of imbecile contempt, somehow slinks away abashed after the first verse at the "Church-porch :" "Thou whose sweet youth and early hopes enhance Rhyme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure: And that fine gentleman, Taste, having relieved us of his sweetly-scented presence, redolent with the "balm of a thousand flowers," let us, in closing, quote one of the profoundest utterances of the Elizabethan age, George Herbert's lines on Man: But man hath caught and kept it, as his prey. His eyes dismount the highest starre: He is in little all the sphere. Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they Finde their acquaintance there. "The starres have us to bed; Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws: Musick and light attend our head. All things unto our flesh are kinde "More servants wait on Man Than he'll take notice of; in every path He treads down that which doth befriend him O mightie love! Man is one world, and hath "Since then, my God, thou hast So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it, That it may dwell with thee at last! Till then afford us so much wit, That as the world serves us we may serve thee, 11* SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. HE characteristic of a good prose style is, tha THE while it mirrors or embodies the mind that uses it, it also gives pleasure in itself. The quality which decides on its fulfilment of these conditions is commonly called taste. Though taste is properly under law, and should, if pressed, give reasons for its decisions, many of its most authoritative judgments come directly from its instinct or insight, without regard to rules. Indeed, a fine feeling of the beauty, melody, fitness, and vitality of words is often wanting in men who are dexterous in the application of the principles of style; and some of the most philosophic treatises on æsthetics betray a lack of that deep internal sense which directly perceives the objects and qualities whose validity it is the office of the understanding laboriously to demon strate. But whether we judge of style by our perceptions or by principles, we all feel that there is a distinction between persons who write books and writers whose books belong to literature. There is something in the mere wording of a description of a triviality of dress or manner, by Addison or Steele, which gives greater mental delight than the description of a campaign or a revolution by Alison. The principle that style is thus a vital element in the expression of thought and emotion, that it not only measures the quality and quantity of the mind it conveys, but has a charm in itself, makes the task of an historian of literature less difficult than it at first appears. Among the prose-writers of the age of Elizabeth we do not, accordingly, include all who wrote in prose, but those in whom prose composition was laboring to fulfil the conditions of art. In many cases this endeavor resulted in the substitution of artifice for art; and the bond which connects the invisible thought with the visible word, and through which the word is sur charged with the life of the thought, being thus severed, the effect was to produce a factitious dignity, sweetness, and elegance by mental sleight of hand and tricks of modulation and antithesis. In one of the earliest prose-writers of the reign of Elizabeth, John Lyly, we perceive how easily the demand in the cultivated classes for what is fine in diction may degenerate into admiration of what is superfine, how elegant imbecility may pass itself off for elegance, and how hypocrisy and grimace may become a fashion in that high society which constitutes itself the arbiter of taste. Lyly, a scholar of some beauty, and more ingenuity, of fancy, was especially fitted to corrupt a language whose rude masculine vigor was beginning to be softened into harmony and elegance; for he was one of those effeminate spirits whose felicity it is to be born affected, and who can violate general nature without doing injustice to their own. The court of Elizabeth, full of highly educated men and women, was greatly pleased with the fopperies of diction and sentiment, the dainty verbal confectionery, of his so-called classic plays, and seems to have been entirely carried away by his prose romance of Euphues and his England, first published in 1579. In this persons of fashion might congratulate themselves that they could find a language which was not spoken by the vulgar. The nation, Sir Henry Blunt tells us, was in debt to him for a new English which he taught it; "all our ladies were his scholars"; and that beauty in court was disregarded "who could not parley Euphuism, that is to say, who was unable to converse in that pure and reformed English." Those who have studied the jargon of Holofernes in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, of Fastidious Brisk in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour, and, later still, of Sir Piercie Shafton, in Scott's novel of The Monastery, can form some idea of this "pure and reformed English," the peculiarities |