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Among the foremost of these I might mention the present poet-laureate and some of his friends. The prose-writers on that side of the question Mr. Godwin, Mr. They make bad philosophers and worse politicians. They live, for the most part, in an ideal world of their own; and it would perhaps be as well if they were confined to it.
Holmes enjoys, as one of the most popular poets and prose-writers of the day, has made the public overlook the fact that literature has been the recreation of a life of which medical science has been the business. By far the larger portion of his time, for the last thirty years, has been devoted to his profession.
Many of the fragments deal with the literary controversies of the time, going down even to the minutiae of spelling and grammar; many more show the beginnings of that translation into the language of common life of the precepts of the Greek schools, which was consummated for the world by the poets and prose-writers of the following century.
But the real intellectual and moral manliness of Webster underlies all his great orations and speeches, even those where the animating life which gives them the power to persuade, convince, and uplift the reader's mind, seems to be altogether impersonal; and this plain force of manhood, this sturdy grapple with every question that comes before his understanding for settlement, leads him contemptuously to reject all the meretricious aids and ornaments of mere rhetoric, and is prominent, among the many exceptional qualities of his large nature, which have given him a high position among the prose-writers of his country as a consummate master of English style.
Earlier prose-writers Joinville, Froissart, Rabelais, Montaigne had been in turns charming, or picturesque, or delicate, or overflowing with vitality; but none had struck upon the really characteristically French note. They lacked form, and those fine qualities of strength and clarity which form alone can give.
During the later years of Elizabeth he built up in these still retreats the stately fabric of his "Ecclesiastical Polity." The largeness of temper which marked all the nobler minds of his day, the philosophic breadth which is seen as clearly in Shakspere as in Bacon, was united in Hooker with a grandeur and stateliness of style which raised him to the highest rank among English prose-writers.
It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and just of French prose-writers, who says that we must recognize at last that, "failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only talk of ourselves." This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules of literary criticism.
As a king's adviser, Commynes would have been as much in place at the side of Louis XIV. as at that of Louis XI.; as a writer, he, in the fifteenth century, often made history and politics speak a language which the seventeenth century would not have disowned. Let us pass from the prose-writers of the middle ages to their poets.
For, quite apart from his philosophical pretensions, he claims recognition as a great writer; he is, indeed, one of the best of the few really excellent prose-writers of whom Germany can boast.
Its exploitation began early enough to be noticed by Herodotus, the oldest of Greek prose-writers. 'The natives, when they see the smoke, come down to the shore, and, laying out to view so much gold as they think the worth of the wares, withdraw themselves afar. The Carthaginians upon this come ashore and look.
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