Oil the Senteucc-Leugth in English Prose. 7 



We now pass to the modern age. Of course, thanks to 

 the conventionalizing spirit of the eighteenth century, we 

 find there is now a fashion in sentences as well as in other 

 things, and no well-advised reader — not to say writer — but is 

 conscious of its demands. Perhaps De Ouincey may be taken 

 as the best connecting name. For he is a professional and 

 writes ex cathedra like those of the stately generation before 

 him, yet is filled to the full with the spirit of the new century. 

 He writes a somewhat long sentence, and at first seems in- 

 sensible to the instinct of form. But if we examine his style 

 closely we soon discover there is great economy of predica- 

 tion, and of a sort very different from Bacon's. How would 

 Hooker, or Dryden, or even Bunyan have managed such 

 sentences as these.-' "To intercept the evil whilst yet in 

 elementary stages of formation, was the true policy; whereas 

 I in my blindness sought only for some mitigation to the evil 

 when already formed, and past all reach of interception." — 

 "With a government capable of frauds like these, and a 

 people (at least in the mandarin class) trained through cen- 

 turies to a conformity of temper with their government, we 

 shall find, in the event of any more extended intercourse with 

 China, the greatest difficulty in maintaining the first equations 

 of rank and privilege." De Quincey is evidently obeying an 

 impulse to husband his verbs and concentrate his reader's 

 attention upon the principal predication. But he is in no 

 wise burdened with the sense of obligation to write short and 

 crisp and ringing sentences. He is in reality behind his age, 

 hence cannot catch its spirit or be its leader. The task of 

 materializing and interpreting the new English rhetorical 

 impulse was to fall to the lot of a contemporary and every 

 way equal genius. De Ouincey's sentence-length as exhibited 

 in the first thousand sentences of the Opium Eater is 32.28. 



Who then is the true nineteenth-century leader to whom 

 De Ouincey gives place '^. A search for the sentence-mini- 

 mum among the literature-makers of the day reveals him. 

 It is in the style of Lord Macaulay that the new Rhetoric 

 finds its interpretation and example. Hitherto had the rhe- 



