74 LITEKAEY VALUES 



may God so keep me." Under pressure, the peasant 

 mind, and indeed all other minds, are, at times, ca- 

 pable of these things. But usually the charm of 

 rustic speech is in its plainness and simplicity, like 

 that of other rural things, a bridge, a woodshed, a 

 well-sweep, a log house, — no thought of style, 

 thought of service only. But the beauty of what 

 may be called the architectural style of the great 

 prose masters, — Gibbon, Burke, Browne, Hooker, 

 De Quincey, — like the beauty of a Greek temple or 

 a Gothic cathedral, is quite another matter. What 

 both have in common is the beauty of sincerity and 

 reality. 



The vernacular style of writers of the seventeenth 

 century, like Walton, Fuller, Baxter, Jonson, is more 

 in keeping with the taste of to-day than the rhetori- 

 cal and highly wrought style of certain of the eigh- 

 teenth and early nineteenth century writers. 



Hence, when we ascribe style to simple, homely 

 things, or to speech, we mean something quite dif- 

 ferent from style when applied to the great composi- 

 tions either in literature, music, or architecture. 



Milton could plan and build the lofty rhyme and 

 attain beauty ; Wordsworth attains beauty by his sin- 

 cerity and simplicity, and his fervent love of rural 

 things. He has not style in the Miltonic sense. 

 One has classic beauty, the other, natural or naive 

 beauty. The monumental works of the ancients 

 were planned and wrought like their architecture, 

 and have a beauty that rivals nature. Shakespeare 

 larely attains anything like classic beauty, and has 



