condemned as second-rate, a remarkable fulness and sustained richness which endear it to specialists. If it be compared, for instance, with the real Augustan age in Rome, or with the Spanish period of literary supremacy, it may claim to hold its own against these rivals in spite of their superior rank, because of its more copious interest. If it has neither a Horace nor a Calderon, it has a great extent and variety of writers just below these in merit, and far more numerous than what Rome or Spain can show during those blossoming periods. It is, moreover, fertile at far more points than either of these schools. This sustained and variegated success, at a comparatively low level of effort, strikes one as characteristic of an age more remarkable for persistent vitality than for rapid and brilliant growth. The Elizabethan vivida vis is absent, the Georgian glow has not yet dawned; but there is a suffused prosaic light of intelligence, of cultivated form, over the whole picture; and during the first half of the period, at least, this is bright enough to be very attractive. Perhaps, in closing, the distinguishing mark of eighteenthcentury literature may be indicated as its mastery of prose as a vehicle for general thought. It is customary to note the Restoration as marking the point where English prose took a modern form. This is true, but there was nevertheless much left to reform in the practice of authors. At the close of the reign of Charles II., we find the most accomplished prose-writer of the age still encumbering himself in the toils of such sentences as this: "That which is not pleasant to me, may be to others who judge better, and to prevent an accusation from my enemies, I am sometimes ready to imagine that my disgust of low comedy proceeds not so much from my judgment as from my temper, which is the reason why I so seldom write it, and that when I succeed in it, I mean so far as to please the audience, yet I am nothing satisfied with what I have done, but am often vexed to hear the people laugh and clap, as they perpetually do, where I intended them no jest, while they let pass the better things, without taking notice of them." A hundred years later, such a sentence had become an impossibility. It is not merely that we should search Burke or Robertson in vain, at their weariest moments, for such a flaccid chain of clauses, but that the ordinary newspaper-man, the reporter or inventor of last night's speeches, would no longer endure this clumsy form, this separation of the noun from its verb, and the pronoun from its noun. It was the work of the period which we roughly describe as the eighteenth century to reform and regulate ordinary writing. It found English prose antiquated, amorphous, without a standard of form; it left it a finished thing, the completed body for which subsequent ages could do no more than weave successive robes of ornament and fashion. BIBLIOGRAPHY Addison, JOSEPH, vols. i.-iv., Oxford, 1830. New edition, 1770. Anstey, C., Poetical Works. Ed. Anstey, 1808. Arbuthnot, John. [Not yet edited.] Armstrong, John. In Chalmers's English Poets, vol. xvi. Barrow, Isaac, vols. i.-viii. Theological Works, Oxford, 1830. Ed. Mallet, 5 vols., 1754. 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