On the Sentence-Length in E)iglisJi Prose. ii 



in scarf and epaulette, and marching witli merry music to the 

 place of punishment. The soldier has a sadder work than 

 the hangman. His office is not to despatch occasionally a 

 single criminal ; he goes to the slaughter of thousands as free 

 from crime as himself. The sword is worn as an ornament ; 

 and yet its use is to pierce the heart of a fellow-creature. As 

 well might the butcher parade before us his knife, or the 

 executioner his axe or halter. Allow war to be necessary, 

 still it is a horrible necessity, a work to fill a good man with 

 anguish of spirit. Shall it be turned into an occasion of 

 pomp and merriment.-'"^ In the paper entitled Gcnins : 

 Father Taylor, from which the former passage is cited, we 

 compute for Bartol the average of 15.97 words per sentence. 



But it will be evident that the evolution of sentential 

 economy since Hooker has not proceeded so much in the 

 way of shortening simple sentences — where natural limita- 

 tions must be quickly reached — as in the decrease of modi- 

 fying clauses. The decline in the use of complex (or com- 

 pound) sentences is thus illustrated. In the first book of 

 Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity there are 720 sent- 

 ences, but only 93 are uninvolved : per cent of simple 

 sentences, 13. In Macaulay there are properly 386 simple 

 out of every 949 : per cent of simple, 41. In Channing the 

 ratio is 281 to 704, and the per cent, 40. In Emerson the 

 per cent is 46; in Bartol, 52. Moreover in Bartol there are 

 only 65 semicolon clauses in 459 periods, and only five 

 sentences occur in which the semicolon is used twice. But 

 in Hooker as many as six semicolons may upon occasion be 

 found in a single sentence. 



There is also a further element in the movement towards 

 sentential simplification, — the tendency to think and to cast 

 the sentence in direct, pictorial forms rather than — as 

 once — in symbolic or abstract ; but the statistics of this 

 change are too incomplete to quote. Moreover, to avoid 

 complication, no consistent attempt has yet been made to 



1 Lecture on War (Works, vol. v.), pp. 144, 145. 

 129 



