iously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner
parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the
French _Doudie_, where they attract more infection in one minute than
they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any
authors of like argument.

This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficulties
our prose had to encounter and overcome. But no one would seriously
propose it as a model for those who would write well, which is our
present business. I have called it 'clotted.' It is, to use a word of the
time, 'farced' with conceits; it needs straining.

Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to say
something: that is, to _make_ something. It is not, like modern Jargon,
trying to dodge something. English prose, in short, just here is passing
through a period of puberty, of green sickness: and, looking at it
historically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with the
stature of the grown man to be.

These throes tear it every way. On the one hand we have Ascham,
pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue
(yet with a sure instinct he does it):--

If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or
else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him,
that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one
of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write... And
as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in
them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary,
everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling,
that no man can do worse.

On the other hand you have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks and
poises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived two
hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance;
Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.

For all these writers were alive: and I tell you it is an inspiriting
thing to be alive and trying to write English. All these authors were
alive and trying to _do_ something. Unconsciously for the most part they
were striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find a
rhythm for its periods.

And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too there
befel a miracle.

You will not ask me 'What miracle?' I mean, of course, the Author