Development of Fonn in Literature. 23 



Here was evidence in plenty of a systematic decrease in 

 sentence length and weight: That the principle at work was 

 something more than economy of effort in sentence-making 

 seemed clear. The goal of the development was the every- 

 day oral sentence structure. On reaching that the decrease 

 in predication and sentence weight would doubtless cease. 

 Here then was apparently the explanation of the mystery 

 found in Macaulay's style as exhibited on p. 18. The short 

 analytic sentences were of the conversational kind ; the long 

 counterbalancing periods were of the- book sort, that had 

 made our earlier prosaists so hard to read. The real inter- 

 pretation of the results thus far might be summarized in the 

 observation that the oral sentence-sense was fast prevailing 

 over the literary sentence form. Proof of this was best 

 exhibited by gathering together periods of the same length 

 in the authors examined. The change from De Quincey to 

 Channing, for instance, is exhibited in the diagrams, on the 

 page opposite, of their respective summaries from pp. 3 

 and 6, 7. 



The figures at the side of these and following diagrams 

 indicate the number of times sentences of a given length 

 occur ; those at the bottom of the plates the number of 

 words in sentences. The exhibit from Channing covers the 

 750 periods of Self-culture, except two, one of 187 words and 

 one of 109, the former of which could not be shown upon a 

 practicable scale. The curve of De Quincey includes, in 

 addition to the 500 periods exhibited on page 3, the next 

 200, for fair comparison with authors following. From the 

 latter diagram eight periods — of 102, 105, 141, no, 114, 

 125, 176, 114 words respectively — have been perforce ex- 

 cluded. 



In marked contrast with the preceding we may compare 

 the following curves respectively from Macaulay and Emer- 

 son. These show their sentence length of maximum fre- 

 quency as determined from the periods given on pp. 4, 5 and 

 8, 9. Of sentences containing more than seventy words, ten 

 are here omitted from Macaulay, and seven from Emerson. 



359 



