tury Sir Walter Ralegh of the sixteenth, the age of Elizabeth; Sir Thomas Browne of the seventeenth, -the age of the Stuarts; Henry Fielding of the eighteenth, the age of the Georges; Lord Macaulay of the nineteenth, the age of Victoria.

From Ralegh I take his famous apostrophe to Death, which closes the great" History of the World," -the book which busied his thirteen years of imprisonment in the Tower of London:

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"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet."

Long we find it, and very loose, in spite of its surging cadences.

From Sir Thomas Browne I take the famous sentence from his "Urn-Burial" which was so dear to De Quincey

"Now, since these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard underground, and thin walls of clay, outworn all the strong and spacious buildings above it, and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests, what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his relics, or might not gladly say, Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim?"

Still long, but no longer loose, this sentence. Elaborately, carefully, artificially periodic; modelled, indeed, on inflected Latin.

From Fielding I take, even more at random, a bit of "Tom Jones":

"Now, there is no one circumstance in which the distempers of the mind bear a more exact analogy to those which are called bodily, than in the aptness which both have to a relapse. This is plain in the violent diseases of ambition and avarice. I have known ambition, when cured at court by frequent disappointments (which are the only physic for it), to break out again in a contest for foreman of the grand jury at an assizes, and have heard of a man who had so far conquered avarice as to give away many a sixpence, that comforted himself at last on his deathbed, by making a crafty and advantageous bargain concerning his ensuing funeral with an undertaker who had married his only child."

The first two sentences here are much shorter. Written English has come a great deal nearer spoken. Considering the idiomatic freedom of the style, it proves on examination surprisingly periodic; but Fielding's periodicity is nothing like so palpably artificial as Sir Thomas Browne's.

From Macaulay I take, much at random too, a few sentences from his essay on Warren Hastings:

"With all his faults and they were neither few nor small only one cemetery was worthy to contain his remains. In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the Great

Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious accused should have mingled with the dust of the illustrious accusers. This was not to be. Yet the place of interment was not ill chosen. Behind the chancel of the parish church of Daylesford, in earth which already held the bones of many chiefs of the house of Hastings, was laid the coffin of the greatest man who has ever borne that ancient and widely extended name."

Short sentences and long we find here, deliberately intermixed. Periodic, every one of them. Artificial, if you please: the nineteenth century is nothing if not self-conscious. But the free periodicity of Macaulay, frankly recognizing the limits of a language where the order of words chiefly determines the relation of thoughts, is a wonderfully different thing from the half-Latin periodicity of two centuries before.

Of course, these few examples indicate the development of style in a very rough way. They prove nothing, unless very careful and detailed study prove them typical. Personally, I incline to believe that it would. But putting that question aside, these examples certainly show how varied the effects are which can be produced within the limits of periodic sentences alone, and how far from modern a style must be whose periodicity is laboriously artificial. They show too, with much distinctness, another trait in the composition of sentences which is worth keeping in mind. In each

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of the four extracts the sentences are balanced. balance of Ralegh's clauses is very obvious and simple,- as obvious as that of the Psalms. In the passage from Sir Thomas Browne is a clause whose balance is to me the most exquisite I have found in the language to see just what is meant by balance, then, we cannot do better than study it for a moment in detail:

“Quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests."

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Not only every significant word in this clause has one to balance it; but the main consonantal sounds of each balancing pair are identical, and yet so subtilely varied that though the exquisite art of the phrase is not exquisite enough to seem quite artless, few would perceive exactly in what the artifice consists. Quietly balances conquests; rested balances three; drums balances tramplings. An obviously balanced style Dr. Johnson's is notoriously the most so in our classical literature has the fatal fault of aggressive artificiality. A style which neglects balance is often, in effect, still worse. Take this sentence, for example, from some newspaper: "As distinctly as W. Renshaw is at the head of the men, so is Miss Maud Watson the premier lady player." What makes this so vile is not so much, I think, the barbarous impropriety of the last clause, as its utter and needless dissimilarity to the first. In brief, I am accustomed to urge pupils to make style as balanced as idiomatic freedom will allow.

I have now discussed, as far as time will permit, the first two phases of the sentence which I proposed at the beginning of this chapter: the danger of offending in composition against the paramount authority of good use, and some of the different effects which within the limits of good use may be produced by sentences of different kinds. Our business now is to turn to the principles of composition, and to inquire how far good use will allow us to apply them to the composition of sentences.

These principles of composition, you will remember, are three: The first, the principle of Unity, concerns the substance of a composition: every composition should group itself about one central idea. The sec

ond, the principle of Mass, concerns the external form of a composition: the chief parts of every composition should be so placed as readily to catch the eye. The third, the principle of Coherence, concerns the internal arrangement of a composition: the relation of each part of a composition to its neighbors should be unmistakable. The question before us now is how far we may apply these principles to the composition of sentences.

To turn, then, to the principle of Unity,—that every composition should group itself about one central idea. In the first chapter I pointed out sufficiently how very elastic this principle is as our purpose varies, the same idea may legitimately be made the central idea of a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter or a book. The question of scale, in short, is a perfectly indepen