes were caught by a bright 
 glancing light on the white ground, and with the ready transition of 
 infancy, it was immediately absorbed in watching the bright living 
 thing running towards it, yet never arriving. That bright living 
 thing must be caught ; and in an instant the child had slipped on 
 all fours, and held out one little hand to catch the gleam. But the 
 gleam would not be caught in that way, and now the head was held 
 up to see where the cunning gleam came from. It came from a 
 very bright place ; and the little one rising on its legs, toddled 
 through the snow, the old grimy shawl in which it was wrapped 
 trailing behind it, and the queer little bonnet dangling at its back 
 toddled on to the open door of Silas Marner's cottage, and right up 
 to the warm hearth, where there was a bright fire of logs and sticks, 
 which had thoroughly warmed the old sack (Silas's greatcoat) spread 
 out on the bricks to dry. The little one, accustomed to be left to 
 itself for long hours without notice from its mother, squatted down 
 on the sack, and spread its tiny hands towards the blaze, in perfect 
 contentment, gurgling and making many inarticulate communications 
 to the cheerful fire, like a new-hatched gosling beginning to find 
 
 itself comfortable. But presently | the warmth | had a lulling [ 
 effect, | and the little | golden | head | sank down | on the old | 
 sack, | and the blue eyes | were veiled | by their delicate | half- 
 transparent | lids. 
 
 It was, as most people know, the fate of Mr. Froude Mr. Froude. 
 to attract whether in all or in any cases by his own 
 fault matters nothing here opprobrium from the most 
 opposite quarters. Even where one would think him 
 least assailable, from the side of style, there have not been 
 wanting assailants. " Slipshod," " journalese," and so 
 forth, are words I have heard uttered, and seen written, to
 
 410 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 his address ; and that, too, from persons who neither 
 revenged The Nemesis of Faith, nor formed part of the 
 chorus of Furies of which Mr. Freeman was coryphee, 
 nor partook of the probably mistaken but not unrespect- 
 able resentment aroused by his management of the 
 Carlyle documents. I do not think the reproaches were 
 ever just ; though the singular carelessness which he 
 always exhibited as to fact a carelessness often shown 
 to the positive damage of his own case, and therefore 
 evidently not dishonest as to others may sometimes 
 have extended to his writing. Certainly, by far the 
 greater part of that writing, from the exquisite crispness 
 of the Cats Pilgrimage to the more formal rhetoric of the 
 History, and almost all the rest, is that of a great master 
 of style. And one famous passage which has justly 
 become part of the " ordinary " of the prose antholdgist, 
 but which is all the more suitable for us attains a beauty 
 scarcely inferior to that of anything given within the 
 covers of this book, perhaps not to that of anything to be 
 found outside of them : 
 
 For, indeed, | a change | was coming | upon the world, | the 
 meaning | and direction | of which | even still | is hidden | from us, | 
 a change | from era | to era. | The paths | trodden | by the footsteps | 
 of ages | were broken up ; | old things | were passing | away, | and 
 the faith | and the life | of ten | centuries | were dissolving | like a 
 dream. | Chivalry j was dying ; | the abbey | and the castle | were 
 soon | together | to crumble | into ruins ; | and all | the forms, | 
 desires, | beliefs, | convictions | of the old world | were passing 
 away, | never | to return. | A new | continent | had risen up | be- 
 yond | the western | sea. | The floor | of heaven, | inlaid with 
 stars, | had sunk back | into an infinite | abyss of | immeasurable | 
 space ; | and the firm | earth | itself, | unfixed | from its founda- 
 tions, | was seen | to be but a small | atom | in the awful | vast- 
 ness | of the universe. | In the fabric | of habit | which they had
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 411 
 
 so | laboriously | built for themselves, j mankind | were to remain | 
 no longer. 
 
 And now | it is all | gone | like an un | substantial | pageant | 
 faded ; | and between us | and the old j English | there lies | a gulf | 
 of mystery | which the prose | of the historian | will never | ade- 
 quately | bridge. | They cannot | come | to us, | and our | imagina- 
 tion | can but feebly | penetrate | to them. | Only | among the aisles | 
 of our cathedrals, | only | as we gaze | upon their silent | figures | 
 sleeping | on their tombs, | some faint | conceptions | float | before 
 us | of what | these men | were | when they were alive ; | and 
 perhaps | in the sound | of church bells, | that peculiar | creation | 
 of the mediaeval | age, | which falls | upon the ear [ like the echo | of 
 a vanished | world. 
 
 This exquisite passage is evidently to some extent a 
 hybrid between the " standard " and the new " Corinthian " 
 style ; nay, we can go nearer to the fact, and say that it 
 is in a way, though not in the least a copy of either, a 
 hybrid between Newman and Ruskin. It has, as we 
 observed above, something of the clear, cool, silvery note 
 of the former, variegated and flourished up, but still 
 recognisable. It has, if not borrowed, paralleled not a 
 few of its fioriture from or with the other ; and in particular 
 we may note not merely one but two consecutive drops 
 into blank verse 
 
 Had risen up beyond the western sea . . . 
 
 The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk 
 
 though, as in Ruskin himself, the too obtrusive effect is 
 cleverly " passed " or masked. But another note, far 
 older than either Newman or Ruskin, is present that 
 ubiquity, or at any rate frequency, of the Ionic a minore 
 or third paeon (they are usually very difficult to distinguish 
 in our tongue) which has such melodious influence, and 
 which seems to acquire special effect from being followed 
 or preceded by certain other feet.
 
 412 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Matthew The most distinguished writer who, in age, in 
 
 Arnold. University membership, in influence on " mid-Victorian " 
 times, and in other ways yet, forms a sort of triad with 
 Ruskin and Froude I have to the knowing named 
 Matthew Arnold occupies, from our point of view, a 
 rather singular position. It is well known from external 
 testimony, and could have been easily discovered from 
 internal evidence, that Mr. Arnold took a great deal of 
 trouble with his prose indeed relatively, if not positively 
 also, more than with his verse. You never find in the 
 Essays the irritating and sometimes almost incredible 
 slips of carelessness or bluntness of taste that frequently 
 mar the Poems, and a positively ill-sounding clause is very 
 much harder to find than such strange combinations of 
 cacophony and absurdity in line as, for instance 
 Have felt their huge frames not constructed right. 
 For this reason or that, however and it would not be 
 difficult to suggest more than one or two, he hardly 
 ever so much as attempted symphony or polyphony in 
 prose even the famous and never - to - be - forgotten 
 epiphonema to Oxford has probably less of either than 
 any other writer of his rank would have given to it. 
 And as a general rule he abstains altogether from the 
 smallest touch of distinctly " numerous " prose. His earlier 
 manner, 1 indeed, is merely of the best of that variation of 
 the " standard " which may almost be said to be peculiar 
 to Oxford, and which we find in Oxonian contemporaries 
 so different as Newman and Mansel. 
 
 His peculiar But later, while assuming, at any rate very often, 
 repetition a t ne f conversational lightness, he affected, almost 
 always, a system of selection of word and phrase which, 
 one may almost say, was intended to do duty for rhythm 
 proper. It threw back, in some degree, to that peculiarity 
 of the oratorical style of the eighteenth century which 
 we noticed, and which consisted in arranging runs of 
 comparatively unaccented syllable-batches, relieved from 
 insignificance by the presence of strongly stressed conclu- 
 
 1 No better example of it, or of its kind generally, can be found than the 
 well-known Preface to the Poems of 1853.
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 413 
 
 sions in clause and sentence. But it took considerable 
 liberties with this principle, and indulged in what, I fear, 
 the eighteenth century itself would have unhesitatingly, 
 and in a certain sense irrefutably, stigmatised as flat 
 tautology. Of its object we need not talk much : it was 
 intended, no doubt, to attract, and, till it teases too much, 
 it is undoubtedly successful in attracting, attention to the 
 theme. But it must be quite evident that the writer 
 either thinks nothing of mere pleasantness of sound, or 
 (in places at least) deliberately disregards it in order to 
 attain this object. He makes, once more, a sort of return 
 to balance as his one machine of rhythmical appeal ; but 
 it is a balance not merely double as usually, or treble as in 
 Johnson and others, but polycentred, the repeated words 
 being the pivots. 1 
 
 Let me remark, however, that not only in the moral sphere, but Examples, 
 also in the intellectual and spiritual sphere, energy and honesty are 
 most important and fruitful qualities ; that, for instance, of what we 
 call genius energy is the most essential part. So, by assigning to a 
 nation energy and honesty as its chief spiritual characteristics, by 
 refusing to it, as at all eminent characteristics, openness of mind and 
 flexibility of intelligence, we do not by any means, as some people 
 might at first suppose, relegate its importance and its power of 
 manifesting itself with effect from the intellectual to the moral sphere. 
 We only indicate its probable special line of successful activity in 
 the intellectual sphere, and, it is true, certain imperfections and failings 
 to which, in this sphere, it will always be subject. Genius is mainly 
 an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius there- 
 fore, a nation whose spirit is characterised by energy may well be 
 eminent in poetry ; and we have Shakespeare. Again, the highest 
 reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of 
 divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry ; therefore, 
 a nation whose spirit is characterised by energy may well be eminent 
 in science ; and we have Newton. Shakespeare and Newton : in 
 the intellectual sphere there can be no higher names. And what 
 that energy, which is the life of genius, above everything demands 
 and insists upon, is freedom ; entire independence of all authority, 
 prescription, and routine the fullest room to expand as it will. 
 Therefore, a nation whose chief spiritual characteristic is energy will 
 
 1 It has also, of course, no slight relation to the system specially remark- 
 able in Dryden, of dotting the same word at different places of succeeding 
 verses (v. Hist. Pros. ii. 364). But, for obvious reasons, it has quite a 
 different effect.
 
 414 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 not be very apt to set up, in intellectual matters, a fixed standard, 
 an authority, like an academy. . . . The form, the method of 
 evolution, the precision, the proportion, the relation of the parts to 
 the whole, in an intellectual work, depend mainly upon them. 
 And these are the elements of an intellectual work which are 
 really most communicable from it, which can most be learned and 
 adopted from it, which have, therefore, the greatest effect upon 
 the intellectual performance of others. Even in poetry these 
 requisites are very important ; and the poetry of a nation, not 
 eminent for the gifts on which they depend, will more or less suffer 
 by this shortcoming. In poetry, however, they are, after all, 
 secondary, and energy is the first thing ; but in prose they are of 
 first-rate importance. In its prose literature, therefore, and in the 
 routine of intellectual work generally, a nation with no particular 
 gifts for these will not be so successful. These are what, as I have 
 said, can to a certain degree be learned and appropriated, while the 
 free activity of genius cannot. Academies consecrate and maintain 
 them, and, therefore, a nation with an eminent turn for them 
 naturally establishes academies. So far as routine and authority 
 tend to embarrass energy and inventive genius, academies may be 
 said to be obstructive to energy and inventive genius, and, to this 
 extent, to the human spirit's general advance. But then this evil is 
 so much compensated by the propagation, on a large scale, of the 
 mental aptitudes and demands which an open mind and a flexible 
 intelligence naturally engender, genius itself, in the long run, so 
 greatly finds its account in this propagation, and bodies like the 
 French Academy have such power for promoting it, that the general 
 advance of the human spirit is perhaps, on the whole, rather furthered 
 than impeded by their existence. 
 
 If I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its 
 turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, 
 for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully 
 near and vivid way, I should answer with some doubt, that it got 
 much of its turn for style from a Celtic source ; with less doubt, 
 that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source ; with no 
 doubt at all, that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural 
 magic. 
 
 Any German with penetration and tact in matters of literary 
 criticism will own that the principal deficiency of German poetry is 
 in style ; that for style, in the highest sense, it shows but little 
 feeling. Take the eminent masters of style, the poets who best give 
 the idea of what the peculiar power which lies in style is, Pindar, 
 Virgil, Dante, Milton. An example of the peculiar effect which 
 these poets produce, you can hardly give from German poetry. 
 Examples enough you can give from German poetry of the effect 
 produced by genius, thought, and feeling expressing themselves in 
 clear language, simple language, passionate language, eloquent
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 415 
 
 language, with harmony and melody ; but not of the peculiar effect 
 exercised by eminent power of style. Every reader of Dante can at 
 once call to mind what the peculiar effect I mean is ; I spoke of it 
 in my lectures on translating Homer, and there I took an example 
 of it from Dante, who perhaps manifests it more eminently than any 
 other poet. But from Milton, too, one may take examples of it 
 abundantly ; compare this from Milton 
 
 . . . Nor sometimes forget 
 Those other two, equal with me in fate, 
 So were I equall'd with them in renown, 
 Blind Thamyris and blind Masonides ; 
 
 with this from Goethe 
 
 Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, 
 Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt. 
 
 Nothing can be better in its way than the style in which Goethe 
 there presents his thought, but it is the style of prose as much as of 
 poetry ; it is lucid, harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not 
 received that peculiar kneading, heightening, and recasting which is 
 observable in the style of the passage from Milton, a style which 
 seems to have for its cause a certain pressure of emotion, and an 
 ever-surging, yet bridled excitement in the poet, giving a special 
 intensity to his way of delivering himself. In poetical races and 
 epochs this turn for style is peculiarly observable ; and perhaps it is 
 only on condition of having this somewhat heightened and difficult 
 manner, so different from the plain manner of prose, that poetry gets 
 the privilege of being loosed, at its best moments, into that perfectly 
 simple, limpid style, which is the supreme style of all, but the 
 simplicity of which is still not the simplicity of prose. The 
 simplicity of Menander's style is the simplicity of prose, and is the 
 same kind of simplicity as that which Goethe's style, in the passage 
 I have quoted, exhibits ; but Menander does not belong to a great 
 poetical moment, he comes too late for it ; it is the simple passages 
 in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect, being masterpieces 
 of poetical simplicity. One may say the same of the simple passages 
 in Shakespeare; they are perfect, 'their simplicity being a poetical 
 simplicity. They are the golden, easeful, crowning moments of a 
 manner which is always pitched in another key from that of prose, 
 a manner changed and heightened ; the Elizabethan style, regnant 
 in most of our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the continua- 
 tion of this manner of Shakespeare's. It was a manner much more 
 turbid and strown with blemishes than the manner of Pindar, Dante, 
 or Milton ; often it was detestable ; but it owed its existence to 
 Shakespeare's instinctive impulse towards style in poetry, to his 
 native sense of the necessity for it ; and without the basis of style 
 everywhere, faulty though it may in some places be, we should not 
 have had the beauty of expression, unsurpassable for effectiveness 
 and charm, which is reached in Shakespeare's best passages. The
 
 416 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 turn for style is perceptible all through English poetry, proving, to 
 my mind, the genuine poetical gift of the race ; this turn imparts to 
 our poetry a stamp of high distinction, and sometimes it doubles the 
 force of a poet not by nature of the very highest order, such as 
 Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond what his natural richness 
 and power seem to promise. 
 
 and Now the clauses and sentences of these passages are 
 
 discuss >n not i n h armon i ous . but it becomes difficult to attend to 
 any harmony that they have individually, and all but 
 impossible to put it together as symphonic, because of 
 the perpetual carillon-accompaniment (but no ! a carillon 
 means a tune let us say, the perpetual unsystematised 
 change-ringing) of the stressed word-bells or word-group- 
 bells. If you attend to sound only or mainly, the echo of 
 " energy," " honesty," " nation," " genius," " intellectual and 
 moral sphere," of " style," " simplicity," " manner," produces 
 an almost stunning clash and jangle. If you muffle the 
 sound, and look only at the grammar, it would seem as if 
 the writer had taken an oath never to use a pronoun, 
 never to employ a periphrase or synonym, and to leave no 
 single one of a group of adjectives without its single and 
 special noun, as in " clear language, simple language, 
 appropriate language, eloquent language" In the earlier 
 examples (v. sup.}, where he had not made up his mind 
 to absolute monogamy in nouns, there is nothing of this. 
 But in the later he has no doubt quite in accordance with 
 his general principles somewhat sacrificed rhythm to 
 inculcation, and measure to mannerism and controversial 
 effect. 
 
 Mansei. A fourth Oxford contemporary of the Ruskin-Arnold- 
 
 Froude group that malleus of innovators, and master of 
 logical treatment, Dean Mansei has been praised by a 
 much younger prose magician of a wholly different school, 
 Mr. Pater himself, for " the literary beauty of closeness, 
 and repression, with economy, of a fine rhetorical gift." 
 The praise was well deserved ; and I remember one of 
 Mansel's professorial lectures in the Hall of Magdalen (I 
 do not know whether it was ever printed) which was the 
 very finest example of the severer spoken prose, neither
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 417 
 
 too much observing nor too little regarding the laws of 
 written, that I have heard. I have forgotten, in the lapse 
 of five and forty years, all but a few scraps 1 hardly even 
 complete sentences of it ; but the following extract repro- 
 duces, with extraordinary vividness, the key of it as it still 
 rings, inarticulately but with perfect accomplishment of 
 rhythm, in my memory's ear. All those who know the 
 finest examples of seventeenth -century oratory of the 
 sacred kind (such as the magnificent extract from Donne 
 given above 2 ) will recognise something of its probable 
 origin ; and I have little doubt that on Mansel, as on so 
 many others of his time, the wand of Newman had had its 
 influence. But there is no copying of anybody ; there is 
 not even the half - independent discipleship which we 
 have often noted. The sweep and soar and swoop which 
 Hooker had introduced into English is here carried on, 
 with somewhat shorter and more varied flights, but with 
 the same general aim at, and achievement of, a close, 
 not exactly " dying " the composition is too much 
 alive, too virile, too sinewy, for that but requiescent 
 creating and diffusing an atmosphere of peace ; most 
 definitely felt, no doubt, by those who also know the 
 shock of the author's dialectic, and the piercing thrust of 
 his satire, but surely perceptible to all. 
 
 In His moral | attributes, | no less | than in the rest | of His 
 infinite Being, | God's judgments | are | unsearchable, | and His 
 ways | past finding | out | While He | manifests | Himself | 
 clearly | as a moral | governor | and legislator, | by the witness | of 
 the moral | law | which He | has established | in the hearts | of 
 men, | we cannot | help feeling | at the same time, | that that law, | 
 grand as it is, | is no measure | of His grandeur, | that He Himself | 
 is beyond it, | though not | opposed to it, | distinct, | though not | 
 alien ) from it. | We feel | that He | who planted | in man's con- 
 
 1 For one from a sermon not a lecture v. inf. p. 469. 
 2 Page 162. 
 
 2 E
 
 418 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 science | that stern | unyielding | imperative | of duty, | must Him- 
 self | be true | and righteous | altogether ; | that He from Whom | all 
 holy desires, | all good counsels, | and all just works | do proceed, | 
 must Himself | be more holy, | more good, | more just | than these. | 
 But when | we try | to realise | in thought | this sure | conviction | 
 of our faith, | we find | that here, | as everywhere, | the finite | 
 cannot | fathom | the infinite, | that, while | in our hearts | we 
 believe, | yet our thoughts | at times | are sore troubled. | It is con- 
 sonant | to the whole | analogy | of our earthly | state | of trial, | 
 that, in this | as in other | features | of God's | providence, | we 
 should meet | with things | impossible | to understand | and difficult | 
 to believe ; | by which | reason | is baffled | and faith tried ; | #cts | 
 whose purpose | we see not ; | dispensations | whose wisdom | is 
 above us ; | thoughts | which are not | our thoughts, | and ways | 
 which are not | our ways. | In these things | we hear, as it were, | 
 the same | loving | voice | which spoke | to the wondering | disciple | 
 of old : " What I do, | thou knowest not | now ; | but thou shalt 
 know | hereafter." The luminary | by whose influence | the ebb I 
 and flow | of man's moral | being | is regulated, | moves around | 
 and along | with man's | little | world | in a regular | and bounded | 
 orbit : | one side, | and one side | only, | looks downwards | upon its 
 earthly | centre ; | the other, | which we see not, | is ever | turned 
 upwards | to the all- 1 surrounding | Infinite. | And those tides | 
 have their seasons | of rise | and fall, | their places | of strength and 
 weakness ; j and that light | waxes | and wanes | with the growth | or 
 decay | of man's mental | and moral | and religious [ cujture ; and 
 its borrowed | rays | seem | at times | to shine | as with their own j 
 lustre, in rivalry, | even | in opposition, | to the source | from which | 
 they emanate. | Yet is that light | still | but a faint | and partial | 
 reflection | of the hidden | glories | of the Sun | of Righteousness, j
 
 xi RUSK IN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 419 
 
 waiting | but the brighter | illumination | of His presence | to fade [ 
 and be swallowed up j in the full | blaze | of the heaven | kindling | 
 around it ; | not cast down | indeed | from its orbit, | nor shorn | 
 of its true brightness | and influence, | but still | felt | and acknow- 
 ledged | in its real | existence | and power j in the memory | of the 
 past | discipline, | in the product | of the present | perfectness, 
 though now | distinct | no more, | but vanishing | from sight | to be 
 made one | with the glory | that beams | from the " Father | of 
 lights, | with whom | is no | variableness, | neither | shadow | of 
 turning." l 
 
 One has seen it, of course, insinuated, or definitely A false censure 
 alleged, that prose of this kind owes its attraction to the corrected - 
 scrap-sugar-plums the bribes, as by a sort of bilingual 
 pun one might call them at once in French and English 
 of the all-sweetening phrase of the Authorised Version, 
 which are scattered about it. It is not necessary to 
 call the remark ungenerous, for it does not reach that 
 sphere of censure ; it can be at once dismissed as utterly 
 uncritical. If those who make it would kindly try the 
 experiment, they would very rapidly find what a dangerous 
 one it is, and how extremely likely the borrower is to be 
 " undone by his auxiliary." Nor, though he manages 
 with perfect artistry to " write up " to what he borrows, 
 is the general cadence of Hansel's original composition 
 by any means very Biblical. It is rather the balance of 
 the standard style, adjusted and enriched with peculiar, 
 though unostentatious, adroitness. " In the memory of 
 the past discipline, in the product of the present perfect- 
 ness " where the coupling and counterbalancing dactyls 
 of the clause-endings are led up to, in one case, by a 
 dochmiac and an anapaest, in the other by a third paeon 
 or Ionic a minore repeated, after a fashion reminding one 
 
 1 I have rarely, to use the critical slang of the day, found the plan of 
 scansion so "convincing" and so inevitable as here. One's pen can hardly 
 keep up with the demand of the feet to be marked, as they march past to 
 their own grave but triumphant and unmistakable music.
 
 420 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 of the Miltonic device of selecting epithets of different 
 value for pairs of corresponding nouns is a phrase hardly 
 to be excelled in the quieter numerosity, though, in 
 truth, the whole passage is full of such things, which 
 unite themselves, in the larger effects, with an almost 
 consummate beauty. 
 
 Pater. But the writer who has been cited as a praiser of 
 
 Mansel is, beyond all question from our point of view, 
 the most remarkable of those belonging to the last 
 division of the nineteenth century. For all but forty 
 years, and (though some of his children may not know 
 it) to the present moment, Mr. Pater has been the father 
 of all such as essay to write delicately, just as Mr. 
 Meredith has been the father of all those who try to 
 write enigmatically. That in each case the famille has 
 been often rather deplorable} and that the intermarriage 
 between the two styles has sometimes produced monsters 
 of the most unlovely kind, may be perfectly true. But 
 because the children too frequently set other people's 
 teeth on edge, it does not follow that the grapes which 
 the fathers ate were sour. Those of Mr. Pater's vineyard 
 most certainly were not. 
 
 To carry the pedigree upwards instead of downwards 
 (and in good sooth it is the more gracious procession), 
 there can be no doubt that Pater represents another 
 result of that Ruskin- Newman blend which we have 
 already noted in Froude, but which was far more deliber- 
 ately, extensively, and decoratively carried out on the 
 south side than on the north of Brasenose Lane. If 
 there is one thing which, more than another, can be justly 
 urged against Ruskin, it is the absence of quiet. If there 
 is one thing, more than another, that may be put to the 
 credit of Pater, it is the presence thereof. Orr this apex 
 of English prose, if on no other, there is Rest. 
 His quietism. This seems to me so much the instinctive and dis- 
 
 1 The old joke on Diderot's Ptre de famille and the imitations of it. To 
 myself the explained allusion is nearly as detestable as the explained super- 
 natural ; but I am told that the public thinks differently.
 
 xi RUSK IN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 421 
 
 tinctive character of his rhythm that I have not chosen, 
 to illustrate it, the usual purple panel (for one cannot 
 insult it by calling it a " patch ") of the " Gioconda," l in 
 which, fine as it is, there is just the slightest hint of an 
 intention to " set the trumpet to the lips and blow." 
 Another passage of the same essay, if less definitely 
 rounded off, seems to me preferable ; and I think that it, 
 with yet another from Marius, will suffice. But it must 
 always be remembered that the care of the paragraph 
 was one of Mr. Pater's first and greatest anxieties ; when 
 I remarked on it, in the Fortnightly essay referred to in 
 the Preface of this book, he wrote to me expressing 
 special gratification, and acknowledging that it had been 
 one of his principal objects. But his paragraph was not, 
 as too many people are under the delusion that a para- 
 graph must necessarily be, brought to some deeply marked, 
 insistent, peremptorily " concluding " end. He liked 
 and he had a marvellous faculty in doing it to drop off 
 at this end with a new sort of modified aposwpesis, re- 
 placing the actual abruptness of that figure by a gentle 
 glide. However, to the examples : 
 
 The movement j of the fifteenth | century | was twofold ; | partly | 
 the Renaissance, | partly | also | the coming | of what is called | the 
 modern spirit | with its realism, | its appeal | to experience ; | it 
 comprehended j a return | to antiquity, | and a return | to nature. | 
 Raffaelle | represents the return | to antiquity, | and Lionardo | the 
 return | to nature. In this return j to nature | he was seeking | to 
 satisfy | a boundless [ curiosity | by her | perpetual | surprises, | a 
 microscopic | sense | of finish | by her finesse j or delicacy | of 
 operation, j \ha.\.subtilitas \ naturae \ which Bacon | notices. | So | we 
 
 1 "The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters," etc. 
 (Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London, 1873), p. 1 18). Any one 
 who cares to look it up, or, remembering it, analyses his remembrance, will 
 find that Lilith-foot, the minor Ionic (with its attendant dochmiac, the 
 penultimate long, and amphibrach, for longer and shorter variation), as 
 prevalent as usual.
 
 422 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 find him | often | in intimate | relations j with men | of science, | 
 with Fra | Luca | Paccioli, | the mathe|matician, | and the anatomist | 
 Marc Antonio | della Torre. | His observations | and experiments | 
 fill | thirteen | volumes | of manuscript ; | and those | who can 
 judge | describe him as | anticipating | long before, | by rapid | 
 intuition, | the later | ideas j of science. | He explained | the 
 obscure | light | of the unillu|minated part | of the moon, | knew | 
 that the sea | had once covered | the mountains | which contain j 
 shells, | and the gathering | of the equatorial | waters | above | the 
 polar. 
 
 He | who thus | penetrated | into | the most secret | parts | of 
 nature | preferred | always | the more | to the less | remote, | what, | 
 seeming | exceptional, was an instance | of law | more refined, | the 
 construction | about things | of a peculiar | atmosphere | and mixed | 
 lights. | He paints | flowers | with such curious | felicity | that 
 different | writers | have attributed | to him | a fondness | for 
 particular | flowers, | as Clement | the cyclamen, | and Rio | the 
 jasmine ; | while at Venice | there is | a stray leaf | from his port- 
 folio | dotted | all over | with studies | of violets | and the wild rose. 
 In him | first appears | the taste | for what | is bizarre \ mrecherchd\ 
 in landscape ; | hollow | places | full | of the green | shadow | of 
 bituminous | rocks, | ridged | reefs | of trap rock | which cut | the 
 water | into quaint | sheets | of light | their exact | antitype | is 
 in | our own | western | seas ; | all | solemn | effects | of moving | 
 water ; | you may follow | it springing | from its distant | source | 
 among the rocks | on the heath | of the "Madonna | of the balances," | 
 passing | as a little j fall | into | the treacherous | calm | of the 
 " Madonna | of the Lake," | next, | as a goodly | river | below | the 
 cliffs | of the " Madonna | of the Rocks," | washing j the white | walls | 
 of its distant | villages, | stealing j out I in a network I of divided |
 
 xi RUSK IN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 423 
 
 streams | in " La Gioconda " | to the sea-shore | of the "Saint Anne" 
 that delicate | place | where the wind | passes | like the hand [ of 
 some | fine etcher | over | the surface, | and the untorn | shells | lie 
 thick | upon the sand, | and the tops | of the rocks, | to which the 
 waves | never rise, | are green | with grass | grown fine | as hair. 
 It is the landscape, | not | of dreams | or of fancy, | but of places | 
 far withdrawn, | and hours | selected | from a thousand | with a 
 miracle | of finesse. | Through his | strange veil | of sight | things 
 reach | him so ; | in no | ordinary j night | or day, | but as I in faint 
 light | of eclipse, | or in some | brief interval | of falling | rain | at 
 daybreak, | or through | deep water. 
 
 There is scarcely, I think, in all the examples given 
 in this book, one more profitable for study, in gross and 
 in detail, than this. It is my purpose only to give hints 
 and outlines for such a study here : the scansion contains 
 the whole of it, in what should, by this time, be sufficiently 
 readable shorthand. The first paragraph, to a hasty 
 reader, whose attention has not been drawn to that 
 scansion, may contain nothing, or hardly anything, 
 structurally or superficially different, not merely from the 
 " standard " style of the eighteenth or early nineteenth 
 century, but from the whole general construction and 
 ordonnance of the more orderly English prose since 
 Dryden or Temple. The diction itself is neither positively 
 modern nor definitely archaic. Except a possible suspicion 
 of the Arnoldian " What I tell you three times is true," x 
 there is nothing that even approaches a trick, and in 
 particular there is not, I think, a single instance of that 
 peculiar picturesque or imaginative catachresis of words 
 that introduction of them with a slightly new meaning, 
 and in slightly unexpected company which was begun by 
 Donne and Browne and their satellites, which disappeared 
 with the " school of prose and sense " in prose as well as in 
 
 1 " Return to antiquity," " return to nature." And here Major Pendennis 
 might interject, " It was only twice, sir !"
 
 424 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 verse, and which, recovering itself and its powers with the 
 Romantics, reached in different ways its furthest reason- 
 ably possible with Mr. Pater himself and Mr. Meredith. 
 Even Conyers Middleton could, as far as this paragraph 
 is concerned, have found no things that he might not 
 with all grace of congruity have thought, nor any words 
 that he might not, with equal grace, have written. 
 
 But the things, though he might have thought them, 
 would not have " reached " Conyers so ; and the words, 
 though they might have come from his pen, would have 
 been arranged by it in a very different manner. We 
 have seen that in the seventeenth-eighteenth-century sober 
 style, though you can apply the system of quantitative 
 scansion as you can to almost everything spoken or 
 written by an educated Englishman the process has. in 
 differing degrees, but more or less uniformly in kind, a 
 certain air of superfluity and unnaturalness. It neither 
 evolves nor explains any music : it merely shows that 
 there is little or none to be explained or evolved. Here 
 it is entirely different. The application of the test at 
 once interprets that difference of the general rhythm 
 which a merely faithful reading must have intimated 
 already to ear of body or ear of mind. That mysterious 
 consonance or symphony the existence of which I have 
 been tracing, if I do not pretend to have mastered the 
 complete secrets of its counterpoint is here, as it is not 
 in Conyers Middleton. And the partition and quanti- 
 fication justify themselves, in this instance, as clearly as, in 
 that, they were felt to be things out of place. 
 
 But in the second paragraph a further, a more obvious, 
 but a much more dazzling and wonderful transformation 
 is effected. The cunning, but simple and somewhat 
 suppressed, harmony of the earlier writing extends and 
 sublimes itself into polyphony, as unique and as "original 
 as anything that we have seen. The tone is still quiet 
 in fact the easy undulation of the first paragraph is 
 exchanged for a much slower movement, with fewer 
 paeons and dochmiacs, though both are thrown in for 
 variety's sake, and especially to prevent the thing from
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 425 
 
 being too languid and too " precious." But most of the 
 feet are trisyllabic, dissyllabic, or monosyllabic ; and the 
 clause-, sentence-, and paragraph-closes are distinguished 
 by that curious muffled arrest which we have noticed 
 momentary suspension of movement without a jar a 
 sort of whispered " Hush ! " Here, too, you get those 
 slight idiosyncratic diversions of words (for catachresis, 
 after all, is a bad name to throw at so beautiful a dog) 
 to which allusions have been made above, and which affect 
 rhythm so powerfully, though so quietly, by the slight 
 shock they give to the understanding "green shadow," 
 " solemn . . . water," " delicate place." Here, too, is the 
 immixture of actual metre or suggestion of metre, but 
 far more intricate and nuanced than in Ruskin or 
 Kingsley ; * together with undulations, 2 not definitely 
 metrical, but infinitely subtler than those of Gibbon. 
 Yet all this is done without the least touch of such 
 preliminary warning and advertisement as is frequent in 
 De Quincey and Landor, and as may be seen perhaps 
 even in his own longer passage on the " Gioconda." A 
 new paradox suggests itself, to take place beside Dryden's 
 old one of " silence invading the ear." Silence is blended 
 with sound, and the charms of both invade and soothe 
 the ear together. 
 
 On this day truly no mysterious light, no irresistibly leading hand 
 from afar, reached him ; only, the peculiarly tranquil influence of its 
 first hour increased steadily upon him in a manner with which, as he 
 conceived, the aspects of the place he was then visiting had some- 
 thing to do. The air there, air supposed to possess the singular 
 property of restoring the whiteness of ivory, was pure and thin. An 
 even veil of lawn-like white cloud had now drawn over the sky ; and 
 under its broad, shadowless light every hue and tone of time came 
 out upon the yellow old temples, the elegant pillared circle of the 
 shrine of the patronal Sibyl, the houses seemingly of a piece with 
 the ancient fundamental rock. Some half-conscious motive of poetic 
 grace would appear to have determined their grouping ; in part 
 
 1 "And the un|torn shells | lie thick [up]on the sand, . . . 
 
 And the tops | of the rocks, [to] which the waves | never rise, . . . 
 Are green | with grass | grown fine | as hair." . . . 
 
 2 " And the gathering of the equatorial waters above the polar. ... He 
 who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature."
 
 426 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 resisting, partly going along with, the natural wildness and harshness 
 of the place, its floods and precipices. An air of immense age 
 possessed, above all, the vegetation around a world of evergreen 
 trees the olives especially, older than how many generations of 
 men's lives ! fretted and twisted by the combining forces of life and 
 death into every conceivable caprice of form. In the windless 
 weather all seemed to be listening to the roar of the immemorial 
 waterfall, plunging down so unassociably among these human 
 habitations, and with a motion so unchanging from age to age as to 
 count, even in this time-worn place, as an image of unalterable rest. 
 Yet the clear sky all but broke to let through the ray which was 
 silently quickening everything in the late February afternoon, and 
 the unseen violet refined itself through the air. It was as if the 
 spirit of life in nature were but withholding any too precipitate 
 revelation of itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work. 
 
 This second passage, as it seems to me, occupies, with 
 remarkable exactness, a middle place, in point of rhythm, 
 between the first and second paragraphs of the other. I 
 have not scanned it ; though, as I read it, I can see the 
 scansion just as clearly as if I had a proof of it with the 
 quantity -marks lying before me. It is evidently on 
 something the same level as the fine pieces of description 
 that we gave from De Quincey and Landor earlier : it is 
 not so uniquely or insistently Paterian as the instances of 
 the curiosity of Lionardo, but it retains enough of its 
 creator's quality to exhibit that quality pretty clearly. 
 The possibility of " roar " imaging " rest " as subtle as it 
 is obvious l and true is itself something of a key-note, or 
 at least a key. I wish he had not written " elegant " a 
 word which seems to me to have been so irretrievably 
 " sullied by ignoble use " that, except for technical 
 purposes, or used deliberately in malam fartem, it should 
 be left to bleach itself by time's kind office for at least a 
 century or two. Otherwise the thing is faultless as 
 things in the middle style should be, though those in the 
 very highest need or should not. 
 His apes Nothing, yet once more, could be easier, or more 
 
 delightful to me, than to multiply extracts from Mr. 
 Pater ; but, as I have striven to make clear, this is not, 
 
 1 The subtlety of the obvious is what some innocent decriers of that same 
 are incapable ot seeing.
 
 xi RUSK IN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 427 
 
 primarily, a Book of Beauties. His methods were, of 
 course, methods if not exactly " aleatory," for they 
 required as much calculation as chess certainly perilous ; 
 and he did not always show himself master of them. 
 Some early " turns " in the Studies he cancelled ; and in 
 the latest books, from Gaston de Latour onwards (though 
 I think the accusation of " slovenliness," which I have 
 heard made by some critics, is unjust) it is certain that 
 they did not always " come off." In particular, the 
 demon of burlesque suggestion pretty early marked his 
 prey ; and got it once or twice in Mr. Pater himself, con- 
 stantly in Mr. Pater's imitators. A sentence of one of 
 the earliest of these, the late Mr. Frederick Myers 
 " to trace the passion and the anguish which whirl along 
 some lurid vista toward a sun that sets in storm, or gaze 
 across silent squares by summer moonlight amid a smell 
 of dust and flowers," * is just a little dangerous in itself. 
 And it was suggested at the time by an urbane critic, 
 that the rhythm would be positively improved, and the 
 sense not materially damaged, if you read " gaze by 
 moonlight across summer dust and flowers amid a smell 
 of silent squares." Here perhaps, even more than else- 
 where, the way to Hell is hard by the gate of Heaven ; 
 yet we need scarcely be less grateful to those who open 
 to us the ports of salvation. 
 
 No one with the slightest interest in literature can Mr. Swin- 
 require to be told that Mr. Swinburne could, from his burne ' 
 own prose writings alone, supply material for a very 
 elaborate dissertation on prose rhythm. Indeed, it is one 
 of the " Dick Minim " criticisms respecting him that he con- 
 fused the limits of the two harmonies, and that, in the one 
 as in the other, he pushed the exuberance of his language 
 beyond the permitted verge of either. From the first his 
 virtuosity in the " numerous " kind was evident ; and it 
 was evident, likewise, who were his masters. To two of 
 
 1 The context of this remarkable fioritura cannot be said to lessen its 
 risk of frigidity ; for it is a description of the way in which William Words- 
 worth did not regard London.
 
 428 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 them Carlyle and Newman he has paid magnificent 
 OpeTrrpa l in his adaptation of the final chorus of the 
 Eumenides. I do not at the moment remember any 
 similar passage about Mr. Ruskin. But no reader of the 
 Blake, when it appeared, could possibly avoid seeing the 
 debt, of suggestion at least, to Modern Painters. I have 
 never known whether the following remarkable passage 
 was written before or after that quoted above from Mr. 
 Pater the dates of publication would prove nothing, for 
 the author of the Studies was accustomed to exercise a 
 thoroughly Horatian custody over his writings before he 
 published them. And, when the two are examined, the 
 resemblance will be found to be more superficial than 
 essential. But, superficially, it certainly exists, and the 
 Ruskinian connection, elsewhere more patent still, is less 
 idiosyncratised than in Pater. 
 
 The mixed There is, in all these straying songs, the freshness of clear wind, 
 influences in and purity of blowing rain ; here a perfume as of dew or grass 
 him. against the sun, there a keener smell of sprinkled shingle and brine- 
 
 bleached sand ; some growth or breath everywhere of blade or herb 
 leaping into life under the green wet light of spring ; some colour 
 of shapely cloud or mound of moulded wave. The verse pauses 
 and musters, and falls always as a wave does, with the same patience 
 of gathering form and rounded glory of springing curve, and sharp, 
 sweet flash of dishevelled and flickering foam, as it curls over, 
 showing the sun through its soft heaving side in veins of gold that 
 inscribe, and jewels of green that inlay, the quivering and sundering 
 skirt or veil of thinner water, throwing upon the tremulous space of 
 narrowing sea in front, like a reflection of lifted and vibrating hair, 
 the windy shadow of its shaken spray. 2 
 
 There, of course, the last clause is a pure blank-verse 
 line, as naked, as unblushing, and as beautiful as the 
 
 1 For we care nothing about his disagreement with their principles ; and 
 the tribute paid to " the eternal substance of their greatness " is of the amplest, 
 all the ampler for the difference of views. The piece referred to is the ' ' Two 
 Leaders " (they are not named, but unmistakable) of the second Poems and 
 Ballads (1878). There are, of course, plenty of spits and spurts at Carlyle, 
 especially later, when Carlyle's own unadvised words about some of Mr. 
 Swinburne's darlings had been more unadvisedly published. But they do 
 not disannul the earlier and nobler home-sending, vir' etitppovi Trofj.irq., of the 
 great and honoured ones who were to him the children, to others the 
 watchmen, of the night. 
 
 2 William Blake (London, 1868), p. 134.
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 429 
 
 Aphrodite whom the context from which it rises suggests ; 
 while more than one or two or three others hide them- 
 selves, or half show themselves, as attendant Oceanides in 
 the quivering veil. As for the diction and imagery, not 
 merely would Vida that immortal has put on a good 
 deal of mortality, and does not matter much class it 
 with crines magnae genetricis for " grass " as an awful 
 example of too fanciful writing, but I fear that Aristotle 
 would put it with the exercises of Lycophron, and that 
 even Longinus would discover in it the parenthyrson. But 
 we are not as ancients were ; and though in some respects 
 they may have had the better of us, let us at least have 
 the profits and the solace of our difference. We can 
 take this as good if we choose ; and if I had as many 
 votes l for literature as the late Reverend Washbourne 
 West of Lincoln College, Oxford, had for Parliament, I 
 would give them all for its goodness. 
 
 The Blake is full of such things, though I think this Examples in 
 is the best. It exhibits, and they all exhibit, that delight gjj and 
 in alliteration which, again, Dick Minim sagely reprehends. 
 But it shows a curious contrast to Pater and Newman- 
 less to Ruskin and Carlyle in its tendency to make the 
 closes of clause, sentence, sentence-batch, and paragraph 
 distinctly emphatic? I hardly know a better combined 
 example of these two tendencies in little than a phrase 
 (I quote from memory, my copy of Under the Microscope 
 having retired from ken at the moment) in which Mr. 
 Swinburne summed up part of the remarkable paper 
 
 devoted just fifty years ago by Charles Baudelaire, to 
 
 ^ 
 Wagner and Tannhauser 8 the words " grown diabolic 
 
 1 I forget whether legend says fourteen or forty-nine ; it adds that they 
 were selected with such foresight and ingenuity that they could all be 
 exercised from Oxford in the course of an average general election. Mr. 
 West's character, in other respects, may not have been perfect (though I 
 have heard that he was a much better fellow than Liberal party spirit among 
 dons, and resentment of Proctorial excesses among undergraduates, used to 
 declare him). But he certainly ought, since his votes were always given on the 
 right side, to have a light time in Purgatory for this. 
 
 2 Our earliest preceptist on prose rhythm would certainly have approved 
 this. See App. II. 
 
 3 (Euvres, vol. iii. ; UArt Romantique. pp. 207-267 (Paris, 1868).
 
 430 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 among ages that would not accept her as divine." 
 In this phrase, perhaps, we get another glimpse of 
 one of those panthers quested so long and caught so 
 rarely a capital example of prose rhythm of the 
 elaborate kind, which lends its processes to pretty clear 
 analysis. This phrase, it will be seen, descends in 
 shortening magnitudes of feet, through dochmiac, third 
 paeon, and amphibrach (a combination which, I think, 
 almost deserves the designation of a "/rare-metre "), and 
 then continues in feet, trisyllabic, but different from the 
 
 amphibrach, bacchic (for I leave "uxepter" to coster- 
 mongers and phoneticians), anapaest. One of the main 
 points in it is the length and fulness and hurry of the 
 opening, with this descent, the level progress of the 
 
 trisyllabic feet, and the clench of the ending " divine." 
 That Mr. Swinburne sometimes overdid this emphasis 
 that he indulged occasionally in an almost Kinglakian 
 exaltation, in antithetic epigram, of the brass above 
 the reeds and the strings, may be true. But nobody 
 except Shelley, and perhaps Thackeray, has ever, in 
 verse or prose, completely escaped turning a manner into 
 a mannerism. 
 
 Yet besides the nineteenth-century influences, one of 
 which has yet to be mentioned, there was another, conveyed 
 perhaps partly through this postponed one, which was 
 noticeable even in the Blake itself, and which became 
 stronger and stronger. This was an almost Johnsonian 
 tendency to antithesis and balance, sometimes couched in 
 the shorter and more pithy form of the great lexico- 
 grapher's conversational style, and sometimes periodised 
 into something very like a caricature of his most elaborate 
 written manner. It may have come partly direct for 
 Mr. Swinburne's natural tendency to admire everything 
 good in literature, and everything noble in life, got the 
 better, in Johnson's case as in others, of his adscititious 
 crotchets, political and other. But I think it came also, 
 and largely, from Landor, in respect to whom, and in 
 respect of whom, nature and the crotchets rather unluckily
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 431 
 
 joined. It is at any rate certain that the somewhat 
 ponderous and occasionally overtoppling irony to which 
 this style lends itself so easily, and which, when Mr. Swin- 
 burne indulged in it, always used to send cold water 
 down his admirers' backs, is much more Landorian than 
 Johnsonian. For the God of Humour whose functions, 
 I suppose, were held in commendam with his many others 
 by Hermes in Greece, while nobody in Rome, except 
 perhaps Plautus, Catullus, and Petronius could have found 
 the way to his temple never deserted Johnson ; while he 
 not only never visited Landor, but cruelly sent a lying 
 spirit in his place. 1 
 
 This infusion, however, sometimes produced magnifi- 
 cent passages and constantly very happy fragments ; it 
 certainly often makes Mr. Swinburne's prose remember- 
 able beyond the wont of the usual nineteenth-century 
 medium, the impressions of which, even when caressing 
 and delightful, are apt to be faint. It is unlucky, no 
 doubt, that any man let alone a great poet who could be, 
 when he chose, almost as great a prose writer should, 
 not long after reproaching (justly enough) George Chap- 
 man with the clumsiness of his style, revenge himself 
 (again justly enough) on a private enemy by such an appal- 
 ling sentence as that quoted beneath. 2 But " the brother- 
 
 1 His conduct to Mr. Swinburne himself was more capricious. That poet 
 could be both humorous and witty ; but even his wit, and still more his 
 humour, had the drawback of being exceedingly " undependable. " The very 
 light and good phrase about Chastelard and Queen Mary, "growing up to 
 years of indiscretion " in Valois society, occurs on the same page of the 
 Miscellanies with a sneer at the Jesuits, the point of which is not merely 
 blunted, but absolutely swallowed up and lost, in a volume of verbiage. 
 
 2 It would not be fair to put it into the text. But, for all the ninefold 
 involution of its caricatured periodicity, it has a fine rhetorical swing, provided 
 that breath and brain give you leave to last it out. " Such a Crispinulus or 
 Crispinaccio would have found his proper element in an atmosphere whose 
 fumes should never have been inhaled by the haughty and high-souled author 
 of The Poetaster ; and, from behind his master's chair, with no need to seek, 
 for fear if not for shame, the dastardly and lying shelter of a pseudonym 
 which might at a pinch have been abjured, and the responsibility shifted from 
 his own shoulders to those of a well-meaning and invisible friend, the 
 laurelled lackey of King James might as securely have launched his libels 
 against the highest heads of poets to whom in that age all looked up, and 
 who would have looked down on him, as ever did the illustrious Latinist 
 Buchanan against the mother of the worthy patron whose countenance would
 
 432 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 less Antigone of our stage " (for Cordelia) is almost 
 fltusguam-'La.ndorian in its combined felicity of sense, and 
 
 weight, and rhythm. " That precious | waif of piratical | 
 salvage which we owe | to the happy rapacity of a 
 
 hungry | publisher" would not have been written exactly 
 by the eighteenth-century Johnson ; but I fancy that, if 
 the passage was before his twentieth-century ghost, it may 
 have said, when he met Mr. Swinburne the other day, 
 " Why, sir ! it is pretty well ; but you should not alliterate 
 so much." And just below these words, the rhythmical 
 secrets of the best Johnsonian style are hit in two con- 
 secutive sentences. " The deeper complexities of the 
 subject are merely indicated." " Simple and trenchant 
 outlines of character are to be supplemented by features 
 of subtler suggestion, and infinite interfusion." 
 
 In this style composite indeed, but made a real 
 " order " by his own genius Mr. Swinburne filled nearly 
 half a score of volumes with a prose which as one re-reads 
 it, sometimes after many years, sometimes after short 
 intervals between former perusals, loses little if anything 
 of its charm, and proves itself, as has been said, strangely 
 rememberable and singularly remembered. He could, 
 when he chose, write with almost perfect simplicity ; 
 much in the review of Sir Walter Scott's Journal, and the 
 " Recollections of Professor Jowett," which will be found 
 opening the Studies in Prose and Poetry, could not be 
 more free from ampullae of any kind than it is. But 
 this was when he was at once thoroughly interested in 
 his subject, and not over-excited by it. When he was at 
 all in a rage, things were in a more parlous condition ; 
 but whenever he did not try irony, he even then wrote 
 very finely. Extreme admiration of the combative kind 
 
 probably have sufficed to protect the meanest and obscurest creature of his 
 common and unclean favour against all recrimination on the part of Shake- 
 speare or of Jonson, of Beaumont or of Webster, of Fletcher or of Chapman." 
 One thinks of the exclamation of Mr. Weller after the equally well -deserved, 
 and equally breath - exhausting, chastisement of Stiggins ; but the actual 
 composition is all right, and the conduct of the cadence exemplary.
 
 xi RUSK IN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 433 
 
 was again perilous. 1 I myself, mot chttif, think almost as 
 highly of Hugo's poetry as he did. But I confess that, in 
 his Victorian commentings, one never knows whether 
 there is to be such gorgeous prose-poetry as the overture 
 of the review of LHomme qui rit, which I shall proceed 
 to quote, or such splutters as one which I shall not quote, 
 but which may be found, by any one who chooses, face to 
 face with the masterpiece, at the second page-opening of 
 the Essays and Studies. 
 
 Once only in my life I have seen the likeness of Victor Hugo's 
 genius. Crossing over when a boy, from Ostend, I had the fortune to 
 be caught in mid-channel by a thunderstorm strong enough to delay 
 the packet some three good hours over the due time. About midnight, 
 the thundercloud was right overhead, full of incessant sound and 
 fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to have life, 
 and a delight in its life. At the same hour, the sky was clear to the 
 west, and all along the sea-line there sprang and sank, as to music, 
 a restless dance or chase of summer lightnings across the lower sky ; 
 a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of shining 
 Oceanides along the tremulous floor of the sea. Eastward, at the 
 same moment, the space of clear sky was higher and wider, a 
 splendid semicircle of too intense purity to be called blue ; it was of 
 no colour nameable to man ; and midway in it, between the storm 
 and the sea, hung the motionless full moon ; Artemis watching with 
 a serene splendour of scorn the battle of Titans and the revel of 
 nymphs, from her stainless and Olympian summit of divine, in- 
 different light. Underneath and about us the sea was paved with 
 flame ; the whole water trembled and hissed with phosphoric fire ; 
 even through the wind and thunder I could hear the crackling and 
 sputtering of the water-sparks. In the same heaven and at the 
 same hour, there shone at once the three contrasted glories, golden 
 and fiery and white, of moonlight and of the double lightnings, 
 forked and sheet ; and under all this miraculous heaven lay a 
 flaming floor of water. 2 
 
 1 A complete re-reading of the whole prose work, in chronological order, has 
 only increased my own admiration, always great, for the extraordinary felicity, 
 and the broad-cast range, of Mr. Swinburne's impartial judgments on English 
 and other literature. But when the crazes took him either way he was wont 
 to mistake, in the language of Theodore Hook's fiendishly clever skit on poor 
 Queen Caroline's mock court 
 
 " Lord for a man ; 
 
 For a maid, Lady Anne ; 
 
 And Alderman for a beau beau ! 
 
 And Alderman for a beau ! " 
 
 2 After reading this gorgeous piece it is amusing to recall the following 
 words, "the detestable as well as debateable land of pseudo-poetic rhapsody 
 in hermaphroditic prose, after the least admirable manner of such writers as 
 
 2 F
 
 434 A HISTOR Y OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 Now here again, of course, there will be " murmurs and 
 movements among the audience." <&{\oi avBpet persons 
 not only dear, but good and wise, for some of whom one 
 has unfeigned and unconventional respect will say, " Oh ! 
 but this ought to have been put into poetry ; it has no 
 business in prose, and in fact is half over the fence already." 
 This I most humbly and politely, but also most firmly 
 and irrevocably, deny. In the first place, fully as I believe 
 in the doctrine that the poet is to number " the streaks of 
 the tulip," yet I admit that he is not to number them too 
 much that he is to generalise and ^realise, to adjust and 
 omit, as the rules of his art may require. Here the artist 
 wanted to put, and was right in putting, everything that 
 was there * a wealth of detail which would have been 
 out of place in verse. In the second place, he has most 
 triumphantly vindicated the position of highly toned 
 and highly coloured prose, by making its tones and its 
 colours, its diction and its ordonnance and its rhythm, dis- 
 tinctly non-poetic. A novice or a bungler would almost 
 certainly have written " have I seen," and so have given a 
 handle to objectors to cry " Poetic inversion ! " But 
 Athene, who, perhaps out of odium theologicum, had not 
 touched Jeremy Taylor's hand or ear, touched Mr. Swin- 
 burne's, and it went right. At two or three other points 
 (I leave to the reader what should be the pleasure of 
 finding them) blank verse lay ahead, and would almost 
 certainly have been run into, not merely by novices or 
 bunglers, but by many great ones. Mr. Swinburne, 
 beckoned by his Oceanides, steers clear of it, keeping 
 throughout to the deep waters of pure prose rhythm. 
 
 " From her stainless j and Olympian summit, of divine, | 
 indifferent light" is one of the things that one carries 
 
 De Quincey" (Miscellanies, pp. 222, 223). Now, as I have ventured to 
 demonstrate, De Quincey's prose is not " hermaphroditic " its charms may- 
 be the charms of Felise or Faustine, they are not those of Fragoletta. But 
 De Quincey, we know, had blasphemed some of Mr. Swinburne's gods, and 
 was a Tory, and perhaps, in Swift's too famous words, " deserved the gallows 
 for something else ; and so he shall swing." 
 
 1 Those who know their Hazlitt will recognise the quotation.
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 435 
 
 about in memory like the great verse-jewels of the older 
 harmony a beryl with a song in it that has nothing 
 harmful, but a joy, and a marvel, and a blessing for ever. l 
 
 In touching on the prose of William Morris, it is hardly wmiam 
 possible to avoid a small excursus of controversy, such as M r s 7~ 
 
 " Wardour 
 
 I have elsewhere for the most part eschewed. Critics of street "or 
 worship have pronounced his method "Wardour Street" ; not? 
 and in Wardour Street, or out of it, there can, it seems, 
 come no good thing. Well ! that was pretty much Ben 
 Jonson's objection to Spenser ; and I do not think the 
 best judgment of posterity has endorsed it. For my part, 
 I have no more antecedent objection to thing or person 
 because the street from which it comes is named " War- 
 dour " than I have preference for it because that street is 
 named " Regent " or " Rivoli." All I want to know is 
 whether it is beautiful and delightful. For me, I find 
 beauty and delight in Morris's following of Mandeville 
 and Malory and some saga-men, not only now and then, 
 not only not seldom, but very nearly always. It is, of 
 course, like all falsettos, liable to a breakdown ; and 
 this sometimes, though not very often, occurs. At other 
 times it seems to me extremely agreeable, and very 
 nearly your only style for the matter. If anybody does 
 not want the matter, well and good ; let him leave it 
 alone. I want the matter, and I like the style. 
 
 One remarkable point about it, as it concerns our 
 department, is that, though written by a poet who was a 
 quite exceptional master of metre, there is less that is 
 decidedly metrical about it much less than there is in 
 
 1 We may note here, too, an admirable example "in eadem materia" of 
 the difference in the rhythms. Omit "and " : 
 
 " From her stain | less Olym|pian sum) mil 
 Of divine, | indif) ferent light " 
 
 is pure verse, and the last line requires no omission to make it so. But the 
 foot distribution is quite different ; and no one with an ear would read it so in 
 prose. Of course, the singular persons who ask plaintively, " How a difference 
 in naming the feet can alter the rhythm ? " may see no alteration here. But to 
 me a spondee or iamb followed and preceded by an anapaest, and an anapaest 
 and a pseon followed by a monosyllable, produce rhythms as different as a 
 hawk from a hand-saw.
 
 436 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 De Quincey or in Pater, both of whom deliberately endea- 
 voured to put non-metre on a level with metre, not (as 
 their heartiest admirer may admit) without a certain 
 reason in the fact that the gods had apparently not made 
 them poetical. But this absence is a proof that the 
 medium " comes," as the gardeners say, " true " that it is 
 a real mimesis of its original, and not a mere stealing, 
 copying, or " faking " of an imitation of another kind. If 
 the reader will turn back to Malory himself, or even to 
 the account of him here, he will see how that miraculous 
 " compiler " took solid verses from his predecessors, and 
 welded or melted them into perfect prose rhythm. Morris 
 borrows less, but he observes an equally perfect prose form. 
 It is part also of the " truth " of the revival that there are 
 few distinctly purple passages : those who know their 
 Malory are, of course, well aware that the purplest of the 
 Morte the dirge on Lancelot is at least possibly not 
 part of the original, but added when taste became more 
 rhetorical. The rhythm is simply narrative or conversa- 
 tional, with the due tone and colour of romance thrown 
 in. It is even not particularly easy to select passages 
 short enough for our custom, and yet contributing the full 
 merit of the medium. The following, from The Well at 
 the World's End * (the longest, and perhaps on the whole 
 the best, of all the series) may do for one : 
 
 Again he spoke, and his voice was weaker yet. " Kneel down 
 by me, or I may not tell thee what I would ; my voice dieth before 
 me." / Then Ralph knelt down by him ; for he began to have a 
 deeming of what he was ; and he put his face close to the dying 
 man's, and said to him, " I am here ; what wouldst thou ? " / Said 
 the wild man very feebly, " I did not much for thee, time was ; how 
 might I when I loved her so sorely ? But I did a little. Believe it, 
 and do so much for me that I may lie by her side when I am dead, 
 who never lay by her living. For into the cave I durst go never." / 
 Then Ralph knew him, that he was the tall champion whom he had 
 met first at the churchyard gate of Netherton ; so he said, " I know 
 
 1 I have sometimes wondered whether he took the very striking description 
 of the well itself from that of the Well of St. Senanus on the wild Clare coast 
 \njack Hinton. The suggestion may raise a laugh ; but Morris, who knew 
 good things when he saw them, may have found them in Charles Lever as 
 well as in Charlotte Yonge.
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 437 
 
 thee now, and I will promise to do thy will therein. I am sorry that 
 I have slain thee ; forgive it me." / A mocking smile came into the 
 dying man's eyes, and he said, whispering, " Richard it was, not 
 thou." The smile spread over his face ; he strove to turn more 
 towards Ralph, and said in very faint whisper, " The last time." / 
 No more he said, but gave up the ghost presently. 1 
 
 If that is " Wardour Street," and Wardour Street can 
 give us such rhythms as that, I would it were as long as 
 the American Avenues that can count the house numbers 
 by two or three thousand nay, as long as the road from 
 this world to the next. 
 
 About Mr. George Meredith, who has divided with Mr. George Mere- 
 Swinburne and Mr. Pater the tutorship of most elaborate Meredithesity 
 prose-writers for the last thirty or forty years, it is always 
 difficult, for a person whom the gods have been kind or 
 unkind enough to make critical, to write. For as such a 
 person cannot write in a rage, and as it is equally im- 
 possible for him to write, about this subject, in a rapture, he 
 runs the chance of almost Swinburnian excommunications 
 from some of the rapturous, and of polite commiseration 
 from others. To say that Mr. Meredith could not be 
 rhythmical, and admirably so, in prose as in verse, would 
 be absurd. To say that in prose where he has not, to 
 my remembrance, let us explicitly into the secret, as he has 
 in verse he generally would not, is simply the truth. 
 That there may be a rhythm of the topsy-turvy a kind 
 of quaternion-rhythm I do not deny ; but in the existing 
 conditions and dimensions of the English-literary universe 
 it is difficult to discover, here, anything even corresponding 
 to the symmetry with which, in the good old days, little 
 boys used to turn actual corporeal " cart-wheels " on 
 Holborn Hill. When a writer is perpetually endeavouring 
 
 1 I have taken the liberty, while indicating by the slant down-stroke / 
 the author's short paragraphs, to close them up, in order to show that nothing 
 like the stave-division of Ossian or the Leaves of Grass is necessary to bring 
 out the rhythm. It is quite pure and continuous prose, though exquisitely, 
 however quietly, musical. As a Morrisian of nearly the oldest guard, I may 
 perhaps be allowed to express pleasure at seeing how, in various quarters, the 
 prejudice against this delightful poet as a mere improvisator e, pleasant enough 
 but rather trivial, is lifting and flying. And though the prose has not yet 
 shared this justice, I think it will come.
 
 438 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 to make his reader see stars by impinging him on an 
 abutment of blank wall, rhythm is needless and not to be 
 expected. " The irony of Providence sent him by a cook's 
 shop, where the mingled steam of meats and puddings 
 rushed out upon the wayfarer like ambushed bandits, and 
 seized him and dragged him in, or sent him qualmish and 
 humbled on his way." The actual cadence here is not 
 ill ; but you have hardly time to appreciate it, while you 
 are wondering whether ambushed bandits rushing out 
 would make you " qualmish and humbled," whether a 
 " qualmish " passer-by would feel " humbled," even putting 
 the bandits out of the question, and whether one humbled 
 by hunger and poverty would not rather feel " pangs " 
 than "qualms." 
 
 The rhythmical drawback to this fantastic style which 
 is occasionally, no doubt, attractive enough in itself is that 
 it is perpetually opposing snags and ledges to the clear 
 current of the composition. Sometimes these utterly defy 
 all harmony. They are, of course (let me observe it to 
 obviate the withering of my withers by the remark of a 
 pious Meredithian that " there are some, perhaps many, who 
 lack the intelligence and the sensibility that can alone 
 admit them within the charmed circle of appreciative 
 readers "), perfectly deliberate. But here is one drawn 
 from a large context of similar utterances, the opening 
 chapter of Diana of the Crossways. 
 
 No blame whatever, one would say, if he had been less copious 
 or not so subservient in recording the lady's utterances ; for though 
 the wit of a woman may be terse, quite spontaneous, as this lady's 
 assuredly was, here and there she is apt to spin it out of a museful 
 mind at her toilette or by the lonely fire, and sometimes it is 
 imitative ; admirers should beware of holding it up to the withering 
 glare of print ; she herself, quoting an obscure maxim-monger, says 
 of these lapidary sentences, that they have merely the value of 
 chalk eggs which lure the thinker to sit ; and tempt the* vacuous to 
 train for the like, one might add, besides flattering the world to 
 imagine itself richer than it is in eggs that are golden. 1 
 
 Now I can quite understand a competent judge saying 
 
 1 I wonder how many of the charmed etcetera have perceived the under- 
 current of leprechaun-\ik.e satire in these words.
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 439 
 
 that this way of writing is in its way precious to the 
 mind ; but I can hardly imagine any granting to it the 
 favour and the affection of the ear. Of course Mr. 
 Meredith was perfectly well able (and now and then, 
 specially in the The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, con- 
 descended to display the ability) to lay eggs all golden in 
 sound as well as in sense. But, then, at others, he con- 
 descended, in another sense, to write things worse than 
 the passages quoted things that not I or Cluvienus at 
 our worst could outgo in positive badness of style and 
 sound. 
 
 The worthy creature's anxiety was of the pattern of cavaliers 
 escorting dames an exaggeration of honest zeal ; or present example 
 of clownish goodness it might seem ; until entering the larch and 
 firwood among the beaten heights, there was a rocking and straining 
 of the shallow-rooted trees in a tremendous gust, that quite pardoned 
 him for curving his arm in a hoop about her, and holding a shoulder 
 in front. 
 
 Here, as so often, one thinks of his old housemate Mr. 
 Swinburne's happy retorsion of Ben's famous bravado : 
 
 By God, 'tis good ; and if you like't you may. 
 By God, 'tis bad; and worse than tongue can say. 
 
 And the fact is, that here, as of Ben, and as perhaps is 
 necessary, both are true. 
 
 It has been said that Mr. Meredith and Mr. Pater, 
 sometimes separately, sometimes together, have been the 
 real patterns of the various attempts made, during the last 
 thirty or forty years, to " raise " (I think that is what they 
 call it) the poor English language " to a higher power." 
 Mr. Swinburne, immensely followed at first in verse, was 
 also imitated to some extent in prose. But the mimesis 
 mocked the endeavours in too open a fashion, and the 
 sublime effort of an American poet in the one harmony 
 
 Where the cocoa and cactus are neighbours, 
 Where the fig and the fir-tree are one 
 
 was, rather always than occasionally, paralleled in the 
 other. Meredith and Pater have kept the field as 
 objects of imitation, and the results have been sometimes
 
 440 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CHAP. 
 
 very terrible, often very amusing. I once began a 
 museum of awful examples, but abandoned it as rather 
 unfair in fact, as I have ventured to argue elsewhere, I 
 think taking living authors for subjects, unless in the 
 official way of business, and at their own quasi- 
 invitation as a reviewer, is doubtful literary " cricket," 
 though it can plead Mr. Arnold as a great practitioner. 
 But I do " remember, forget, and remember" (for I did my 
 deliberate and fairly successful utmost to bury name, title, 
 and place of publication in oblivion) a magazine article not 
 of the last century, and not, I think, far back in the last 
 decade, which, though obviously sincere, was the most 
 triumphant and pyramidal composition of cadenced 
 nonsense and meaningless Marivaudage-Meredithese, that 
 Aristophanes or Lucian in Greek, Jonathan Swift or 
 Henry Duff Traill in English, could ever have compassed 
 as a parody-caricature. 
 
 Stevenson. It would be difficult, either for my personal satisfaction, 
 or for the suitableness of things, to leave out Mr. 
 Stevenson ; but to exhibit that " sedulous apery " of his, 
 which he so frankly confessed, would require far more space 
 than can be spared. It is a commonplace now that only 
 at the end of his too short life did he acquire that he was 
 even then but on the point of acquiring a style perfectly 
 natural, free, and his own. One piece and one only a 
 well-known and early one, but very characteristic shall 
 be given, because in it, especially from the " apish " side, 
 there are to be seen mingled two of the most opposite 
 influences that can possibly be imagined at first sight, the 
 influences of Ruskin and of Macaulay. At the last name 
 some may utter shouts of surprise, contempt, or horror, but 
 I have little doubt of the fact ; and few younger or even 
 middle-aged critics of the present day know how all- 
 pervading, even when and where it was not- exactly 
 relished, was the influence of the History and the Essays 
 up to a period quite late enough for Stevenson to have 
 felt it. However, it shall speak for itself, and perhaps may 
 well close this chapter, with a short postscript of " excuses 
 for absence." Nor need we, I think, deal with his
 
 xi RUSKIN AND LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 441 
 
 interesting discussions of style; for they are rather general, 
 and would require some controversy which I wish to keep 
 out of this book. 
 
 At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are 
 all these sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life ? Do the 
 stars rain down an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother 
 earth below our resting bodies ? Even shepherds and old country- 
 folk, who are the deepest read in these arcana, have not a guess as 
 to the means or purpose of this nightly resurrection. Towards 
 two in the morning they declare the thing takes place ; and 
 neither know nor inquire further. And at least it is a pleasant 
 incident. We are disturbed in our slumber, only like the luxurious 
 Montaigne, " that we may the better and more sensibly relish it." 
 We have a moment to look up on the stars. And there is a special 
 pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse 
 with all outdoor creatures in our neighbourhood, that we have 
 escaped out of the Bastille of civilisation, and are become, for the 
 time being, a mere kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's flock. 
 
 When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. 
 My tin was standing by me half full of water. I emptied it at a 
 draught ; and feeling broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, 
 sat upright to make a cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, 
 jewel-like, but not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the 
 Milky Way. All around me the black fir-points stood upright and 
 stock-still. By the whiteness of the pack-saddle, I could see 
 Modestine walking round and round at the length of her tether ; I 
 could hear her steadily munching at the sward ; but there was not 
 another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over 
 the stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour of the sky, 
 as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish gray 
 behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue black between the 
 stars. As if to be more like a pedlar, I wear a silver ring. This I 
 could see faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette ; and at 
 each whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated and became for a 
 second the highest light in the landscape. 
 
 I had at one time thought of extending my examples 
 from this chapter of prose. I had intended to cite and 
 analyse the mastery over the " collect " euphony 
 marvellously difficult of the English Prayer-Book, shown 
 by Christina Rossetti, that consummate mistress of rhythm 
 in verse ; the living-dream fancies of the author of 
 Phantasies and The Portent ; the admirably sinewy prose 
 of Huxley ; the quaintness and " race," often blended 
 with positive beauty, of Mr. Black more ; the vigorous
 
 442 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM CH. xi 
 
 antithesis and seldom - overdone epigram of my friend 
 the late Mr. Henley ; and the almost uncanny ease 
 and grace of that wonderful unfinished History of 
 England which (I do not know what have been its 
 later fortunes) its publisher told me at the time " nobody 
 would buy or read," and which came, in changed 
 harmony as under a changed author's name, from the 
 same pen that wrote lonica. But yet, once more, this is 
 not a Book of Beauties ; and it ought not to be made too 
 long a book ; and we must say something general before 
 we close, and perhaps add an Appendix or two after the 
 main curtain has dropped. I hope it will not have been 
 a bad concert ; but probably nobody will be sorry that it 
 should be done.
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 WHETHER at, or towards, the conclusion of the present 
 attempt the well-meaning adventurer is, to any consider- 
 able extent, in the traditional position of " master " to 
 himself as he was when he began it, I shall not pretend 
 to say. That he is at least more conscious than ever of 
 the audacity of the attempt itself, I can heartily asseverate. 
 Yet the increased consciousness need not, I trust, be 
 incompatible with a hope, if not a belief, that something 
 at least has been attempted, even that an appreciable, if 
 inadequate, something has been done. If I have not 
 climbed the mountain, I think I may perhaps be allowed 
 to have provided a convenient shop at its foot, where 
 maps, and rope, and axes, and alpenstocks, and perhaps 
 some provisions and stimulants for the journey, can be 
 obtained a little more conveniently than they could be 
 obtained before. And it may here be possible, not merely 
 to add to the information already given by summarising 
 it, but to deduce, or rather infer, some more general 
 considerations than have hitherto, save now and then in 
 a glance, been ventured upon. 
 
 As in reference to Prosody, so in reference to Prose 
 Rhythm, I disclaim, detest, abominate, and in every other 
 English and classical form renounce, the attempt to show 
 how a prose-harmonist should develop his harmony. But 
 I hope that I may perhaps have shown, and may now 
 show farther, how the harmonists of the past have 
 developed theirs. And I have tried to do this by using 
 continuously that principle of arrangement by feet which, 
 though with proper distinctions for the language, forces 
 
 443
 
 444 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 itself upon Englishmen, to my thinking, quite as inevit- 
 ably as, according to Quintilian in the passage which I 
 have used as motto, it forced itself upon Romans. 
 
 To a certain extent, of course, the old demurrer, " Does 
 English admit of feet at all?" remains ; but I shall take 
 the liberty to neglect it, merely referring to what I have 
 said already in the History of Prosody. There are, no 
 doubt, some differences in the two cases ; but they are 
 differences mainly, if not wholly, of " administration." 
 In verse a man may object to the foot system, but he 
 always has to make some substitute for it 1 some "accent-," 
 or "stress-," or "bar-," or " section- "plan of distribution 
 to account for the manifestly organic character of his 
 subject. With prose, for obvious reasons, it is different. 
 Only an abject fool, or a bizarre and almost impossible 
 genius, 2 thinks that he may write verse comme bon lui 
 semble. But as everybody " speaks prose without know- 
 ing it," so, without being quite, a fool or at all a genius, 
 he may hold that there is nothing much to know about it 
 that its exercises are incapable of being reduced to 
 rule, and that when such demands as mere grammar or 
 perspicuity makes are complied with, there is no more to 
 be said. 
 
 Still, when any one of tolerable wits, and possessed of 
 ears in body and mind, condescends really to consider the 
 subject, he can hardly refuse to ^consider, or at least 
 rearrange, his ideas on it It is impossible that any such 
 person shall continue to see no difference between Sir 
 Thomas Browne and Conyers Middleton, between the 
 Authorised Version and the Revised, between Locke and 
 Berkeley, between Hooker or Donne and any twentieth- 
 century tub-thumper. And if he thinks a little longer 
 
 1 At the very moment when I was revising this proof, I happened to 
 receive a letter in which there occurred the words, " I do not scan by feet, 
 but by tune and time." No "retort" was necessary, for the remark (it had 
 nothing to do with this book, of the existence of which the writer was 
 ignorant) was well-wishing and quite uncontroversial. But "reply" was 
 easy. "As soon as you have done this, feet of one kind or another will 
 have appeared, inevitably, if without your knowing it." 
 
 2 Even Blake, who answers to this latter description as well as another, 
 did not think anything of the kind, and tells us so.
 
 CONCLUSION 445 
 
 still, he will see that much, if not all, the difference 
 belongs, as far as expression, not thought, is concerned, 
 to this question of rhythm. Now rhythm requires, as a 
 condition of its existence, the difference which I designate 
 by the terms " long " and " short," and the values which 
 I so term are, by inexorable and inevitable mathematical 
 laws, grouped into the batches which I call " feet." And 
 this arrangement of groups is applicable, and has been 
 here applied, to the whole course of English prose. 
 
 The actual summary of the past application may be 
 given briefly, but should not, I think, be omitted here, 
 for the simple reason that I do not know where else it is 
 attainable. We saw that in the oldest the technical 
 " Old " or " Anglo-Saxon " stage, the tendency to regard 
 the rhythm of prose and that of verse as identical was 
 perhaps a little deceptive, but that both were actually, to 
 a very large extent, trochaic ; and that, in the more 
 ambitious exercises of prose, the writers seemed to have 
 little to rely upon, except the same instruments of accent 
 and alliteration which they would have used in verse. 
 But we saw, also, that both poetic rhythm and poetic 
 word-choice, especially the latter, could be discarded ; and 
 that a simple narrative style, not more cadenced than 
 conversation, could be and was produced. 
 
 In Middle English we saw that the necessary processes 
 of remoulding the language from an inflected, synthetic, 
 purely Teutonic dialect into an uninflected and analytic 
 tongue of mixed Teutonic and Romance, assisted by the 
 absence of any person of distinct genius in literature for 
 two or three centuries, delayed the formation of a definite 
 rhythm ; but that when this process of formation began 
 to draw to an end in the earlier fourteenth century, and 
 when, a little later, the absence of genius began to be 
 supplied, an almost entirely new range of rhythms, except 
 in the simplest narrative and conversation, began likewise to 
 be evolved. The disuse of inflection mitigated the trochaic 
 tyranny automatically ; the provision, by the Romance 
 admixture, of differently balanced and, on the whole, 
 more polysyllabic vocabulary, varied the new rhythm-
 
 446 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 bases. We saw how, at last, people began consciously to 
 try writing " fairly " ; how devices for it were adopted, and 
 how, at the Renaissance, the critical literature of the older 
 Rhetoric, in which prose rhythm, and discussion of it, held 
 a large place, began to exert influence. 
 
 Finally finally, that is to say, as far as this stage of 
 it is concerned we saw how the two great kinds of 
 rhythmical arrangement, the balanced rhetorical anti- 
 phony on the one hand, and the long swelling complex 
 symphony on the other, were almost pitted against each 
 other by Lyly and Hooker. In the first of these writers 
 we have, beyond all possibility of question, a deliberate 
 attempt to make rhythm as well as other constituents of 
 style ; in the second, with however much or however 
 little deliberation, we have, equally beyond question, the 
 actual attainment of a style pre-eminently finished * in 
 rhythm. There is, indeed, a kind of cross-antithesis 
 between these two remarkable writers Hooker being 
 plain and quiet in respect of diction, grammatical arrange- 
 ment, rhetorical trick and ornament, to such a pitch that, 
 as we observed, some well-meaning persons have held 
 that he approaches the poor and the beggarly ; while 
 Lyly, going to the ends of the earth for his vocabulary, 
 and twisting his style into all sorts of figures, so contents 
 himself with the easiest and most rudimentary kind of 
 rhythm that other equally well-meaning persons have 
 scouted the classing of him as " ornate." 
 
 In the following century, however, and when plain 
 and ornate styles are now distinctly ranged against 
 each other, this reversal of characters ceases except in 
 Bacon himself, who has more of sixteenth than of seven- 
 teenth character, and is " mixed " in this as in the other 
 qualities of style. The plainer writers do, as a rule, keep 
 to plain antithetic or antiphonic rhythm ; the ornater do, 
 as a rule, adapt to their apples of gold the picture-frame 
 of silver, and marry the magnificence of their language 
 and imagery to symphonic and polyphonic harmony. 
 
 In the conflict, or at least the competition, of the two 
 styles we saw how, for long, remnants of the old musical
 
 CONCLUSION 447 
 
 or rhetorical clangour clung even to plain styles like that 
 of Hobbes, and to half-French polished styles like that of 
 Temple, while it attained to the fullest possible symphony 
 and polyphony m Browne and Taylor and Milton. But 
 this music is killed by demands of business ; by the 
 intrusion of grammar-books ; and (to speak frankly) by 
 the ceasing, for a time, of the birth of musicians. The 
 " naked, natural way of writing " (as it seemed to itself) 
 which succeeded, sinks almost all rhythm but that of 
 parallel arrangement of more or less varying lengths, 
 where the ends only (and sometimes not even the ends) 
 had much of any rhythmical intention. But Dryden 
 shows how, by the idiosyncrasy and " fingering " of genius 
 rather than by any discoverable or analysable tricks of 
 composition, there could be got out of, or superimposed 
 upon, the nature and the nakedness, a subtle but astonish- 
 ing development of art and vesture. And the last two 
 or three sentences really supply an abbreviation of the 
 history of prose rhythm, as of prose style generally, from 
 1660 to 1800, or a little later. The tendency is always 
 downwards not always, though sometimes, to a more or 
 less vulgar, and often jerky conversation, as in L'Estrange, 
 and Collier, and Bentley, and the baser Mandeville but 
 always to the flatness and meanness of the Photian 
 observation l to the alignment of rhythmically soundless 
 or monotonous clauses with, at the best, a certain parallel- 
 ism to give them a kind of sound, if not of resonance. 
 And from time to time individual writers attempt dead- 
 lifts Addison with the undulations and end-crispings 
 of the milder, Swift with the clenching or crushing 
 mould of the stronger, irony ; Berkeley by perfecting, as 
 nobody but Plato and Malebranche had done before him, 
 the order natural to Logic and the more refined Rhetoric ; 
 Bolingbroke, by courting a showier and more " tricked and 
 frounced " sister of the rhetorical family. But always 
 style drops down again, to a nakedness which is not in the 
 least ashamed, and a something else which is not so much 
 the presence of nature as the absence of art. 
 
 1 V. supra, p. 229.
 
 448 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 And then we come to the three Titans who set them- 
 selves it is difficult not to think in all cases deliberately 
 to the business of raising it for good, and who in a 
 certain sense succeed, their efforts in each case being very 
 mainly, if not in by far the greatest part, rhythmical. 
 There is Johnson who, without in his most characteristic 
 style in the regular " Johnsonese " going much beyond 
 balance and antithesis for instruments, varies the form and 
 application of these instruments almost prodigialiter ; 
 arranges his contrasts and correspondences in intricate 
 mosaics of triple or quadruple parallel group -effects ; 
 compels attention to the whole composition of these 
 mosaics (the neglect of which had been the great fault of 
 the plain style hitherto) by deliberately pitting adjective 
 against adjective, substantive against substantive, verb 
 against verb ; and swings the whole, in ponderous but hot 
 clumsy libration, against the reader's ear and mind at 
 once. 1 Burke takes the Bolingbrokian bladders, and fills 
 them, as smugglers of old are said to have done, not with 
 wind, but with spirit (with the wind of the spirit if any- 
 body likes), and once more compels, by his union of 
 imagery with sentiment and argument, the same continuous 
 attention to the whole flow of his phrase. While later 
 Gibbon, refusing or deserting mere balance, extends and 
 undulates it into something like the old sweep of Hooker, 
 and, in a manner hardly before practised since the middle 
 of the seventeenth century, connects the rhythm of his 
 sentences with that of his paragraphs. 
 
 And so there comes about less by the efforts or the 
 determination of any single one of these, than as a result 
 of two, even of all, of them, and of others back to Addison 
 and Dryden what has been called the " standard style " 
 in rhythm as in other things a style not aiming, except 
 in its deliberate " flights," and not aiming very full- or high 
 even then, at polyphonic effect in sentence, and symphonic 
 arrangement of sentences confining itself as a rule to 
 
 1 There is nothing that symbolises the true Johnsonian manner better to 
 my mind than the swing of the ram, with its stages and suspensions and 
 shielded engineers working it, in the old classical Companion -pictures.
 
 CONCLUSION 449 
 
 decently adjusted balance but never, unless it is below 
 itself, inharmonious ; troubled about selection of seemly and 
 well-warranted language ; steering very carefully clear of 
 anything in the least suggesting poetry, but steering clear, 
 more carefully still, of cacophony, and vulgarity, and 
 flatness. This is the style which, for more than a hundred 
 years, has been affected by our best expositors and 
 arguers ; which, till Macaulay and Carlyle in their 
 different ways deserted it, was supposed to be especially 
 incumbent on historians ; which has sometimes been 
 called academic ; which is still aimed at by those who do 
 not aim at, or succumb to, special peculiarities, and which 
 is still successfully written by some persons, whose names 
 will very readily occur, without a mention which might 
 appear sycophantic to themselves and invidious to others. 
 The very full account which has been given, in the 
 last two chapters, of attempts during the last hundred 
 years to adapt this style to special purposes, and the 
 slight, but perhaps sufficient, notice of its degradations, 
 may excuse us from anything more than a paragraph 
 upon both here. It is sufficient to leave the degradations 
 alone ; and to say of the embellishments that they have, in 
 all cases, represented attempts to imbue and supersaturate 
 prose with rhythm ; to reintroduce, and if possible extend, 
 the endeavours of the seventeenth century at symphony 
 and polyphony. But, where they have been strictly 
 legitimate, they have always kept in mind that this 
 hyperdose of rhythm should stop rigidly short of con- 
 tinuous, complete, and definite metre. There may have 
 been more differences, in theory and in practice, on the 
 point whether, as the strictest theorists of old held, even a 
 formed fragment of metre is forbidden in prose ; or 
 whether, as the more liberal of those teachers allowed, 
 such fragments are quite legitimate and almost unavoid- 
 able, the only thing absolutely prohibited being con- 
 tinuous, undisguised, obtrusive, metrical run. Of the 
 work of the explorers I think they almost deserve the 
 title of conquistadores of this almost new prose-world 
 examples have been given and analysed, from the long 
 
 2 G
 
 450 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 unknown experiments of Coleridge, who was born all but 
 a century and a half ago, to the achievements of Mr. 
 Swinburne and Mr. Meredith, who died but the other day. 
 
 There remains only the duty not to be shirked but 
 to be undertaken with anything but a light heart of 
 seeing whether we can generalise from this more than 
 millennium of particulars ; whether we can not merely, as 
 perhaps has been done to some extent, arrange a pano- 
 rama of what has happened, but can to any degree 
 systematise the happenings. 1 
 
 One great principle we can perhaps lay down, as 
 established beyond possibility of contradiction. It is not 
 new there is no doubt that the proper correction of the 
 famous saying of Pococurante Junior is " There is nothing 
 true except what is not new : and this matters very 
 much." But the principle has not been exactly pro- 
 claimed from the house-tops, and whether proclaimed or 
 not, it has been very little attended to, and never, to my 
 knowledge, worked out at all till the present occasion. 
 As the essence of verse-metre is its identity (at least in 
 equivalence] and recurrence, so the essence of prose-rhythm 
 lies in variety and divergence. As the identity of recur- 
 rence in verse is, in the best examples, tempered by an 
 equivalence which must be pretty exact, so the variety in 
 prose-rhythm is tempered, in the same sentence and in 
 different sentences, by a second principle of association 
 which will be further expounded shortly. As you 
 certainly will not produce the best verse by attempting, 
 like the eighteenth-century people, to make identity and 
 recurrence absolute, so you certainly will not secure the 
 best prose by simply turning out feet anyhow, only taking 
 care that no two or three following shall be the same. 
 We have occasionally noted and have left the fact, 
 indicated by scansion, to the apprehension of the intelligent 
 reader in a much larger number of cases that many of 
 the most attractive rhythm-groups in prose appear to be 
 
 1 I hope to give in Appendix III. a tabular synopsis of the chief 
 "findings" of this kind insisting, there as here, on their strictly provisional 
 character.
 
 CONCLUSION 451 
 
 founded on a sort of foot -extension, and then foot- 
 retraction, of feet related to each other in composition or 
 cadence monosyllable, iamb, amphibrach, third paeon, 
 dochmiac dochmiac, paeon, amphibrach, trochee, with a 
 final monosyllable, or not, according to a provision which 
 corresponds to catalexis in verse. But we should probably 
 interpose some remarks on the feet themselves, a table 
 of which may be found elsewhere. 1 
 
 The dochmiac, or five-syllable foot, admitting a large 
 variety of changes, but seldom found with more than 
 two long syllables in it, 2 and often with one, I have 
 unhesitatingly admitted to a place in prose. In fact I 
 have been liberal (or licentious) enough to suggest that, in 
 certain kinds of prose, where the rhythm of the internal 
 parts of the clause is imperfectly marked, there might be 
 batches of even six syllables, where it would be difficult to 
 select more than one long enough to serve as the nucleus 
 or back-bone of a foot. But these instances occur very 
 rarely, if at all, in the highest kind of " numerous " art, 
 and there is always in them a sort of elision, synaloepha, or 
 slur. 3 But of the five-syllable foot in prose I have as 
 little doubt as I have room for it in verse. In some 
 cases, no doubt in many perhaps it may be split up into 
 a paeon and a monosyllabic foot, or into two syllables 
 and three. But, in a proportion which is not perhaps a 
 minority, the total rhythm, the legitimate rhetorical 
 current of the cadence, is not improved by this. The 
 dochmiac, in fact, like the paeon, but even more so, is one 
 of the great distinguishers of English prose- from English 
 verse-rhythm ; and one of the strongest arguments against 
 our modern stress-prosodists who make four- or five- or 
 six-syllable " bars " in verse, is that these tend (as indeed 
 
 1 P. xvi. 
 
 2 Because so much ballast in its hold would break it up. I have said 
 elsewhere that I do not quite know how the Greeks pronounced it in verse 
 (it is not absolutely certain that it was anything but a " book-made " foot 
 with them), and -we most assuredly could not get it in there. But it is easy 
 enough to take it in the more sesquipedalian stride of prose, and I think it a 
 distinct convenience here. 
 
 3 Indeed Thel wall's appoggiatura or " grace " syllable, an unnecessary 
 crime in verse, is not unthinkable, or wholly shocking, in prose.
 
 452 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 they do in other ways also) to obliterate the " great 
 divide " between the two harmonies. 
 
 Advancing a little further, we find that the quadri- 
 syllabic feet, or some of them, play an exceedingly 
 important part in English prose. This importance, as to 
 the paeon had, as we saw, been noticed by Aristotle in 
 Greek ; and in English also I should hardly object to a 
 system which made it the " foot of all work " in prose. 
 Many of my own scansions admit quite cheerfully of 
 " coupling up " monosyllabic feet, or a trisyllabic and a 
 monosyllable, or two dissyllables, into paeons generally, 
 epitrites seldom but sometimes, and the rest of the quadri- 
 syllabic feet ] more or less frequently. But for the more 
 ornate and numerous prose, I may here repeat one of those 
 general observations which I have already often made in 
 the text and notes, to wit that the third paeon, especially 
 when, by the large commonness of English, the final 
 syllable manufactures something like an Ionic a minore, is 
 found, and found in a great, perhaps a predominant, portion 
 of those passages which aim at special harmonic effect. 
 
 In trisyllables it has been suggested that the amphi- 
 brach holds first place ; and I should not be averse to 
 seeing a fated and metaphysical connection with the 
 prominence of the paeon and the dochmiac, 2 in the very 
 
 1 Except the dispondee. Four long syllables would overweight a single 
 foot in English prose, as three (which are not too much here) do in English 
 verse. And, if they were found together, the inseparable emphasis would be 
 better attained by a molossus and a monosyllable, two separated spondees, or 
 (as is optionally possible to the number of five at the beginning of Sir 
 Thomas Browne's diploma-piece) monosyllables paused apart. 
 
 2 The " procession " of the relation of some of these may be pardonably 
 extra-illustrated in symbols here : 
 
 w w Amphibrach, 
 w w \j Third paeon, 
 w w w w Dochmiac. 
 The reader will see at once that many of these procession-groups may be 
 
 similarly constructed, as that of long syllable, iamb, anapaest -{ w (' or 
 
 {-v^v/j (ww-J 
 
 _> V, with endless others. In fact, if Guest's 
 
 Aldrichian suggestion of a formal arrangement a priori of all possible 
 " sections " for verse, to be tried on their merits, was rather horrid and slightly 
 futile ; a similar arrangement of these and other groups, to be actually experi- 
 mented on in prose, is not a merely Bedlamite notion.
 
 CONCLUSION 453 
 
 fact that it is a foot, as I have also said, certainly to be 
 dispensed with in verse, and with great uncertainty to 
 be admitted anywhere, or in most places, there. But it 
 is not Turkishly-minded towards its brethren ; on the 
 contrary, it seems rather to like the assembling of them 
 together, round the throne where it sits as primus inter 
 pares. Every form of trisyllabic is, I believe, to be found 
 with us, the tribrach being, perhaps the rarest, though so 
 frequent in verse, because it has rather little substance for 
 prose, and is apt to take unto itself a syllable or dissyllable 
 of some strength, and become a paeon or dochmiac. So too 
 its opposite, the molossus, is not very common, though 
 (as not in verse) perfectly possible, and sometimes ex- 
 tremely effective. The others, dactyl and anapaest, cretic 
 and bacchic and anti-bacchic, are scattered everywhere. 
 In their variety, and in their want of exact (with a 
 presence of floating) equivalence, they lend themselves to 
 the general system of our prpse most happily. 
 
 Of the dissyllabics, the pyrrhic may seem to be even 
 more rare than in verse, and for the same reason (" only 
 more so ") which partially excluded the tribrach its want 
 of substance and its extreme tendency (like little sugar 
 bubbles in a cup of tea) to coalesce with or be sucked 
 into its greater neighbours. A purist who objected to 
 the six-syllable " sections " of the peculiar rhythm referred 
 to above might get rid of them, perhaps most easily, by 
 allowing pyrrhics. But, as has been remarked before, the 
 rhythmical tension of these passages is so low, or their 
 speed so high, that it hardly allows foot-marking of a very 
 definite kind. The others spondee, trochee, iamb are, 
 of course, ubiquitous. The singular deafness which could 
 deny, or the more singular asceticism which would 
 renounce, the spondee in English verse, will be more 
 hard put to it still in prose, and can pretend to effect its 
 purpose only at the cost of even more disastrous results. 
 As for the trochee, we have seen that it was once the 
 master of rhythm in prose as in verse ; and it has never, 
 to the present day, wholly lost its power, which is 
 specially great at the close of a sentence or rhythm-
 
 454 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 group. 1 For the iamb, it is great in the same place, and 
 in the interior or beginning is as great or greater. But 
 it is rather as a temperer or admixture as what the 
 cooks call a liaison that it is most important, and, 
 when it is relied upon by itself, the dangerous Delilah of 
 blank verse is always at hand to trim the prose Samson's 
 locks. 
 
 Of the existence of the monosyllabic foot in English 
 prose I am as great a champion as I am of it in English 
 verse, and I think it is infinitely more prevalent. As 
 allowed above, it may sometimes be compounded with 
 trisyllables into a paeon, and with paeons or other fours 
 into a dochmiac. But in a very large number of cases, 
 and especially at the end, this would make a far feebler 
 and less effective cadence than the " bearing up " <of it 
 into a substantive foot, which becomes valuable, and 
 almost invaluable, as a strongly-marked pivot or stepping- 
 stone in the turn or progress of the rhythm. And after 
 all, we have so many monosyllables in the English 
 language that the least we can do for them is to give 
 them full status in this fashion. 
 
 Thus we have, for basis of calculation and partition in 
 prose rhythm, a body of feet, from one syllable to five at 
 least, admitting of arrangement to the number in all of 
 something like threescore individual combinations, and 
 providing, when combined with each other in the various 
 groups which we call clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, 
 a possibility of variety which is rather mathematically 
 than rhetorically infinite. 
 
 All this is, so far, a pretty solid road to walk upon. 
 But, at this point, are we not rather " on the brink of 
 Eternity," like the Major and the footman and Mr. 
 Titmarsh in Thackeray's frontispiece? Is it possible to 
 support, extend, and multiply those specimen -nints as to 
 combination of feet which were given above ? It may be ; 
 but I have repeatedly warned the reader not to expect 
 too much from the attempt. 
 
 1 For Mason's objection, based on mistaken dicta of the ancients, see 
 Appendix II.
 
 CONCLUSION 455 
 
 In the first place, I must deprive myself of a weapon, 
 or instrument, or whatever it may prefer to be called, of 
 which the ancients availed themselves largely, and which 
 almost my chief predecessor, John Mason, 1 borrowed from 
 them without hesitation. I am totally unable to allow 
 in English, and I frankly admit inability to understand 
 even in Greek and Latin, the division of feet into sheep 
 and goats into "noble and generous" on the one side, 
 " base and weak " on the other. I have indeed admitted 
 a certain want of substance, for the purposes of English 
 prose, in feet consisting entirely of short syllables ; but 
 this is a quite different thing from marking-off, as Mason 
 does, not merely pyrrhic and tribrach, but trochee, dactyl, 
 amphibrach, and anti- (Mason calls it by its other name, 
 palim-) bacchic as " base," while iamb, spondee, anapaest, 
 cretic, bacchic, and molossus are made peers of the 
 rhythmic realm. 
 
 Of course the advantage or let us rather say the 
 object, for it seems to me a most dubious and treacherous 
 " advantage " of this is obvious. When you have patented 
 your " noble " numbers and branded your " base " ones, it 
 is quite clear that the more you use the first, and avoid 
 the second, the better will your combination be. If you 
 must use the rabble, stuff them into the interior of your 
 sentences ; begin with something distinguished and 
 (almost more carefully) end with the same. Back up a 
 pawn with a peer whenever you can, and so forth. 
 Certainly the apparent difficulty of the question is 
 marvellously lessened, in fact it may seem almost to vanish 
 bodily. But is there not, as far as English is concerned 
 (for, unlike some modern " scholars," I am not prepared 
 to dictate to Greeks and Romans about their own pro- 
 nunciation, grammar, and prosody), a rather big other 
 question begged somewhere ? Mason himself, a solid 
 commonsense John Bull, finds a few difficulties as how 
 to do away with the Dionysian epithet c-e/iz/o? for the 
 dactyl, or with Cicero's remarkable statement that numer- 
 ous prose non semper numero fit. I most certainly shall 
 
 1 V. Appendix II.
 
 4$6 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 not admit any " baseness " in the amphibrach, after having 
 laboriously traced it, as a potent and effective ingredient 
 in the finest English prose, for three whole centuries. As 
 for that of the trochee, it is simply absurd. For age the 
 trochee bears the bell in English from every other foot ; 
 for softness and solemnity alike, for clangour and for 
 plangency, it has no superior in verse or prose ; and, as a 
 closing foot, it is perhaps present in an absolute majority 
 of our finest prose harmonies. The dactyl, " kittle " to 
 deal with in verse, and in fact better avoided, is often 
 highly effective in prose ; and though the antibacchic has 
 perhaps less " character " than any of the others, and is 
 indeed in English often indiscernible from the amphibrach, 
 there is no " baseness " of any kind about it, and it is not 
 even open, as the pyrrhic and tribrach are, to the charge 
 of a certain want of " body." 
 
 The office of the Promoter is more gracious than that 
 of the Devil's Advocate, and even if it were not, I have 
 not the slightest intention of exchanging to the latter in 
 reference to the so-called " generous " and " noble " feet. 
 To me all feet are beautiful alike, on the mountains of 
 verse and in the plains of prose, if they move themselves 
 delicately or vigorously but aright. I shall only comment 
 on the extreme arbitrariness of the preference of the 
 bacchic over its counterpart, merely on the more general 
 assumption that a foot which ends with a long syllable is 
 nobler than one which ends with a short. Perhaps my 
 sense of this arbitrariness, in English, is deepened by my 
 knowledge of the fact that, in English, and especially in 
 English prose, so many last syllables of feet (as instanced 
 above in the case of the third paeon) are common or 
 indifferent, that there is a real difference between our 
 language and the two great classical tongues in this 
 respect. And I confess that in what is perhaps the most 
 beautiful prose sentence ever written, the last of the 
 Platonic Apology, I always, in the teeth of accent and 
 quantity alike, feel inclined to lengthen the first syllable 
 of 6e& in order to get a nearer approach to trochaic 
 ending. Which is, no doubt, sinful ; but I am English,
 
 CONCLUSION 457 
 
 and I hope it is permitted to me to hear as well as to 
 speak Englishly. 1 
 
 We shall therefore take, or rather I have already taken 
 throughout, the lesson of St. Peter on the housetop, and 
 scout the idea of any foot being common or unclean. 
 For the placing of them there must be many searchings 
 of heart and of mind. If I hope anything about this poor 
 book, it is that, on the facts given and the problems stated, 
 many such searchings, more profitable than my own in 
 result, may be made by others. As to one point, which 
 governs all, something may be said first. It may be 
 objected by some careful scrutineers that, after disallowing 
 Mr. Stevenson's criticism as to foot-making by word- 
 splitting, I have after all followed it, and have generally, 
 in the latter part of the book at any rate, refrained from 
 making feet end in the middle of a word. I have said 
 something about this before, but should probably say a 
 little here too. At the time when he made the criticism 
 referred to I was a mere novice and experimenter in this 
 matter. After twenty years of scattered and occasional, 
 and after two of continuous and systematic practice, I 
 have not altered my opinion that such division is perfectly 
 legitimate in all cases, in some decidedly to be preferred, 
 and in not a few perhaps necessary ; but that, if anybody 
 dislikes it, it can in the majority be avoided. One reason 
 for the avoidance, which I think I may say positively was 
 not present to Stevenson's mind, is that such avoidance 
 produces a new and valuable distinction from verse- 
 scansion, where the less foot-end and word-end coincide 
 unquestionably the better. 
 
 I have said, in more than one place, that the few 
 English dealers with this subject appear to me to have 
 
 1 After all, Plato often uses rd Belov as equivalent to 6 0e6s. Perhaps the 
 whole should, however familiar, be given, if only to consecrate the page with 
 its beauty : 'AXXi | y&p rfdrj \ upa \ airifrcu, \ tfiol JJLV \ diro6avov\/j.v(ji, \ 
 v/j.Tv d | /Sioxro/i.^J'ots. | birbrepoi \ 8 i]fj.Civ \ Hpxovrai \ tirl &/J,eivov | irpa.yp.a., \ 
 &di)\ot> | ira,vTi \ TrXriv el \ r<f def. The text is Professor Burnet's ; for myself 
 I think I like ir\i)i> 1) better. The scansion, while respecting Greek quantity, 
 carefully pretends only to give the foot-division most agreeable to the English 
 ear above spoken of. I do not know, and I doubt whether anybody knows 
 exactly, how Aristotle or Demetrius, Dionysius or Longinus, would have 
 scanned it.
 
 458 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 bestowed, again no doubt in following of their classical 
 guides, disproportionate if not always exclusive attention 
 in the endings of sentences, adding sometimes, on the 
 same suggestion, a little in reference to the beginnings. 
 And we have seen that the practice of the eighteenth 
 century, to which they chiefly belonged, to some extent 
 justified (though in a way rather damning by implication) 
 this restricted attention. In fully developed prose-rhythm 
 " a beginning, a middle, and an end " are to be demanded 
 and respected as impartially as in an Aristotelian tragedy. 
 But there is also a natural tendency 'respicere finem ; and, 
 in the architecture of the paragraph more particularly, 
 these endings, as we have actually pointed out in many 
 cases, bear a part of dominant importance. The most 
 beautiful endings in English are trochaic or quasi-trochaic. 
 But the abrupter iambic or quasi-iambic close has a 
 strength and weight of its own, and an admixture of the 
 two is undoubtedly desirable in the formation of a perfect 
 paragraph the universal word-of-command and password, 
 " Variety," coming in here also. 
 
 The beginning is, in English, perhaps of somewhat less 
 general importance than it seems to have been in the 
 classical languages. By this I mean that it may lack a 
 very particular or striking character without much general 
 damage to the rhythmicality of what follows not by any 
 means that such character cannot, or cannot advantage- 
 ously, be imparted to it. The magnificence of the passage 
 from the Authorised Version of Isaiah, which has been so 
 fully examined and compared, would be much less than it 
 is if it were not so fully " set " and harbingered by the 
 opening blasts of the iamb " Arise ! " and the great mono- 
 syllable " Shine ! " supported on either side by its attendant 
 pauses, which give it almost the weight of a molossus. 
 That of the crowning sentence of the Urn Buri&l would 
 be impaired if the five blows on the coffin lid of " Now- 
 since-these-dead-bones " did not usher in the more com- 
 plicated symphony of the Dead March that follows. But 
 these are instances of exceptional tension and intention ; 
 and as a rule it is our English habit not to begin too
 
 CONCLUSION 459 
 
 flourishingly or startlingly. For which reason I have paid 
 less attention than most people have done to De Quincey's 
 " Bishop of Beauvais " and to Pater's " The presence that 
 thus arose beside the waters," insinuating as is the direct 
 caress of its minor Ionic tone. 1 
 
 But, after all, the words of a not perhaps wholly illucid 
 or unhumorous critic of life in general may occur to us, in 
 regard to the particular point. This philosopher used to 
 say that, while it was the utterest commonplace of its 
 kind to exhort to the improvement of youth, and a trivi- 
 ality scarcely less trodden to dwell on the value of making 
 the most of age, hardly any one had taken as text the 
 fact that the years of man's life from thirty to fifty the 
 only period in which pleasure in enjoying and power to 
 enjoy walk hand in hand ; when a man's means are often 
 competent, and his calls on them not yet burdensome ; 
 when health of body and mind at once is fully reached 
 and not yet dissipated that such golden years are allowed 
 to pass in a hurry and huddle of so-called occupations 
 which, even when they are pleasant, as most things, work 
 and play, are then to the not decidedly unfortunate do 
 not allow themselves to be thoroughly savoured in the 
 present, and laid up carefully in memory for the future. 
 But as this preacher had not the pen of Solomon, or that 
 of Mr. Browning, he did not write a new Ecclesiastes or 
 Rabbi ben Ezra \ he only said, " Take care of your 
 middles? 2 And so I should say to a person ambitious to 
 write good numerous prose in English. It was the fault 
 of the early stages that they did not take care either of 
 beginning, or middle, or end ; it was the virtue of the great 
 sixteenth- or seventeenth-century writers that they took 
 equal care of all ; the fault of the succeeding school that 
 these " middles " were specially neglected ; and the glory of 
 the nineteenth-century restorers, from Coleridge onwards, 
 that they minded them. 
 
 1 Actually, of course, amphibrach, fourth pason, and dochmiac. But all 
 these have touches in various ways of the undulating method of the minor 
 Ionic, so often indicated as the most cajoling of all measures in English prose, 
 and they give the sequence noted at p. 452. 
 
 2 Dr. Johnson said nearly the same thing, but with a different application.
 
 460 A HISTOR Y OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 But how to take this care ? that is the question the 
 rose on this rose-tree round which we constantly circle, 
 but from which Danger as constantly warns us off. Some 
 hints have been given ; a few more may be tried. Many 
 of them are simple enough applications, in different ways, 
 of the universal Law of Variety. A very obvious one, 
 which we have traced through centuries of time and 
 scores of examples, is the juxtaposition, in gradual 
 lengthening or shortening (the former is the more 
 common), of clauses constructed on a more or less similar 
 rhythm-scheme. This, as we saw, is very largely found 
 in the more elaborate prose of the eighteenth century, 
 and by no means absent from that of the nineteenth. 
 The fault of it is almost as obvious as its merit. It is 
 somewhat too mechanical ; and, like all things mechanical 
 without exception, is in danger of becoming monotonous. 
 It also creates a sort of stave effect, which, as elsewhere 
 observed, is especially to be avoided. But it has un- 
 doubted possibilities of charm, and perhaps even its 
 obviousness is not quite so great as it may seem to one 
 who has perceived the inwardness for himself, or has had 
 it pointed out to him. At any rate, it does not seem to 
 have been much dwelt on by ancient critics. 
 
 They, on the other hand, were fully aware of another 
 device which, indeed, could escape no one, even if he 
 were sitting down, in a vacuum of examples, to consider 
 the subject for the absolutely first time still less when he 
 had any considerable number of such examples before 
 him. And this is the mixture of short and long sentences 
 which is recommended to us in a great passage of 
 Dionysius. This, though it also may be said to be in a 
 manner mechanical, is not so to any extent that implies 
 monotony ; and, in greater or less degree, it has been 
 universally resorted to. Its dangers, however, are real, 
 though insidious ; and to see them when the snares have 
 been boldly stripped of their covering, we have only got 
 to turn to Macaulay, to Kinglake, and to many more 
 modern instances. Excessive contraction and letting 
 out, the constant sending forth giant and dwarf in
 
 CONCLUSION 461 
 
 company, communicates the smatch of cheap epigram 
 the sound and the scent of the halfpenny or farthing 
 cracker. But it is, of course, purely the fault of the 
 author if he lets himself indulge unduly in these futile 
 and fatal fireworks ; and still more his fault if he allows 
 the indulgence to become a habit and an obsession. The 
 actual mingling of short sentence and long is almost an 
 indispensable resource for all styles, except those which, 
 like Hooker's, and to some extent Gibbon's, rely upon 
 long undulating sweeps, unbroken by any stop or flutter. 
 Even Sir Thomas Browne indulges in it ; and it is a 
 question whether some of the most apparently quietist 
 styles, such as Mr. Pater's, do not disguise its actual 
 presence by a different system of punctuation, so that 
 what would have been sentences become clauses merely. 
 
 Some allusions in what has just been said may point 
 us to a fresh path in the maze the way in which 
 rhythmical difference can be engineered by making the 
 closes of clause, sentence, and paragraph abrupt, complete, 
 or dying. While there is even a fourth way, of which, as 
 hinted above, Mr. Pater was almost the inventor, and 
 which effects a sort of compromise between the abrupt 
 and the dying by the employment of a gentle aposiopesis. 
 The abrupt form is, of course, that constantly employed 
 by Carlyle ; of the complete, examples may be found 
 anywhere in the proficients of the " standard " style, or 
 in those who diverge but little from it, as in Gibbon and 
 Macaulay earlier, Newman and Froude later. But these 
 two last and Mr. Pater (Mr. Swinburne prefers the com- 
 plete) also indulge to some extent in the " dying " close 
 the coda which, though in no way abrupt, and not even 
 giving the curious suggestion of a soft breaking-off which 
 we have called aposiopetic suggests to the mind's ear 
 ripples of further echo, potential if not actually audible 
 something corresponding to the " unheard melodies " of 
 the poet. Of these forms the abrupt and complete will 
 generally be embodied in an iambic or long monosyllabled 
 ending ; the others in the trochaic or short syllabled, at 
 least in some foot possessing a strong penultimate,
 
 462 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 whether the actual last be long or short. And it need 
 hardly be said that by giving prominence to one or other 
 of these, or by varying them in admixture, almost infinite 
 further differences of rhythmical effect may be produced. 
 
 Yet another point that emerges is, that we cannot in 
 prose, as we can in verse, lay it down that juxtapositions 
 of particular feet are uniformly good or bad. We know 
 that, in English verse, the anapaest seeks out the iamb, 
 and the dactyl the trochee, as a companion or equivalent ; 
 while the substitution of dactyl for iamb, and anapaest 
 for trochee, with the consequent juxtaposition of the two 
 in each case, always, or almost always, leads to jangling 
 and jarring. But this is by no means the case in prose ; 
 and the reason is obvious enough, and, in fact, directly 
 connected with the general principle of prose -rhythm- 
 variety. The verse-unit is more or less fixed, the prose 
 is altogether fluid ; and even if actual juxtaposition of 
 two feet should, in itself, make an inharmonious com- 
 position, the feet that occur on either side of them will, 
 if the composer knows his business, undertake the task 
 of arranging a concordat, or an amicable separation, as 
 best may be. In many cases, too, it would be prosaically 
 possible, as it is not poetically, to rearrange the pair, so 
 as to make, for instance, not a dactyl and iamb, but 
 a long monosyllabic foot and a fourth paeon, in which 
 there is no incompatibility nor any suspicion of jar. The 
 looseness of the governing law of rhythm prevents the 
 dissension which would occur under the stricter union 
 of metre. 
 
 We may also observe, by legitimate inference, that, 
 for the finer prose, a pretty large admixture of the bigger 
 feet that is to say, the four- or five-syllabled units is 
 all but necessary. The very inadmissibility, according 
 at least to the system of prosody on which this book is 
 written, of such feet in verse, supplies at once that 
 differentia from verse which, on the same system, is the 
 absolute sine qua non of the best numerous prose. I 
 have arranged in my head, and could easily transfer to 
 paper, endless schemes of unbroken dissyllabic feet, and
 
 CONCLUSION 463 
 
 I find that, though effective for a short time, the com- 
 position becomes extremely monotonous, and is even in 
 some danger of slipping into rough metre. While, if you 
 mix trisyllabics only, the Protean blank verse will, before 
 very long, draw you into its net. The danger can, of 
 course, be averted by seasoning largely with monosyllabic 
 feet ; but this is a merely colourable evasion, for these 
 monosyllables, plus the trisyllables, will simply and natur- 
 ally make paeons, while, when added to pairs of dissyllables, 
 they will make dochmiacs. 
 
 Lastly, there crops up a question, or more than one, 
 as to the effect produced, in prose rhythms, by what we 
 have sometimes called " pivotal " arrangements of the 
 same word or words the part played by epanaphora, 
 epanorthosis, and other forms of repetition generally. 
 We saw that devices of the kind formed a very large 
 part of the method of one distinguished prose-writer of 
 yesterday, Matthew Arnold ; but it was not found by the 
 present writer at any rate, whatever may be the case with 
 his readers, that the effect was wholly or permanently 
 delightful. In actual spoken oratory, or in very rhetorical 
 written passages, epanaphora may be effective ; but it is 
 too rough and boisterous an instrument for higher prose, 
 nor can the looser rhythm tame and train it as does the 
 stricter metre. And, once more, it and all forms of 
 repetition, down to the careless recurrence of a single 
 word except in a markedly different sense, without any 
 special rhythmical stress on it, are dangerous, because 
 they are in a manner rebel to the same great Law of 
 Variety. Epanaphora and similar forms of repetition are 
 good (when not abused) in verse, because they are in 
 accordance with its Law of Recurrence. They are bad 
 in prose for an exactly corresponding reason. 
 
 It may seem that this is an exceeding poor and 
 beggarly result of generalities from so long a history of 
 the subject, and so widely thrown a netting of examples. 
 But there is nothing against which, in course of some 
 thirty years' writing of literary history, I have learnt to 
 set my face more flintily than parade of systematic theory,
 
 464 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 proceeding by elaborate rules and exceptions which for the 
 most part are really nothing but individual phenomena 
 catalogued and scheduled. I believe a most careful and 
 valuable German scholar not long ago elaborated a 
 settlement of the much -debated question, whether the 
 Anglo-Saxon stave is reducible to a fixed scheme of 
 accentual equivalence or not, by pointing out that it must 
 take one of (I think) ninety-two different forms and no 
 more. Such a result here would give me not the slightest 
 pleasure had I attained it. Even putting aside the certainty, 
 which my constitution of mind would impose upon me, 
 that somebody next day would discover a ninety-third ; 
 I should, even if the whole world were actually kind 
 enough to abstain from such a discovery, feel that there 
 was nothing to prevent its being made, and that my 
 ninety-two forms were forms in chalk, men in buckram. 
 I could not even have said to any of them as Mr. Carlyle 
 is said to have remarked to a young lady, " My dear, 
 ye're a nice phenomenon " ; for I should have felt that they 
 were, too possibly, not nice phenomena at all, nothing but 
 futile idols of an insignificant cave. 
 
 All that I have endeavoured to do has been to arrange, 
 for the first time, I believe, 1 a complete survey (according 
 to that foot system which until recently every one used, 
 and which I myself believe to be the only one of the 
 slightest use) of examples of actual English prose rhythm 
 from the earliest times to the present day, and to note, 
 where it was possible, advances and changes in the 
 proportion and character of the rhythm itself generally. 
 
 1 My friend Professor Bouton of the University of New York, who some 
 years ago put himself for a time, as a research student at the University of 
 Edinburgh, under my formal guidance, is, I believe, engaged upon a work 
 concerning prose style, not identical with this, though possibly touching it in 
 some points ; but I have as yet seen none of his book. He tells me, too, that 
 there have been scattered studies in America ; but how far these also may 
 coincide with my investigations I am again ignorant. I thought it better, in 
 the circumstances, to work as independently as possible, with the exception, 
 already often mentioned, of the classical pioneership of Hurd and Mason, and 
 of the experiments of my friend Professor Elton (see Preface), who will, I hope, 
 publish some results of the labours he relinquished as a whole. He most 
 kindly allowed me to see them, but, at my own request, after I had practically 
 finished. Our lines, I think, are pretty parallel.
 
 CONCLUSION 465 
 
 Occasionally some general suggestions, inferences, and 
 even provisional axioms have cropped up, which I have 
 endeavoured to summarise in this Conclusion, and to 
 tabulate, more shortly and strikingly to the eye, in a 
 Third Appendix. But they are only put up and forward 
 as jury-masts or acting-officers ; though I do not take 
 quite such a gloomy view, of at least some of them, as Mr. 
 Midshipman Easy's poor friend, the master's mate, did of 
 his " acting " appointment. 
 
 For as, even in verse, I hold that except as to certain 
 abstract and almost mathematical forms which admit of 
 being filled up with wide variety the final decision must 
 always be left to the sensitive ear in each individual case, 
 so, and infinitely more so, in prose, where are no such 
 forms, or where at least the number of them is infinite, 
 and where Variety itself is mistress and queen the moon 
 that governs the waves of prose, as Order is the sun that 
 directs the orbit of verse the ear once more is judge. 
 " Not worth blotting fair paper, and wasting irrevocable 
 time, in coming to such a result as this ? " It is very 
 possible. But the work lay in my way ; and I found it ; 
 and I tried to do it with such might as I had. 
 
 2 H
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 467
 
 APPENDIX I 
 
 STAVE-PROSE POETRY OSSIAN, BLAKE, WHITMAN, ETC. 
 
 THREE or four years ago, in dealing with Blake's " Prophetic " 
 Books in the History of English Prosody^ a promise was made 
 which has been to some extent " implemented " (as they say in 
 my appointed place) by this book, as well as one of return to 
 the particular subjects specified at the head of this Appendix. 
 But it was even there observed that these subjects only partly 
 belonged to the History of Prose Rhythm, and they were dealt 
 with not very grudgingly in the earlier book. 2 The special and 
 continuous study of the prose division which the last two years 
 have enabled me to give has induced me to lay even greater 
 stress on that " partly " ; and I am now disposed to look upon 
 them as belonging to a Debateable Land which is much more 
 poetic than prosaic. I remember a great and greatly cadenced 
 sentence of Dean Hansel's itself a splendid example of what we 
 are studying in this book (v. sup. p. 417) which I never saw in 
 print, but heard from the preacher's lips some five and forty 
 years ago in the gallery of St. Mary's. "Alienated as man is 
 from God by sin, he is yet more alienated from the Devil by 
 humanity that humanity of which He partook who hath no 
 concord with Belial." And with no irreverence to the subject 
 of this sentence, which, as I have said, is ours by right of form, 
 I may borrow something of that form in saying that, alienated as 
 these media are from verse by their abstinence from strict metre, 
 they are yet more alienated from prose proper by their constant 
 observance of a definite "stave-end," entirely different in 
 character from the closes of clauses and sentences, and making 
 as it were a paragraph of every versicle. 
 
 This applies in some, but in a much less, degree to great 
 
 1 Hist. Pros. iii. 20. 
 
 2 Ibid, and in the context there ; in the special Excursus on Ossian (iii. 43) ; 
 and in the chapter on " American Poets " (iii. 490-492). 
 
 469
 
 470 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 parts of the Authorised Version. Except in the Books which 
 are definitely lyrical, and sometimes even there, paragraphing is 
 possible, though the fact that it has been adopted by the 
 Revisers is enough to show that it is not an improvement. But 
 to paragraph Blake is impossible ; there is the sharpest differ- 
 ence between the actual prose and the quasi - verse parts of 
 the " Prophecies " themselves. If you paragraph Ossian, the 
 frequent indulgences or slips of actual metre which were traced 
 in the other handling, will become more obvious and uglier than 
 ever; while the turgid poetic diction, and the misty gropings 
 of its sense, will lose a great deal by the obliteration of the 
 staves. As for Whitman, the " catalogues," questionable at the 
 best, will take on even more of pure burlesque than they have 
 at present ; the sometimes very artful variations from short to 
 long will lose much of their strikingness and beauty ; and the 
 great charm of the medium the occasional exquisiteness 
 of the separate versicles or paragraphidia will be blurred 
 and blunted. 
 
 It seems to me, therefore, that a very few observations here 
 will be sufficient for the division ; and we may include in them, 
 without special reference, all or most of the writing that may be 
 put in the same class from the ineffably dreary Ossizmc pastiches 
 of the eighteenth century to our latest playings at Blakish and 
 Whitmanese. 
 
 It can hardly be necessary to repeat the demonstrations, 
 given in the History of Prosody, that Ossz'an, at least, was an 
 attempt much rather at a new kind of verse than at a special kind 
 of prose, and that this attempt proceeded, to a very large extent, 
 by the rather schoolboy process of " unrhyming " and stowing 
 away fragments and lumps of actual metre in the pudding. To 
 me, at least, it is practically certain that one of the main causes 
 of this attempt, as well as of its popularity, was the violent if 
 unconscious nisus to get at something better than something 
 at least different from what Blake not so long after was to 
 denounce in his own case, and Cowper to describe with 
 characters of mild damnation in his the " monotonous 
 cadence," the "mechanic art," of the Popian couplet. The 
 innocent, if somewhat bewigged and befogged, praises of my 
 professorial ancestor, Blair, are entirely devoted to the considera- 
 tion of Ossian as a new sort of poetry. The imitators and 
 admirers English and German and French all jumped at it 
 as that and nothing else. There may have been eighteenth- 
 century persons who looked upon it as a debauch in verse ; but 
 I am quite certain that there can have been hardly any who 
 would not have looked on it as pure lunacy if he had considered
 
 APPENDIX I 471 
 
 it as prose. Nor is it. It may, if any one likes, be regarded as 
 a hybrid between the two; but the difference between it, and 
 even the most elaborate numerous prose proper of the seven- 
 teenth or the nineteenth century, is infinitely greater than that 
 between it, and the least accomplished verse of Addison's little 
 senate at the beginning of its own period, or the twitterings of 
 the Delia Cruscans at the close thereof. 
 
 With Blake the gulf deepens ; and indeed that description of 
 his, which has just been referred to, puts the matter out of 
 question. He was not aiming at prose at all, but at vers libres 
 " poetry [not] fettered " something more suitable, both in its 
 freedom and in its complexity, for his mysterious matter. In 
 Ossian we have been able to discover large quantities of scarcely 
 buried metre. The feet kick more than convulsively with a 
 gentle even motion which is that of quite comfortable life 
 through the thin shroud of typographic arrangement. But in 
 Blake there is the hum of a quasi-metrical accompaniment all 
 round the composition ; we practically never get anything more 
 tuneless than recitative ; we are able constantly (and it has been 
 done in the History of Prosody) to refer the measure, now to 
 loosened and lengthened blank verse, now to Alexandrines or 
 fourteeners treated in the same kind of way ; now to irregular 
 but quite perceptible anapaestics. An exceedingly hasty or 
 untrained judgment may feel inclined to say, " Oh ! this is not 
 verse, so it must be prose." Persons less related to the 
 Headlong ap Headlong will probably take refuge in a safer 
 enthymeme. " Although this is extremely uncovenanted verse, 
 it is not safe to call it prose, because there are none of the signs 
 thereof." 
 
 The case of Whitman is not quite so much to be judged off- 
 hand, but it is clear enough. His individual staves versicles, 
 paragraphidia as we ventured to call them, or anything else that 
 anybody likes are, by themselves and individually, in by far the 
 larger number of cases indeed, always (except now and then 
 when something like a definite note of warning is usually 
 sounded) prose pure enough. They are often very beautiful 
 prose, worthy of the most careful scansion and appreciation 
 such as has been given in this book. But, as I have already 
 hinted, when they are taken together, when you at once regard 
 for purposes of observation, and analyse for purposes of experi- 
 ment, their system of juxtaposition, then you perceive that 
 something more than prose that something different from 
 prose has been aimed at certainly ; that it has (in measure 
 differing no doubt according to the taste of the appreciator) 
 been achieved. And this something, the division namely of the
 
 472 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 portions from each other, and their arrangement en Ichelon, and 
 not in line or phalanx, at once puts them aside. The items 
 could receive criticism according to the general principles of 
 the book. The whole escapes us; and whether Prosody will 
 receive it as a subject is out of our concern. 1 
 
 1 As I have mentioned Whitman, it may be asked why no other American prose- 
 writers appear. Their absence is not due to any incivility, and it is not wholly 
 due to the desirableness of economising space. The reason is that, interesting 
 as it might be to deal, say, with Emerson and Poe from our point of view, we 
 should not find much, if anything, in them that gave us new observations. 
 Emerson is practically represented by Carlyle ; Poe at his best by De Quincey 
 and even Landor ; at his not-best by Charlotte Bronte. They have, as it were, 
 their English " correspondents," and do business here by them.
 
 APPENDIX II 
 
 MASON ON PROSAIC NUMBERS 
 
 I HAVE referred several times in the text to the remarkable 
 observations of John Mason, a Nonconformist minister of the 
 middle of the eighteenth century, on the subject of this book ; 
 and though I have not given much space, for reasons of various 
 kinds, to the scanty preceptist literature of that subject, I must 
 make an exception in his case. Whether the tract l is actually 
 " rare " in the technical sense I cannot say. I can only say 
 that, when I first saw it in a catalogue some fifteen or sixteen 
 years ago, I had never seen it even referred to before ; that I 
 have very seldom, if ever, seen a copy catalogued since ; that 
 except Mr. Omond, nobody that I ever met seemed to know it 
 till they heard of it from me ; and that several of my friends 
 have found it impossible to procure. I think this justifies the 
 small trouble I am going to take in giving a brief abstract of it ; 
 and I shall not repent though (as once occurred in another case) 
 somebody should start up and say that he had twenty copies 
 offered him by twenty different booksellers in twenty successive 
 days or words to that effect. 
 
 The pamphlet is a short one of xii-y6 pages in octavo, the 
 print, except in the notes, being of a good large size and fairly 
 "leaded." The Preface has a pleasant eighteenth - century 
 ceremony and rotundity, regretting that "our modern Rhetoricians 
 should lay so little stress upon a Thing which the antient 
 
 1 An Essay on the Power and Harmony of Prosaic Numbers, being a Sequel to 
 one on the Power of Numbers and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic Composi- 
 tions (London : Printed by James Waugh for M. Cooper at the Globe in 
 Paternoster Row, MDCCXLIX). The companion Essay appeared with the same 
 imprint in the same year. A shorter and very practical Essay on Elocution, 
 bound up with my copies of the others, and signed by John Mason, A.M., had 
 reached its fourth edition in 1757, the date of this copy. The author (who, like 
 most of his cloth at the time, was a private tutor and chaplain as well as a 
 minister) lived from 1706 to 1763, and was grandson of a better known John 
 Mason, an Anglican divine and hymn-writer, but an enthusiastic Millenarian and 
 apparently a very decided " crank." Our J. M. is common-sense or nothing. 
 
 473
 
 474 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 Orators considered as so important," and quoting at length that 
 remarkable person, James Geddes, who had so great an influence 
 on contemporary philologists in the older and better sense. The 
 text has ten chapters ; and throughout, the " Numbers " of the 
 title are translated into the adjective " numerous " applied to 
 prose. The first chapter is occupied by a brief sketch of what 
 the " antients " have said, and citations in opposition to the 
 neglect of the modern rhetoricians from Pemberton, 1 from the 
 Fitzosborne's Letters of that Melmoth who also translated Pliny, 
 and was reduced by Johnson " to whistle," 2 and from " Longinus " 
 Smith, who, however, took the other side. 
 
 The second contains that enumeration and classification of feet 
 as " noble " or " base " which has been referred to, discussed, and 
 disapproved above. Then, in Chapter III. he proceeds to explain 
 how the different disposition or combination of these numbers is 
 that which constitutes the difference between a rough and a 
 smooth style admitting, however, that a "rough, masculine, 
 and vehement style " may be " numerous." He is still rather in 
 the bondage of "generosity" and "baseness," and I am afraid 
 his instance, as he uses it, is a fallacy of non causa pro causa. He 
 rightly objects to : " It is a mystery which we firmly believe the 
 truth of and humbly adore the depth of," and rightly prefers 
 " the truth of which we firmly believe, and the depth of which 
 we humbly adore." But the badness of the first form does not, 
 as he thinks, come from the " base and feeble " trochees, or the 
 goodness of the second from its " strong and generous " iambs 
 and anapaests. It comes from the facts, first, that the postponing 
 of the proposition, though a sound English idiom, 3 is a some- 
 what conversational and undignified one, and that "truth of," 
 and " depth of," have a homceoteleuton of a kind particularly to 
 be avoided in prose. 
 
 The fourth chapter (wrongly duplicated as "III." in the 
 original) describes, taking Dionysius as guide, 4 the manner of 
 " reducing " prosaic numbers ; that is to say, of arranging them 
 according to feet. It is curious, however, that while indulging 
 in most unnecessary argument as to the propriety of using tri- 
 syllabic as well as dissyllabic feet, he seems to " shy at " tetra- 
 syllabic, though his ancient authorities constantly use them. 
 Thus, in scanning the opening passage of Genesis, he goes out of 
 
 1 V. Hist. Pros. ii. 544. 
 
 2 V. Boswell, Globe edition, p. 520. 
 
 3 (Mason, wiser than some of our modern grammar- book makers, partially 
 acknowledges this. ) 
 
 4 Mason re-analyses the ancient analysis in a manner which is shrewd in itself, 
 and which I should have liked to follow, but for the reasons given sup. at 
 Chap. I. p. 9.
 
 APPENDIX II 475 
 
 his way to make (and apologise for) a dactyl and spondee. 
 " In the be | ginning | " is a shockingly bad beginning itself; " In | 
 
 the beginning | " or " In the | beginning | " being obviously the 
 right way. 
 
 Chapter V. is devoted to closes ; and poor Mason is much 
 disturbed by his authorities' commendations of a ditrochaic 
 ending. For if a trochee is base and weak, surely a double 
 trochee must be doubly weak and base a sort of Debilitado 
 Doblado to adapt Thackeray. But he gets off rather lamely 
 by the help of the " commonness " of an end-syllable. VI. 
 and VII. deal respectively with " Poetic Prose " (too near to 
 metre) and " Prosaic poetry " (i.e. the parallelisms of Hebrew 
 literature or the set fragments of inscriptions). Under this head, 
 if he had been writing a few years later, Mason would no doubt 
 have classed Ossian. Chapter VIII. is a long one for the book, 
 consisting chiefly of extracts, fully scanned, from Sharp, Tillotson, 
 Addison, Atterbury, Temple, and others, ending with the 
 overture of the Gospel of St. John, which, however, he spoils 
 
 with two initial dactyls " In the be | ginning was " in the teeth 
 both of his own principles and of manifest rhythmical require- 
 ments. 1 IX. contains "rules." As I find that criticism, how- 
 ever politely worded, is sometimes misunderstood, I shall simply 
 reprint them, at full or in summary, with no further remark than 
 that some of them seem to be unhappy, and a few not very 
 relevant. X. ceremoniously perorates with a neat eulogium of 
 " numerous " prose generally. 
 
 The " rules " are as follows : 2 
 
 I. " Furnish yourself with a copia of equivalent words that 
 convey just the same idea ; that you may have it in your power 
 to substitute one of a good number in the room of another that 
 is a bad one, and to choose that which best suits the rhythmus, 
 of which a good ear will soon be judge." 
 
 II. " When four, five, or more short syllables come together, 
 you may part them by inserting amongst them some expletive 
 particle containing a long quantity, which, if it do not strengthen 
 the sense, will at least serve to meliorate the measure." 
 
 III. "An illipsis \sic\ will often help the rhythmus by con- 
 
 1 Just compare this sing-song with the majestic, " In | the beginning | was 
 
 the Word " ! | It is observable that he actually robs himself, and his author, of 
 his own ' ' strong and generous ' ' anapaest. 
 
 2 Those between marks of quotation are quoted exactly ; the others shortened 
 to their gist. The "general" additions have been less respected, and are all 
 shortened, although " quoted."
 
 476 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 tracting two syllables into one as "tis,' 'don't.'" He extends 
 this to the omission of words or part-clauses. 
 
 IV. " A proper use of rhetorical figures " is recommended, 
 but largely suhuled. 
 
 V. " Transposition of words " is suggested. 
 
 VI. Not merely a "good number," but an "emphatic word" 
 is required at the close. 
 
 VII. "Remark the most beautiful closes as well as the 
 tenderest words " in others. 
 
 VIII. " Let your first care be a clear and strong expression 
 of the sentiment." 
 
 IX. " Do not always use the same sort of numbers, be they 
 ever so good." 
 
 X. " Let your composition be so free, natural, and easy, that 
 you may not seem to have any regard to your numbers at all." 1 
 
 He adds a few which he calls "rules of a more general 
 nature," though one might be inclined to call them more 
 peculiar : " Don't have two long sentences together though you 
 may have many short"; "Keep similarly -sounding words far 
 apart "; " Avoid strings of genitives with 'of'"; " Use alliteration 
 now and then"; "Be careful of 'w,' 's,' 'th,' etc."; "Avoid, 
 but not entirely, the frequent postponement of the proposition " ; 
 and " Don't let the beginning of a word duplicate the end sound 
 of the last." 
 
 Most of these are extremely sound ; others perhaps less so ; 
 all perhaps (except II. and IX.), a little rudimentary as regards 
 "numbers." 
 
 If, however, I were to exercise a pen (which has, perhaps, 
 had some practice of the kind) in pulling Mason to pieces as I 
 have neither wish to do nor care for doing I should only break 
 its nib against the impregnable fact that he was the first, and 
 until very recent times practically the only, critic to attack this 
 subject in English with any fulness and on any system. He was 
 actually a teacher of elocution ; and as he was no doubt led by 
 this to the consideration of our subject, we may readily excuse 
 any dictum which may perhaps savour more of the actor or the 
 vjroK/om?s than of the critic pure and simple. I rather doubt 
 myself whether the very finest and most elaborate prose is not 
 better read than heard; for while Dryden was absolutely 
 right in asking why we should consider the mind of man less 
 active than his senses, we may justly intensify the question 
 by retorsion, and ask whether the senses are not actually less 
 active and sensitive than the mind. But this is a by-problem. 
 There is no doubt that style which is intended to be heard 
 1 All these rules are more or less largely explained, illustrated, and commented.
 
 APPENDIX II 477 
 
 has a tendency to exaggerate emphasis, and to avoid intricate 
 rhythms. 
 
 But however this may be, it was a great thing to face the 
 idleness which would not consider these questions, and the 
 tritical commonplaces as to their being trivial, finicking, un- 
 English, and so on. If he might have done more, he did much ; 
 and it is evidence of that stirring of the waters which was going 
 on, that in the very hey-day of the " drab " style at the very 
 moment of the floruit of Conyers Middleton a humble dissent- 
 ing minister should be setting men in the path in which, eighty, 
 and a hundred, and a hundred and thirty years later, De Quincey 
 and Landor, and Newman and Ruskin, and Pater were to tread. 1 
 
 1 It will, perhaps, be only proper, especially in face of that interesting essay 
 of Mr. Shelly's, to which I have before referred, to connect the latest with the 
 first student of Latin and English prose rhythm combined, and to say a very little 
 more about the Ciceronian and cursus systems of Latin prose scansion, which Mr. 
 Shelly has endeavoured to adapt to the cadences of the English Prayer- Book. 
 They have recently, in Germany (see Mr. Clark's book (note, p. 9) and the 
 authorities there mentioned), endeavoured to systematise Cicero, and to show 
 that his own admittedly ' ' desultory " theory of clauses and clause endings may 
 be thrown into three forms 
 
 (1) ----- 
 
 (2) 
 
 (3) ------- 
 
 ( = cretic or molossus + trochaic endings of this or that kind, with others to be 
 brought under these by the same classification a outrance, which makes ninety 
 odd forms of Anglo-Saxon verse). It is again a known fact that when 
 accentual quantification succeeded, forms answering to these were definitely 
 practised and prescribed in the Middle Ages, under the names of cursus flanus, 
 tardus, and velox. A "law" has been also extracted from these by Herr 
 Meyer, according to which there must be two, three, or four unaccented 
 syllables before the last accented one in a sentence. I must not steal Mr. 
 Shelly's applications of this to English ; but merely observe that "I do not 
 agree with Paulus" ; though I hope he will continue his enquiries. I do not, 
 for instance, think that " Rfse to the life immortal" is in the slightest degree 
 sufficient for an English scansion ; even of the accentual kind. ' ' Life ' ' cannot 
 be slurred in such a fashion. And I ought to add that Mr. Shelly himself 
 admits it to be "often impossible to adopt" the cursus rhythm "owing to the 
 character of the English language." / should, though he does not, exclude 
 "many and great dangers" from any resemblance to esse videatur, because 
 
 of the insurgence of "great." And if weight is to be laid on mere trochaic 
 endings, it is to Old English, not to Latin, that we must go.
 
 APPENDIX III 
 
 TABLE OF AXIOMS, INFERENCES, AND SUGGESTIONS 
 
 (It is here most earnestly reiterated that the following propositions are strictly 
 provisional, and presented only as thoughts that have cropped up in the 
 course of the survey of facts given in the text. For Table of Feet, 
 v. sup. p. 16. ) 
 
 1. The Rhythm of Prose, like the Metre of Verse, can, in 
 English as well as in the classical languages, be best expressed 
 by applying the foot-system, or system of mathematical com- 
 binations of " long " and " short " syllables. 
 
 2. But a much larger number of these combinations, to be 
 ascertained (as in the other case) only by practice, are available 
 here, including those of four or five syllables. 
 
 3. The great principle of foot arrangement in prose, and of 
 Prose Rhythm, is Variety. 
 
 4. No foot is in itself " nobler " or " baser " (i.e. better or 
 worse for prose purposes) than another; though feet consisting 
 exclusively of short syllables are somewhat rare, and have a 
 tendency to coalesce with, and merge into, longer and heavier 
 ones. 
 
 5. Feet retain in prose their intrinsic character, i.e. the iamb 
 gives a " rising," and the trochee a " falling " effect, the 
 amphibrach and the Ionic a minore, or third paeon, an undulating 
 or rocking movement, etc. 
 
 6. But the necessity, or at any rate the great desirability, of 
 variation in foot - arrangement somewhat interferes with the 
 extension of these effects to rhythm -groups which, if mainly 
 composed of one foot, would become too much like verse. 
 
 7. It is possible that, especially in certain kinds of prose of low 
 tension, blocks of even six syllables may, by the help of some- 
 thing like slur, assume the position of feet. 
 
 478
 
 APPENDIX III 479 
 
 8. The scansion of prose by these feet often, if not generally, 
 approaches that rhetorical or musical arrangement of verse 
 which has been noticed elsewhere. 1 But in this case there is 
 no other. 
 
 9. There is no objection to the falling of a foot-end in the 
 middle of a word. But it is less frequent in prose than in verse ; 
 and its comparative rarity perhaps furnishes one of the differences 
 between prose- and verse-rhythm. 
 
 10. A still more important difference is that in prose, except 
 at the paragraph-end, there should be nothing corresponding 
 to the line-break in verse. Closed staves of any kind, as in 
 Ossian, etc., always incline to the poetical. The clause- and 
 sentence-break is one chiefly of sense. 
 
 11. Monosyllabic feet are of extreme importance as pivots for 
 the turn, and stepping-stones in the progress, of English prose 
 rhythm. 
 
 12. And this peculiarity, which distinguishes English from the 
 classical languages, is perhaps connected in some way with the 
 great number of English monosyllabic words. 
 
 13. In fully "numerous" prose as much care should be 
 taken of the feet in the middle of a clause or rhythm-group as 
 of those at the beginning and end. 
 
 14. The beginning is often the least prominent part in 
 English, though it may (as shown by some examples in the 
 text) be of great importance in summoning special attention. 
 
 1 5. Neglect of the middle will infallibly deprive the structure 
 of all claim to be really " numerous." A mere " filling " of 
 undistinguished rhythm, between an emphatic beginning and end, 
 is French rather than English, oratorical rather than literary, 
 and always indicative of a low type with us. 
 
 1 6. Such superior importance as belongs to the ends is one 
 rather of connection with other ends, clause- or sentence-, in 
 regard to the total rhythm of the sentence or paragraph, than 
 intrinsic or peculiar. 
 
 17. These ends may be abrupt, complete, or dying, emphatic 
 or gliding off. 
 
 1 8. In some cases there appears to be something in them 
 
 1 In several passages (e.g. iii. 526 note) of Hist. Pros., and more specially 
 and explicitly Historical Manual, 35, 36, and 268, 269.
 
 480 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 corresponding to catakxis in verse the following pause supply- 
 ing what is wanted. 
 
 1 9. But Variety, in the composition of the feet which compose 
 these ends, is of special and paramount importance. 
 
 20. Not seldom, it seems as if gradation in such successive 
 end-feet e.g. anapaest, iamb, long syllable were especially 
 powerful and grateful. 
 
 21. This principle of Gradation which is connected with 
 the more general one of Variety seems indeed to offer (subject 
 to the cautions given) a key to several locks. 
 
 22. It appears constantly in respect of sequences of feet 
 in a clause dochmiac, pseon, a trisyllable, and so on and 
 perhaps very specially in the concluding feet of one anapaest, 
 iamb, long syllable, etc. 
 
 23. The gradation may be either way from longer to shorter, 
 or from shorter to longer. 
 
 24. But something similar is often noticed in the larger 
 units. Sentences and clauses follow in succession to each other, 
 drawing themselves out, or shutting themselves up, like slides 
 of a telescope, and presenting a profile like a flight of steps 
 ascending or descending. 
 
 25. These arrangements are specially prominent in what is 
 called the Balanced style ; in which pairs or batches of clauses 
 and sentences are aligned or opposed to each other, with an 
 antithetic and even antiphonic effect. 
 
 26. But they are often noticeable also in the symphonic 
 and polyphonic style, where the rhythm is rather continuous than 
 antiphonally arranged, and which supplies, perhaps, the best 
 examples of " numerous " prose. 
 
 27. It is, however, possible to combine the two as Mr. 
 Swinburne, more particularly, has shown. 
 
 28. Verses or parts of verses, which present themselves to 
 the ear as such, are strictly to be avoided in prose ; but s"uch as 
 break themselves into prose adjustments are permissible, and 
 even strengthen and sweeten the " numerous " character very 
 much. 
 
 29. In Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, the rhythm is mainly 
 trochaic.
 
 APPENDIX III 481 
 
 30. But in Middle English the iambic rhythm of Latin and 
 French invades, and coalesces with, the trochee, though never 
 suppressing or ousting it. 
 
 31. In closes, especially, trochaic or amphibrachic endings 
 are very frequent, and exceedingly effective, in the best English 
 prose to the present day. 1 
 
 32. This mixture of iambic and trochaic general cadence 
 begets the longer feet, and so the more varied cadences which 
 they bring with them. 
 
 33. The amphibrach itself, rare in verse, would certainly 
 appear to be an exceedingly prevalent foot in English prose. 
 
 34. Three trisyllabics amphibrach, bacchic or anti-bacchic, 
 and anapaest seem in many cases to combine with special 
 harmony. 
 
 3 5. Each of these is also good singly, especially the anapaest, 
 which perhaps ranks next to the amphibrach as a prose foot of 
 three syllables. The cretic occurs, but not eminently. 
 
 36. The molossus, another exile from verse according to the 
 present writer, is quite at home in prose ; though it may some- 
 times, with advantage, be resolved into its constituent three long 
 monosyllables. 
 
 37. The tribrach is perhaps sometimes found, but it shares 
 with the pyrrhic, and still more with the proceleusmatic, the 
 disability referred to in Rule 4, sup. 
 
 38. The dactyl is common enough ; indeed the large number 
 of dactylic words in English, and the frequency with which, in 
 prose, foot- and word-length coincide, force its entrance. 
 
 39. But it seldom combines well with a spondee or trochee 
 after it. The '''hexameter ending" in verse and prose alike, is 
 repugnant to English. 
 
 40. In harmonious passages, especially of an emotional kind, 
 a foot, which may be in most cases either Ionic a minore or third 
 paeon, is present so frequently that it seems to be almost a 
 specific. 
 
 41. Other paeons are very common, but seem to have less of 
 a special effect than this. 
 
 1 In this way the influence of Anglo-Saxon verse on English prose (v. sup. 
 p. 10, note) may be thought to be specially probable. 
 
 2 I
 
 482 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 42. Epitrites are not uncommon, though more so than 
 paeons. They share to some extent, as do the major Ionic, the 
 choriamb and antispast, and the double feet, a tendency to break 
 up and recombine. But (except the dispondee, which would 
 certainly undergo this) all are possible and not very infrequently 
 probable. 
 
 43. The dochmiac, in many of its numerous combinations, is 
 one of the commonest and most useful feet in English prose. 
 In the more accomplished specimens of the last three centuries 
 it would often be impossible to get a satisfactory scansion if it 
 were disallowed.
 
 INDEX 
 
 483 
 
 2 I 2
 
 INDEX 
 
 Addison, 230, 232, 243-252, 256, 260, 
 
 261, 267, 271, 289, 290, 337, 350, 
 
 362, 447 
 ALlhic, 23, 25, 26, 30-36, 39, 42, 72, 
 
 104-105, 115, 162, 218, 219 
 
 Bata, 30 
 
 Alexander, Patrick, 367 
 Alfred, King, 23-25, 66, 104 
 Amadis translations, 116 note 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 165-168 
 Ancren Riwle, The, 44-51, 54, 102, 
 
 220 
 
 Andreas, 28, 29 
 Andrewes, Bishop, 158 
 Anima Poetae, 295, 300-305 
 Apollonius of Tyre, 38-40, 104, 106, 
 
 109, 219 
 Apology for Poetry, Sidney's, 139 
 
 the Miltonic, 170, 171 
 
 the Platonic, 456, 457 note 
 
 Arbuthnot, 252, 271 
 Arcadia, the, 116 note, 139 
 Aristotle, chap. i. passim, 14 note, 
 
 104 note, 118, 147, 224, 232, 244, 
 
 392 note 
 Arnold, M. , 297, 400 note, 412-416, 
 
 423, 440, 463 
 
 Arthur of Little Britain, 93 
 Ascham, 81, 92, 116, 119-122, 134, 
 
 204, 205, 220, 221, 223, 271 
 
 Astrolabe, Chaucer's, 66, 71, 72 
 
 Atterbury, 252 
 
 " Aureation," in sq. 
 
 Austen, Miss, 251, 376 
 
 "Authorised Version," the, 73 note, 
 
 116, 142-158 
 
 Autobiography, De Quincey's, 320 sq. 
 Ayenbite of Inwyt, The, 53 
 
 Babington, Dr. Ch. , 76 note 
 
 Bacon, 132, 158, 163-165, aoo, 205, 
 
 446 
 
 Bain, Professor, 405 
 Balzac, 271 
 Baudelaire, C. , v, 429 
 
 Beaconsfield, Lord, 378-380 
 
 Beccaria, ix 
 
 Bentley, 157 note, 239, 240 
 
 Beowulf, 10, 27, 28 
 
 Berkeley, 252-254, 256, 267, 350, 447 
 
 Bernard, St., 54 
 
 Berners, 75, 82, 92-97, no, 115, 164 
 
 Besant, Sir W. , 82 
 
 " Bishops' " Bible, the, 149 sq. 
 
 Bispel, An, 52 
 
 Blackmore, R. D. , 441 
 
 Blake, 31, 66, 343, 392 note, 405, 
 
 444 note, App. I. 
 Blickling Homilies, The, 15, 25-29, 
 
 IO2 
 
 Boethius, 24-25, 66, 72-75 
 Bolingbroke, 256-259, 273, 374, 380, 
 
 447 
 
 Bonar, Mr., 271 
 
 Bouton, Professor, 464 note 
 
 Breton, N. , ix 
 
 Brontes, the, 405-408 
 
 Brown, Tom, 238, 239 
 
 Browne, Sir T. , 42, 101, 105, 133, 
 159, 162, 181-200, 223, 237, 239, 
 252, 267, 280, 294, 325, 358, 362, 
 
 423. 447 
 
 Bunyan, 39, 88, 105, 127, 239 
 Burke, 42, 127, 272-281, 285, 288, 
 
 290, 291, 294, 299, 324, 337, 357, 
 
 374. 380, 448 
 
 Burnet, T. , 163, 200, 223, 321 
 Burton, R., 165-168, 204, 364 
 Butler, Joseph, 263 
 Byron, 297 
 
 Campbell (the poet), 82, 113, 298 
 
 , Dr. George, 255 
 
 Capella, Martianus, 15 
 
 Capgrave, 76, 80 
 
 Carlyle, 285, 292 note, 349, 350, 364- 
 
 370, 399, 402, 428, 461, 464 
 Castellain, M. , 205 
 Catholicon Anglicum, in 
 Caxton, 81, 82, 103, 115, 217 
 
 485
 
 486 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 Chalmers, Dr., 357, 358 
 Chambers, Mr. E K. , 254, 255 
 Chaucer, 24-25, 39, 55, 57, 66, 75, 
 
 103, 108, 109, 117, 122 note, 217 
 Cheke, Sir John, 116-118 
 Chesterfield, 242 note, 259 
 Christian Morals, 198-200 
 Chronicle, The Anglo-Saxon, 16 note, 
 
 37, 40, 51, 104, 106 
 Church Quarterly Review, The, 9 note 
 Cicero, 4-6, 9 note, 224, 244, 246, 257 
 Clarendon, 166, 179, 204, 214-216 
 Clark, Mr. A. C., 9 note, 133 note, 
 
 477 note 
 
 Cobbett, 105, 127, 271 
 Cockayne, T. O., 31 note, 41 note 
 Coeur de Lion, Richard, 56 note 
 Coleridge, Mr. Ernest, 295, 300 
 , S. T., 42 note, 166, 182, 281, 
 
 311 note, 321, 341, 353-355- 359 
 Collier, Jeremy, 239, 240 
 Colloquy, ^Ifric's, 30, 31 
 Colvin, Sir Sidney, 326 note 
 Complete Angler, The, 216 note 
 Coquillart, 112 note 
 Cornwall, John, 57 
 Courthope, Mr., 248 
 Coventry, 228 
 
 Coverdale, 116 note, 125, 149 sq. 
 Cowley, 230, 231 
 Cowper, 80, 214 
 Coxe, L. , 115 
 Craik, Sir H. (his English Prose 
 
 Selections, notes passim), ix, 257, 267- 
 
 271. 349. 357 
 
 Cranmer, 116 note, 125, 126 
 " Cursus," the, 9 note, 477 note 
 " Cynewulf, The Slaying of," 16-23, 
 
 i5 
 
 (the poet), 28, 29 
 
 Cypress Grove, The, 200 
 
 Dante, 20, 154, 341 
 
 Defoe, 39, 88, 105, 127, 240, 241 
 
 De Interpretatione, 2 note 
 
 Demetrius, 2 note, 3, 4 
 
 De Quincey, v, n note, 42, 176, 186 
 
 note, 260, 273 note, 295, 305-21, 
 
 33, 33 1 . 35. 354 note, 391-3, 406, 
 
 425, 434 note, 436 
 Dialogues, Pope Gregory's, 38 note 
 Dickens, 380-382 
 
 Dictionaries, Early English-Latin, in 
 Diderot, ix 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 2 note, 4, 
 
 176 note, 222, 314, 396 
 Discoveries, Ben Jonson's, 204-208 
 Donne, 101, 133, 159, 162, 163, 223, 
 
 237. 325. 417. 423 
 ' ' Douay " Bible, the, 149 sq. 
 
 Dowden, Bishop, 125 note 
 
 Dream-Fugue, De Quincey's, 310 sq. 
 
 Dream of Boccaccio, 330 
 
 of Euthymedes, 330 
 
 Dreams, their influence, 311 sq. 
 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, 200, 204 
 
 Dryden, 33 note, 41, 228-233, 241, 
 244, 248, 252, 256, 260, 267, 272, 
 289-292, 325, 341, 352, 355, 423, 
 425. 447 
 
 Earle, Professor, n, and chap. ii. 
 
 passim, 44, 55, 75, 291 
 Ecclesiastical Polity, 134-138 
 "Eliot, George," 408-409 
 Elton, Professor, ix note, 464 note 
 Emerson, 472 
 Epicurean, The, 298-300 
 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 244 
 Essay on Death, The, 200 
 Ethelbald, King, his grant to the 
 
 Bishop of Worcester, 16-23, 104 
 Euphues, 116 note, 129-133, 138 
 Euphuism, 39, 129-133, 138-159 
 
 Feet of more than five syllables, 179 
 
 note, 191 note, 451, 478 
 
 Table of, xvi 
 
 Felltham, Owen, 215 
 
 Ferrier, Miss, 271 
 
 Fielding, 39 
 
 Fisher, Bishop, 82, 97-100, in, 203, 
 
 217, 271, 334 
 Florio, 128 
 Fontes Prosae Numerosae, 9 note, 133 
 
 note 
 
 Ford, Emanuel, 116 note 
 Fortescue, Sir John, 76 
 Froissart (Berners 1 ), 91-96 
 Froude, Mr., 389, 409-411 
 Fuller, 362 
 
 Gairdner, Mr. James, 76 note 
 Garden of Cyrus, The, 183, 192 sq. , 
 
 196. 197 
 
 Gardiner, Mr. S. R. , 76 note 
 Gascoigne, 141, 153 
 Gautier, Th., 203 
 Gibbon, 223, 281-285, 288, 290, 291, 
 
 295' 3io. 374, 397. 425. 448 
 Gilpin, 294 note 
 
 Gladstone, Mr. , 257 note . 
 
 Glanvill, 163, 200-203, 22 3. 224 
 Glasgow Herald, The, 156 note 
 Goethe, 81 
 
 Goldsmith, 260, 345, 362 
 Gospels, the Anglo-Saxon, 59, 60 
 Gower, 39 
 
 Gray, 259, 284 note, 294 note 
 " Great " Bible, the, 149 sq.
 
 INDEX 
 
 487 
 
 Greek, prose rhythm of, 1-8, 15 note 
 
 Romances, 39 
 
 Green, Mr. Verdant, 158 note 
 Greville, F. , 101, 133, 140, 159, 161, 
 
 162, 223, 325 
 Guest, Dr., 452 note 
 
 Halifax, 228, 235, 236, 257 
 
 Hampole, 55 note 
 
 Hawkesworth, 270, 350 
 
 Hazlitt, 358-362, 434 note 
 
 Henley, Mr. W. E. 128, 306, 442 
 
 Hermogenes, 2 note, 6 note 
 
 Hita, the Arch-priest of, 131 
 
 Hobbes, 8, 208-214, 2 3 8 
 
 Hook, Theodore, 433 note 
 
 Hooker, 75, 122, 134-138, 180, 222, 
 
 271. 397. 446. 448 
 Howell, 215, 216 
 Hugo, V., 29, 433 
 Human Nature, 210-214 
 Hume, 260, 263 
 Hunt, Leigh, 362-364 
 Huon of Bourdeaux, 93 sq. 
 Hurd, Bishop, v, 6-8, 230, 243-248, 
 
 266, 291 
 Huxley, Mr., 441 
 
 Imitation, translations of the, 112 
 
 Ingram, Dr., 112, 113 
 
 lonica, 442 
 
 Irving, Edward, 358 note 
 
 Isocrates, i note, 2 note 
 
 Italics, note on, 354 
 
 Jane Eyre, 406-408 
 
 Jeffrey, 350, 355, 356 
 
 Jerome, St., 145, 147 
 
 Jocelyn of Brakelonde, 56 note 
 
 Johnson, Dr., 8, 42, 89 note, 132, 193, 
 223, 232, 248, 263, 265-273, 281, 
 288, 291, 294, 387, 341, 349, 357, 
 374. 43-43 2 - 448, 459 note 
 
 Joinville, 107 
 
 Jonson, Ben, 8, 204-208, 223 
 
 " Junius," 257 note 
 
 Keats, 295 
 
 Kemble, J. H., 25 
 
 Ker, Professor W. P., ix note, 12, 48 
 
 note 
 
 King, Bishop, 214 
 Kingsley, Charles, 311, 400-405, 425 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 128, 255, 349, 350, 
 
 362 
 Landor, 42, 212 note, 298, 305, 306, 
 
 311, 324-341, 347, 348, 350, 359, 
 
 362, 391-393, 425 
 Latimer, 105, 120, 127, 128 
 
 Latin, prose rhythm of, 1-8 
 
 , connection with English, 9 note, 
 
 133 note, 140 note, App. II. 
 Law, 263 
 Lawrence, Dr. John, vi, 10, n note 
 
 , Dr. F. , 273 note 
 
 Leechdoms, Anglo-Saxon, 41 
 
 L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 238, 239 
 
 Letter to a Friend, A, 197, 198 
 
 Letter to the Duke of Bedford, 278-280 
 
 Letter to Windham, 257 
 
 Lever, Charles, 436 note 
 
 Life of Schiller, The, 349, 365 
 
 Life of Wilson, The, 281 
 
 Lilliburlero, 202 
 
 Lingua pedantesca, 112 note 
 
 Locke, 228, 229, 238 
 
 Lockhart, 349 
 
 Lonelich (or Lovelich), H. , 84 
 
 Longfellow, vii. note 
 
 Longinus, 2 note, 6-8, 176 note, 224- 
 
 246 
 Lyly, 129-133, 138, 164, 222, 271, 
 
 446 
 Lytton, the first Lord, 377 
 
 Macaulay, Professor G. C. , 94 note 
 
 , Lord, 267, 350, 370-375 
 
 Mackintosh, Sir J. , 259, 271, 277, 
 
 350, 357. 378 note 
 Mail Coach, The English, 310 sq. 
 Malmesbury, William of, 107 
 Malory, 22, 75, 82-92, 100, 101, no, 
 
 115, 217, 436 
 
 Mandeville, Bernard de, 239, 240 
 , Sir John, 39, 55, 62-66, 83, 109, 
 
 362 
 
 Mansel, Dean, 416-420, App. I. 
 Mapes, W. , 107 
 Marseillaise, the, 202 
 Martianus Capella, 15, 280 
 Mason, John, v, 6-8, 79, 155 note, 
 
 248 note, 455-457- App. II. 
 Masson, Professor David, 200, 357 
 Mayor, Professor, 98 
 Melibee, Chaucer's Tale of, 67, 68-71 
 Meredith, Mr. George, 285, 420, 424, 
 
 437-440 
 
 Middleton, Conyers, 230, 260-263, 4 2 4 
 Milton, 92, 103, 157 note, 159, 166, 
 
 168-176, 193, 223, 235, 237 
 Minto, Professor, 164, 166 
 Montaigne, Florio's, 128 
 Moore, 298-300 
 More, Sir T. , 122, 123 
 Morley of Blackburn, Lord, v 
 Morris, Dr., 26, 27; references to 
 
 his editions and Specimens, chaps. 
 
 ii. and iii. , notes passim 
 , William, 91, 115, 325, 435-437
 
 488 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM 
 
 Morte. Arthur, Malory's, 82-92, 115 
 
 , the English verse, 83-87 
 
 Morton, Canon, 44 sq. 
 Mummolenus, St., n note 
 Munday, A., 116 note 
 Myers, Mr. F. , 427 
 
 Napier, Professor, 25 
 Neate, Mr. Charles, 122 note 
 Newman, Cardinal, 75, 388-389, 411, 
 
 417, 420, 428 
 Nicholson, Mr. , 63 
 Nietzsche, 325 note 
 Nisbet, Mr. , 123 note 
 Norden, Herr E. , 9 note 
 North, SirT., 128 
 "North, Christopher," see Wilson, 
 
 John 
 Nursery rhymes, 23 note 
 
 Gates, Rev. John, 168, 169 
 Orpheus, the story of, 24, 25 
 Ossian, 31, 66, 343, 405, App. I. 
 Othere, 23 
 
 Parr, Dr. , 260, 274 
 
 Parson's Tale, Chaucer's, 67, 68 
 
 Paston Letters, The, 76, 80, 81, 221 
 
 Paston, Margaret, 81 
 
 Pater, Mr. W. H. , n note, 42, 162, 
 
 311, 325, 420-426, 436, 439, 461 
 Pattison, Rev. Mark, 168 note 
 Paul, Mr. Kegan, v 
 Peacock, T. L. , 376-378 
 Pecock, Bishop Reginald, 12, 76-80, 
 
 no, 117, 217, 226 
 Pemberton, 151 note 
 Peterhouse, The Master of, see Ward, 
 
 Dr. A. W. 
 Phantasies, 441 
 Photius, 229, 238 
 Pitt, W. , 305 
 Plato, 176 
 
 Plutarch, North's, 128 
 Poe, Edgar, 200, 472 
 Pollard, Mr., 63 
 Poore, Bishop, 45 
 Pope, 41 
 
 Portent, The, 441 
 Prayer-Book, The, 125-127 
 Promptorium Parvulorum, in 
 Punch, Mr., 378 
 Purvey, John, 59 note, 123 note 
 Pusey, Canon, 389 note 
 
 Quintilian, chap. i. passim, 12, 90, 104, 
 147, 224, 225, 244, 246, 341, 396 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter (I. ), 101, 133, 158- 
 161, 223 
 
 Religio Medici, 193-195 
 
 Renan, M. , 180 note 
 
 Represser, The, 76-81 
 
 " Revised Version," the, 53, 79, 134 
 
 note, 142 sq., 152-157 
 " Rheims " New Testament, the, 153.^. 
 Rhetoric, Aristotle's, chap. i. passim 
 Richardson, 260 
 Robert of Brunne (Manning), 55, 62 
 
 of Gloucester, 55 
 
 Robertson, 260, 263 
 
 Rossetti, Miss Christina, 125 note, 180, 
 
 407, 441 
 
 , D. G. , 194 note 
 
 Ruskin, Mr., 42, 71 note, 85, 179, 214, 
 
 311, 325, 353, 382, 392-400, 411, 
 
 420, 425, 428 
 Rymer, 239, 240 
 
 Samson, Abbot, 44 note, 56 note 
 Savile, Sir H., 158 
 Schelling, Professor, 205 
 Scott, SirW., 39, 95, 295-297 
 Septuagint, the, 54, 143 sq. 
 Shaftesbury, 254-256 
 Shakespeare, 39, 90, 118, 158, 202 
 Sheffield, Lord, 281 note, 284 
 Shelley, P. B. , 202, 297, 298, 325 
 Shelly, Mr. John, 9 note, 477 note 
 Skeat, Professor, 25, 35 ; references to 
 
 his Specimens, chaps, iii. and iv. , 
 
 notes passim 
 Sidney, Sir P. , 138-140 
 Sigurd pause in Kingsley, 405 note 
 Simylus, 133 note 
 Smith, Adam, 260, 263-265 
 
 , Professor Gregory, ix note 
 
 , Sydney, 271, 357, 375 note 
 
 , William, Southey on, 286, 287 
 
 Smollett, 260 
 
 Solomon and Saturn, 36 
 
 Soul's Ward, 52 
 
 South, 176, 228, 232-235 
 
 Southey, 83 note, 93 note, 106, 128, 
 
 285-287, 291, 295, 349, 352 
 Spenser, 19 note, 92, 158 
 Sprat, 228 
 Steele, 252 
 Sterne, 260 
 Stevenson, Mr. R. L. , 21, 307 note, 
 
 440, 441, 457 
 Sully, M. de, 84 
 Surrey, 133 
 
 Suspiria de Profundis, 306-319 
 Swift, 239-243, 252, 260, 271, 289, 
 
 290, 440, 447 
 Swinburne, Mr. , 325, 427-435, 439, 
 
 461 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 42, 101, 133, 134,
 
 INDEX 
 
 489 
 
 159, 178-181, 223, 229, 237, 239, 
 
 303, 304, 434 
 Temple, Sir W. , 228, 232, 236-238, 
 
 290, 423 
 
 Tennyson, 42, 88 
 Thackeray, 39, 272, 362, 367, 376, 
 
 382-388, 454 
 Thelwall, 451 note 
 Thorpe, 25, 38 
 Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 
 
 273-275 
 
 Thucydides, 3, 20, 94 note 
 Tillotson, 228, 229, 232 
 Toxophilus, 1 20 
 Traill, H. D., 271, 440 
 Trevisa, John of, 56, 57, 62, 107 
 Trollope, A., 367 
 Tyndale, 59, 60, 116, 123-125, 149 sq. 
 
 Urn Burial, 184-190, 195, 196, 224 
 Urquhart, Sir T., 155 
 Utopia, 122 
 
 Valenciennes, Henri de, 22 note, 109 
 
 Vaughan, Professor, 406 
 
 Villehardouin, 22 note, 54, 107, 109 
 
 Villette, 406-408 
 
 Vision of St. Paul, The, 27 
 
 Vulgate, the, 53, 54, 107, 108, 143 sq. 
 
 Waerferth, Bishop, 38 note 
 Walpole, Horace, 259 
 Walton, Izaak, 215, 216, 236 
 Ward, Dr. A. W. (Master of Peter- 
 house), 171, 259 
 Ward, Ned, 239 note 
 " Wardour Street " language, 19 note, 
 
 54, 435-437 
 Warner, Mr., 63 
 Welldon, Bishop, 156 
 Whibley, Mr. Charles, 129 
 Whitman, 66, 343, 405, App. I. 
 Wilson, John, "Christopher North," 
 
 305, 306, 321-324 
 , Thomas, 115, 118, 220, 221 
 
 Wisdom., the book of, 54, 144 
 Woodford, Samuel, 8, 229 note 
 
 Wooing of Our Lord, The, 51, 52 
 Worcester, W. , 80 
 Wordsworth, 295 and note 
 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, 259 
 Wulfstan, Archbishop, 37, 38 
 
 (Alfred's captain), 24 
 
 Wyatt, 133, 141 
 
 Wyclif, 55, 57-62, 68, 77, 107, 108, 
 122, 149 note 
 
 Yonge, Miss, 436 note 
 Yule, Colonel, 63 
 
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