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GIBBON betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in his "Essay on Literature," or his attempted "History of Switzerland," JOHNSON'S cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler simplicity of his earliest years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they afterwards excelled in.

A man of a very different order from any of these we have just mentioned, but who has made a reputation of his own in literature as well as in politics, closed his career within the same reign. We have already spoken in this volume of William Cobbett's command of simple, strong English, which made his prose style hardly inferior to that of Swift himself.

Kennedy was working when Wren knocked at his door. He had not much time to spare on a bounds-breaking fag; and his manner was curt. "I saw you going into Rose's, in the High Street, this afternoon, Wren," he said, looking up from his Greek prose. "I didn't give you leave. Come up here after prayers tonight. Shut the door." Wren went down to consult Walton again.

This collection of prose arguments and vituperations and versified epigrams, all larded and loaded with quotations from all the Latin and Greek authors whom Alfieri was busy spelling out, does certainly contain many things which, old as they are, strike even us with the force of living contempt and indignation.

It may well be doubted though he felt and expressed not merely in splendid passages of prose and verse for public perusal, but in private letters quite towards the close of his life, that passionate attachment which Oxford more than any other place of the kind inspires whether he would have been long at home there as a resident.

A dainty bit in Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's prose: "The uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde, which is the end of speech."

What wars I have seen have taken place in spots isolated and inaccessible, far from the haunts of men. By day you followed the fight and tried to find the censor, and at night you sat on a cracker-box and by the light of a candle struggled to keep awake and to write deathless prose. In Belgium it was not like that.

It is beautiful, first of all, in the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble, sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures, yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and instinctive beneath all its sedulous art.

Aside from their subjects, both works are models of the new prose, direct, simple, convincing, for which Dryden and the Royal Society labored. They are known to every student of philosophy, but are seldom included in a work of literature.

Before they are acquainted with the true difference between verse and prose, before they are prepared to decide upon the poetical merit of Lily and Virgil, they are called upon to write Latin verse themselves. In the same manner some of their first prose compositions are in a dead language.