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He wrote praises of her manners and of her person for her tomb. But her epitaph, that does not name her, is in the greatest of English prose. What was favour to him? "I am indifferent . . . I am known . . . I am solitary, and cannot impart it."
The very language in which that literature is clothed was spoken only by the court, by a couple of counties, and at the two universities. Its prose and verse were frankly experimental.
There is no room for doubt that the surpassing interest which fiction, whether in poetry or prose, possesses for most minds, arises mainly from the biographic element which it contains. Homer's 'Iliad' owes its marvellous popularity to the genius which its author displayed in the portrayal of heroic character.
The Peloponnesian war, which terminated in the downfall of Athens, was succeeded by a period of exhaustion and repose. The fine arts were checked in their progress, and poetry degenerated into empty bombast. Yet at this very time prose literature began a new career, which led to its fairest development.
They were always written in beautifully clear and fluent English, and were often decorated with a fine quotation in prose or verse. In substance they were extraordinarily simple, though not childish. For example, he often preached on such practical topics as Gambling, National Education; and the Housing of the Poor, as well as on themes more obviously and directly religious.
The first great masters of the Greek language in prose were the historians, so far as we can judge by the writings that have descended to us, although it is probable that the orators may have shaped the language before them, and given it flexibility and refinement The first great prose writers of Rome were the orators; nor was the Latin language fully developed and polished until Cicero appeared.
For the sake of forming a good natural style, and acquiring command of language, write poetry." Forms of Prose Literature, J.H. Gardiner, Charles Scribner's Sons. Materials and Methods of Fiction, Clayton Hamilton, The Baker and Taylor Co. Principles of Literary Criticism, C.T. Winchester, The Macmillan Co. Short-Story Writing, C.R. Barrett. The Baker and Taylor Co.
But it was his prose I loved, and not his piety. His sympathy with the poor bored me: the road he wanted us to build was tiresome. I could see nothing in poverty that appealed to me, nothing; I shrank away from it as from a degradation of the spirit; but his prose was lyrical and rose on broad wings into the blue.
There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has these fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall.
But here it is the prose philosopher who would meet this dull, stupid, custom-bound public on its own ground. He would assume all its absurdities and contradictions in his own person, and permit men to despise, and marvel, and laugh at them in him without displeasure.
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