reat poetry and great prose, it
might be found, have most of their qualities in common. But [5] their
indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it is just
the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively, which it
is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear ever in
mind. Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits of prose
thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they should form
the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of those
qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just the
quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris. Acting on
language, those qualities generate a specific and unique beauty--"that
other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these specimens, which the
reader needs hardly be told, after what has been now said, are far from
being a collection of "purple patches."

Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
rhythm. Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done in
English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly prosaic
merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure
primarily reasonable. Not that that reasonable prose structure, or
architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even
generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence.
Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which
overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an
incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then,
in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers
through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of a prose in
the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in
Latin, or of the "great age in France": and, again in reaction against
this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth
century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle:
such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature
divides itself. And Mr. Saintsbury has his well-timed, practical
suggestions, upon a survey of them