TEE SHERMAN PRINCIPLE IN RHETORIC. 539 



The above list includes romance, drama, allegory, criticism, biog- 

 raphy, description, science and correspondence, but with the exception 

 of 'Faust' and 'Eeinecke Fuchs' the works are all in prose, so that the 

 fact of variation is not disturbed even if we consider prose literature 

 alone. There can be little doubt that a complete examination of 

 Goethe's writings would furnish a chain of sentence-lengths varying 

 by almost insensible gradations from five to thirty-five or forty words 

 per sentence. 



The conclusion from which there seems to be no escape is that the 

 average sentence-length used by an author depends upon at least two 

 factors, one of which is the author's sentence sense, the other the par- 

 ticular form of composition into which his thought is cast. 



What is true of sentence-length holds equally true of predication 

 averages and simple sentence percentages. Other things being equal, 

 the shorter sentences will naturally contain the fewer predications, and 

 a larger per cent, of simple sentences, the limits being single predica- 

 tions, on the one hand, and none but simple sentences, on the other. 

 This general relation is fully made good by the facts. Macaulay, in 

 his 'History of England,' uses 23.3 words per sentence and 2.3 finite 

 verbs, which is almost exactly ten words to one verb. Nearly the same 

 ratio obtains in More's 'Life of Eichard III.' with an average of 3.65 

 verbs out of 36.5 words per sentence; Hooker's 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' 

 with an average of 4.12 verbs and 40.9 words per sentence; Sidney's 

 'Defense of Poesie,' 3.98 verbs and 39.3 words per sentence; and Chan- 

 ning's 'Self-Culture' employs 2.57 verbs out of a total of 25.9 words 

 per sentence. However, in very short sentences there is a tendency to 

 diminish and in very long sentences to increase the ratio of the total 

 number of words to the number of verbs per sentence. Thus Emerson 

 in his 'Divinity School Address' uses 2.14 verbs and 18.0 words per 

 sentence, while Hakluyt in the 'Voyages of the English Nation to 

 America' uses but 4.44 verbs out of an average of 56.8 words per 

 sentence. 



A more striking though less obvious relation exists between predica- 

 tion averages and simple sentence percentages, which is all the more sur- 

 prising, inasmuch as simple sentence percentages are the least constant 

 of the sentence proportions thus far examined. For instance, Lyly's 

 'Euphues' furnishes for five consecutive hundreds 26, 14, 20, 15 and 8 

 simple sentences respectively. De Quincey's 'Opium-Eater' yields the 

 nimibers 10, 19, 15, 7 and 21 for consecutive hundreds, and Macaulay 

 in his ' History of England ' gives simple sentence percentages as widely 

 divergent as 41 and 27, though each average is based upon 500 consec- 

 utive sentences. These are extreme cases, but even the average variation 

 is high. An examination of fifty authors shows that the simple sen- 

 tence percentages based upon an examination of 400 sentences, differs 



