THE authors represented in this volume begin with men whose life belonged in part to the reign of Elizabeth; they end with those who had reached manhood before the close of the Commonwealth. The period was a critical one for English prose. The glory and the daring, the marvellous creative power of the Elizabethan age-these were gone, and our literature was about to pass through a severe ordeal. The rich harvest which the Elizabethans had gathered was drawn from two sources: Something had been inherited from the native stock, which could trace its origin back to ages long before that of Chaucer. There Lad been no slight intermixture therein of the formal and unnatural — of the pedagogic, and even of the pedantic. But it had its

excellences as well. It saved itself by its simplicity and directness; by its marvellous power of using for literary purposes the language of everyday life; above all, by its faculty of assimilating the romantic spirit, which set it free from the artificialities of the homily, and gave to it the quickening force of artistic effort. The native stock, then, was barren neither in promise nor in performance when there came to it the breath of a new life partly stimulating, partly controlling, from the Classical and Romance literatures. It was the glory of the Elizabethans to absorb these without losing what was best and most characteristic in the native stock. It was through this added wealth that they achieved their greatness. But their achievements did not belong, in any large part, to the domain of prose. What they did in that domain was, at the best, to show what were the possibilities of English prose. We have books, indeed, both before the age of Elizabeth,

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and others produced in that age, which show a charm of diction that later ages may strive in vain to reproduce. But such books belong to no school; they conform to no set mode; they haunt us with a reminiscence of the poetical romance, and contain no germ that can develop into a full tree, much less spread into a forest. It would be possible to speculate how the defects might have been supplied, how the secret might have been solved, and a standard for prose fixed as securely as for poetry. All that was hardest of attainment it would seem that the Elizabethans had attained. What they wanted we might judge was but a trick of art. But whether they cared not for the achievement, or the achievement was impossible, they reached to no such perfection, and left no such memory of their sway, in prose as in poetry. The Elizabethan prose did, indeed, in some high examples, show that it had not forgotten the simplicity, the directness, the wealth of romance, and that it was ready also to claim its inheritance in a larger language, enriched by the classics; but for the most part these two streams run apart and do not mingle, and even .n such a detail as the choice of words, the Elizabethans often ndicate their debt to each rather by alcopious variation of their vocabulary, by a deliberate repetition of the same word in its native and in its classical dress, than by any power of moulding a new and richer language, and a more lissome style, out of the louble storehouses at their disposal. The poets and the dramaists of the age of Elizabeth completed their work quickly, and attained, by leaps and bounds, to the consummate perfection of heir diction. But prose style grows more slowly; and its growth s hindered rather than quickened by the very variety of its subect. Poetry is more apt to reflect the forms of monarchy; it as its set usages, its prescribed modes, its court terms; and even e who can do but little towards extending its sway, generally ecognises and obeys its current fashions. But prose, on the other hand, governs only as a republic. Each individual writer would fain interpret its dictates after his own fashion. According to what he has to say, according to the story he has to tell, the argument he has to support, the theory he has to develop, his prose style must vary. More than half of those who write scarcely think of the form in which they cast their story or their thoughts. It is only when they have passed their apprenticeship in the art that they become conscious of the rules, and recognise with submission how few those are, and how con