20 Prosser Hall Frye 



it is in such terms that he speaks a httle later of the intermittent 

 efforts of genius; and the phrasing is presageful of the new or- 

 der — an order, however, which it was reserved for Burke to estab- 

 hsh. And here at last we have the high-water mark of English 

 prose — a prose which is distinct from talk and deeper without 

 being turgid or cumbersome, which is dignified and imposing, and 

 yet flexible and business-like. Faults it has, for English prose 

 always has had and always will have great faults. It is bound to 

 be in extremes of one kind or another; if it is not lacking in spirit, 

 it is subject to coups de tete. But at its best Burke's is perhaps 

 the best on the w^hole that we have in the way of prose as an in- 

 strument of thought. It unites the greatest number of powers 

 with the smallest number of failings of any prose in the language. 

 I do not mean to say that Addison's and Swift's are not sometimes 

 better in some respects ; but neither of them have the compass of 

 Burke's. Sir Thomas Browne's and DeOuincey's and Ruskin's 

 may have pushed farther in some directions ; but they have done 

 so at the expense of their integrity. In short, while this or that 

 author may have excelled or surpassed Burke, acting independ- 

 ently or upon his suggestion, yet he does at least represent in 

 himself the most that prose can do and still remain prose. 



IV 



While the canon of propriety and correctness, therefore, is not 

 necessarily inimical to poetry, the danger for Dryden and his suc- 

 cessors evidently lay in the extremity to which they were likely to 

 push it in the heat of their resentment against what they regarded 

 as the barbaric extravagances of their predecessors. At the same 

 time, however, that, in insisting upon the salutary virtues of mod- 

 eration and restraint, they would seem to be in equal danger with 

 romanticism of confounding poetry and prose and of reducing all 

 literature, though inversely, to a single standard, the standard of 

 prose, yet as a matter of fact, like every classical coterie, they 

 made a very sharp distinction, perhaps the sharpest that has ever 

 been made in English, between the two — or at least between prose 

 and verse. To be sure, the differentia are not very easy to define 



