nent in the West.

Your loving old
G.P.

28

MY DEAR ANTONY,

The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of
English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away,
the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and
there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were
the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all
the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us,
in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative
alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.

This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the general
decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with the rise of the
modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy even to our thoughts.
Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have discussed at the
dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn, what is now set
down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and canvassed in the correct
columns of the _Guardian_.

This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature deeply
and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such as Carlyle,
Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the throbbings of their
hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal of their inmost souls
crying in the market-place, take forcible possession of our affections,
and bring them into closer touch with each one of us than was ever
possible with the older restrained writers.

But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of
intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a
contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy;
and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend
to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of
vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the
doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient
writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great
writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of
simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him
with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so
inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious
outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.

"This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance o