ry well. And a
dozen living novelists are masters of a style of extreme ease and grace.

Side by side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius
who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite
revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was
capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities
of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and _savoir faire_, has
printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George
Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning.
Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and
demoniac incoherences. Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we
weary at last of his everlasting _staccato_ on the trumpet; and even
the magnificent symphonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in
a sort of _coda_ of fantasias which suggest limelights and coloured
lenses. Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, must be
held to be, by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, the
literary dictator of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how
wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would
venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold
was ever taking up his parable--"Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!"--we
are sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even
_Culture_ itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others.

Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and
George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine
and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance,
slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose--the flat,
ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of
raw fact are flung at our heads! What interminable gritty collops of
learning have we to munch! Through what tangles of uninteresting
phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the
higher Philosophy! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr.
Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever
seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a
single irradiating image or one monumental phrase.

There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of
Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon.
Grote poured forth the precious con