pruned, he
balanced; he hung garlands, he draped robes; and he ended by converting
the Doric order of Swift into the Corinthian order of Gibbon. Is it
quite just to describe this process as one by which 'a whole school of
rhetorical writers' was encouraged 'to avoid circumlocution' by the
invention 'of superfluous words,' when it was this very process that
gave us the peculiar savour of polished ease which characterises nearly
all the important prose of the last half of the eighteenth century--that
of Johnson himself, of Hume, of Reynolds, of Horace Walpole--which can
be traced even in Burke, and which fills the pages of Gibbon? It is,
indeed, a curious reflection, but one which is amply justified by the
facts, that the _Decline and Fall_ could not have been precisely what it
is, had Sir Thomas Browne never written the _Christian Morals_.

That Johnson and his disciples had no inkling of the inner spirit of the
writer to whose outward form they owed so much, has been pointed out by
Mr. Gosse, who adds that Browne's 'genuine merits were rediscovered and
asserted by Coleridge and Lamb.' But we have already observed that Mr.
Gosse's own assertion of these merits lies a little open to question.
His view seems to be, in fact, the precise antithesis of Dr. Johnson's;
he swallows the spirit of Browne's writing, and strains at the form.
Browne, he says, was 'seduced by a certain obscure romance in the
terminology of late Latin writers,' he used 'adjectives of classical
extraction, which are neither necessary nor natural,' he forgot that it
is better for a writer 'to consult women and people who have not
studied, than those who are too learnedly oppressed by a knowledge of
Latin and Greek.' He should not have said 'oneiro-criticism,' when he
meant the interpretation of dreams, nor 'omneity' instead of 'oneness';
and he had 'no excuse for writing about the "pensile" gardens of
Babylon, when all that is required is expressed by "hanging."' Attacks
of this kind--attacks upon the elaboration and classicism of Browne's
style--are difficult to reply to, because they must seem, to anyone who
holds a contrary opinion, to betray such a total lack of sympathy with
the subject as to make argument all but impossible. To the true Browne
enthusiast, indeed, there is something almost shocking about the state
of mind which would exchange 'pensile' for 'hanging,' and 'asperous'
for 'rough,' and would do away with 'digladiation' and 'quodlibetica