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Univ., he studied law on the Continent, but succeeding in 1610 to his paternal estate of Hawthornden, he devoted himself to poetry. His finest poem, Forth Feasting , is addressed to James VI. on his revisiting Scotland. D. was also a prose-writer, and composed a History of the Five Jameses, Kings of Scotland from 1423-1524, and The Cypress Grove, a meditation on death.
In the first place "literary form" in the fifteenth century was exceedingly likely to be bad literary form, and we are much better off without it. Unless Sir Thomas Malory had happened to be chaplain at Oxnead, or Sir John Fortescue had occupied there something like the position of Mr. Tulkinghorn in Bleak House, we should not have got much "literature" from any known prose-writer of the period.
XII. By way of concluding, we shall proceed to give our classical prose-writer the promised examples of his style which we have collected. Indeed, we allow him too much when we grant him one eye; but we do this willingly, because Strauss does not write so badly as the most infamous of all corrupters of German the Hegelians and their crippled offspring.
For he is the eldest of the gods, which is an honour to him; and a proof of his claim to this honour is, that of his parents there is no memorial; neither poet nor prose-writer has ever affirmed that he had any. As Hesiod says: 'First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth, The everlasting seat of all that is, And Love.
Then we spoke of Hazlitt, whom he ranked very high as a prose-writer; and when I quoted a fine passage from Hazlitt's essay on Jeremy Taylor, he seemed pleased at my remembrance of it. He asked about Inman, the American artist, who had painted his portrait, having been sent on a special mission to Rydal by Professor Henry Reed of Philadelphia, to procure the likeness.
On the other hand, "when the majority of people begin to read, poetry loses its hold upon the public, and the prose-writer, who composes with greater simplicity and less labor, at last obtains an advantage over his rival the poet, who is put into competition with all the older poets now circulating among a more learned public."
In Defoe, where the record of imaginary fact was carried on with so much ingenuity and knowledge, the qualities we have just mentioned are notably absent; nor can it be said that we find them in any prose-writer of fiction earlier than Richardson, except in some very slight and imperfect degree in Aphra Behn, especially in her Rousseauish novel of Oroonoko.
It is plain, clear, pointed, familiar, perfectly modern in its texture, but with a grave and sparkling admixture of archaisms in its ornaments and occasional phraseology. He is the best and most natural prose-writer of any poet of the day; we mean that he is far better than Lord Byron, Mr. Wordsworth, or Mr. Coleridge, for instance.
Bryant chose to give it, and that his poetry has overshadowed everything else that he did. Few believe that a poet can write well in prose, and those who do, prefer his poetry to his prose. The preference is a just one, but it proves nothing, for literary history shows that a good poet is always a good prose-writer. Mr.
But the greatest prose-writer of the age devoted himself neither to history nor to criticism though his works are impregnated with the spirit of both but to Fiction. In his novels, FLAUBERT finally accomplished what Balzac had spasmodically begun the separation of the art of fiction from the unreality, the exaggeration, and the rhetoric of the Romantic School.
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