4 L. A. Sherman, 



It is to an historical outline of this development of English 

 prose that the present pages are devoted. As has been said 

 already, there is no regular or consistent approach to the 

 modern sentence-form, each author ranging and ranking not 

 according to the sense and fashion of his age so much as 

 according to the quickness of his own instinct of sentence- 

 propriety. Chaucer, for instance, is far in advance of any 

 writer of reputation — except Bacon — until late in the seven- 

 teenth century, surpassing Dryden in brevity even then ; 

 while Swift and Bunyan rank almost with the moderns. 



As introductory to the following statistics of sentence- 

 aggregates in representative authors, it should be said that, 

 though in general clauses have been taken just as they were 

 left by their authors, it has yet been necessary in some 

 instances to amend their form. In some of the earlier writers 

 it not infrequently happens that we are stopped by a period 

 before the predicate is reached. Not infrequently also two 

 independent sentences will appear as if parts of one. But 

 only in such cases as these where the writer defeats his own 

 purpose of pretending to have a meaning, that any hand has 

 been laid upon the texts ; and this with no author after 

 Sidney. 



Passing over the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (which, not 

 composed in English, borrows its sentence-forms from the 

 French or perhaps the Latin original) we begin our examina- 

 tion of English prose with Chaucer. From his superior lite- 

 rary genius and his general good sense it perhaps might have 

 been predicted that he would show the extraordinarily low 

 averages which we find. In the Tale of Melibeus the num- 

 ber of words in the first fifty sentences is 2572 ; in the next 

 fifty, 2536; in the next fifty, 2199; and in the next, 2099. 

 But now in the next fifty sentences the sum rises to 2640, 

 and the next stops at 2338, while of the remaining forty the 

 sum is 2345. Sum total of the words in Melibeus, 16,659; 

 of sentences, 340. Average of words per sentence in this 

 Tale, 48IH. 



But in the Persouns Tale we encounter very different 



122 



