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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



a point from which afterward to find their way ; 

 whether they might desire to ascend upward to 

 our anterior literature, or to come downwafd to 

 the literature of yesterday and of the present. 



The six lives cover a period of literary and 

 intellectual movement in which we are all pro- 

 foundly interested. It is the passage of our na- 

 tion to prose and reason ; the passage to a type 

 of thought and expression, modern, European, 

 and which on the whole is ours at the present 

 day, from a type antiquated, peculiar, and which 

 is ours no longer. The period begins with a 

 prose like this of Milton : " They who to states 

 and governors of the commonwealth direct then- 

 speech, high court of Parliament! or, wanting 

 such access in a private condition, write that 

 which they foresee may advance the public good ; 

 I suppose them, if at the beginning of no mean 

 endeavor, not a little altered and moved inwardly 

 in their minds." It ends with a prose like this 

 of Smollett : " My spirit began to accommodate 

 itself to my beggarly fate, and I became so mean 

 as to go down toward Wapping, with an intention 

 to inquire for an old school-fellow, who, I under- 

 stood, had got the command of a small coasting- 

 vessel then in the river, and implore his assist- 

 ance." These are extreme instances ; but they 

 give us no unfaithful notion of the change in our 

 prose between the reigns of Charles I. and of 

 George III. Johnson has recorded his own im- 

 pression of the extent of the change and of its 

 salutariness. Boswell gave him a book to read, 

 written in 1702 by the English chaplain of a reg- 

 iment stationed in Scotland. " It is sad stuff, 

 sir," said Johnson, after reading it ; " miserably 

 written, as books in general then were. There 

 is now an elegance of style universally diffused. 

 No man now writes so ill as Martin's ' Account 

 of the Hebrides ' is written. A man could not 

 write so ill if he should try. Set a merchant's 

 clerk now to write, and he'll do better." 



It seems as if a simple and natural prose were 

 a thing which we might expect to come easy to 

 communities of men, and to come early to them ; 

 but we know from experience that it is not so. 

 Poetry and the poetic form of expression natu- 

 rally precede prose. We see this in ancient 

 Greece. We see prose forming itself there grad- 

 ually and with labor; we see it passing through 

 more than one stage before it attains to thorough 

 propriety and lucidity, long after forms of con- 

 summate adequacy have already been reached and 

 used in poetry. It is a people's growth in practi- 

 cal life and its native turn for developing this life 

 and for making progress in it which awaken the 



desire for a good prose — a prose plain, direct, in- 

 telligible, serviceable. A dead language, the Latin, 

 for a long time furnished the nations of Europe 

 with an instrument of the kind, superior to any 

 which they had yet discovered in their own. But 

 nations such as England and France, called to 

 a great historic life, and with powerful interests 

 and gifts either social or practical, were sure to 

 feel the need of having a sound prose of their own, 

 and to bring such a prose forth. They brought it 

 forth in the seventeenth century; France first, 

 afterward England. 



The Restoration marks the real moment of 

 birth of our modern English prose. Men of lucid 

 and direct mental habit there were, such as 

 Chillingworth, in whom before the Restoration 

 the desire and the commencements of a modern 

 prose show themselves. There were men like 

 Barrow, weighty and powerful, whose mental 

 habit the old prose suited, who continued its 

 forms and locutions after the Restoration. But 

 the hour was come for the new prose, and it 

 grew and prevailed. In Johnson's time its victory 

 had long been assured, and the old style seemed 

 barbarous. The prose writers of the eighteenth 

 century have indeed their mannerisms and phrases 

 which are no longer ours. Johnson says of Mil- 

 ton's blame of the universities for allowing young ' 

 men designed for orders in the Church to act in 

 plays : " This is sufficiently peevish in a man, who, 

 when he mentions his exile from college, relates, 

 with great luxuriance, the compensation which 

 the pleasures of the theatre afford him. Plays 

 were therefore only criminal when they were acted 

 by academics." We should nowadays not say 

 peevish here, nor luxuriance nor academics. Yet 

 the style is ours by its organism, if not by its 

 phrasing. It is by its organism — en organism 

 opposed to length and involvement, and enabling 

 us to be clear, plain, and short — that English 

 style after the Restoration breaks with the style 

 of the times preceding it, finds the true law of 

 prose, and becomes modern ; becomes, in spite 

 of superficial differences, the style of our own 

 day. 



Burnet has pointed out how we are under 

 obligations in this matter to Charles II., whom 

 Johnson described as " the last King of England 

 who was a man of parts." A King of England 

 by no meAns fulfills his whole duty by being a 

 man of parts, or by loving and encouraging art, 

 science, and literature. Yet the artist and the 

 student of the natural sciences will always feel a 

 kindness toward the two Charleses for their in- 

 terest in art and science ; and modern letters, 



