NATIONAL STYLE 211 



Writers, belonging for the most part to the scholarly classes, 

 began to use their mother tongue according to the rules of 

 Latin syntax. They did not merely transplant a multitude 

 of Latin nouns, adjectives, and verbs with slight terminal 

 alteration into the vocabulary. In so far as they did so they 

 were only continuing the process already at work in the style 

 of the Bible. But they also constructed periodic sentences, 

 and built up paragraphs in the manner of the Roman rheto- 

 ricians. It would be interesting to trace the development of 

 this humanistic use of language through Bacon, Jonson, 

 Burton, Chillingworth, Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy 

 Taylor. These masters of English prose were obeying an 

 instinct somewhat similar to that which moved the poets in 

 their attempt to assimilate English verse rhythms to classical 

 metres. But the language did not lend itself kindly to the 

 periodic structure they affected. What had been done in 

 Latin by means of terminal forms declined nouns and 

 adjectives, inflected verbs, genders those natural artifices 

 of the tongue, which secured lucid and logical arrangement 

 in the most complicated windings of a sentence had now 

 to be attempted by linking together and interconnecting the 

 short phrases which are proper to the genius of English. 

 Consequently, those labyrinthine edifices seem to be compact 

 of loosely welded parts, not wrought into a vitally organic 

 whole. The incoherence and awkwardness of humanistic 

 prose in England reach their climax in some of Milton's 

 cumbrous periods. Sentence, sub-sentence, parenthesis, quali- 

 fying clause, are only kept together by a liberal expenditure 

 of what may be described as verbal hooks and eyes. This 

 passage on Marriage from the ' Doctrine of Divorce ' illus- 

 trates the intricacy of Milton's style, together with its 

 rhetorical sublimity : 



Marriage is a covenant the very being whereof consists in unfeigned 

 love and peace ; and of matrimonial love, no doubt but that was chiefly 

 meant which by the ancient sages was thus parabled : that Love, if he 

 be not twin-born, yet hath a wondrous brother like him, called Anteros, 

 whom while he seeks all about, his chance is to meet with many false 

 and feigning desires, that wander singly up and down in his likeness..; 



