THE ART OF STYLE 229 



forms of expression consecrated to books, and by long-tailed words in 

 osity and ation, either because writers felt that already, in this one act 

 of preference shown to the artificial vocabulary, they had done enough 

 to establish a differential character of regular composition, and on that 

 consideration thought themselves entitled to neglect the combination of 

 their words into sentences or periods ; or because there is a real natural 

 sympathy between the Latin phraseology and a Latin structure of 

 sentence ; certain it is and remarkable, that our popular style in the 

 common limited sense of arrangement applied to words or the syntax of 

 sentences, has laboured with two faults that might have been thought 

 incompatible ; it has been artificial, by artifices peculiarly adapted to the 

 powers of the Latin language, and yet at the very same time careless and 

 clisordinate. 



Every artist in style ought to be able to construct a period 

 like this. But he should be cautious in the exercise of his 

 power, reserving it for solemn and exceptional occasions. De 

 Quincey wrote before the days of Macaulay, the Saturday 

 Review, and Mr. Matthew Arnold. Whatever may be urged 

 against our average prose style now, it can no longer be called 

 'tumid and tumultuary.' From neither a good nor a bad 

 author of the present time would it be easy to extract a 

 sentence with as many inversions, parentheses, suspensions, 

 as many resounding Latin words, and an apodosis so long 

 suspended, as mark the example I have just quoted. Short 

 propositions and easy writing have become fashionable. 

 Simplicity of structure is even ostentatiously paraded. 



Ill 



Among means toward the acquisition of pure style, the 

 most important is ' industrious and select reading.' 



When Ben Jonson, in the Poetaster, administered his purge 

 to Marston, he bade that crabbed writer break his fast upon 

 'old Cato's principles,' then 'taste a piece of Terence, suck 

 his phrase instead of liquorice.' Plautus and Ennius among 

 the Romans were to be shunned as meat too crude for queasy 

 stomachs. So was Lycophron among the Greeks. But 

 Callimachus, Theocritus, and ' high Homer ' might be read 

 with profit. In the sixteenth century these were needful 



