1760-1832:

A row of 18th century houses, or a room of normal 18th
century furniture, or a characteristic piece of 18th century
literature, conveys at once a sensation of satisfaction and
completeness. The secret of this charm is not to be found in
any special beauty or nobility of design or expression, but
simply in an exquisite fitness. The 18th century mind was a
unity, an order. All literature and art that really belong to
the 18th century are the language of a little society of men
and women who moved within one set of ideas; who understood
each other; who were not tormented by any anxious or
bewildering problems; who lived in comfort, and, above all
things, in composure. The classics were their freemasonry.
There was a standard for the mind, for the emotions, for
taste: there were no incongruities.

When you have a society like this, you have what we
roughly call a civilisation, and it leaves its character and
canons in all its surroundings and in its literature. Its
definite ideas lend themselves readily to expression. A
larger society seems an anarchy in contrast: just because
of its escape into a greater world it seems powerless to
stamp itself in wood or stone; it is condemned as an age of
chaos and mutiny, with nothing to declare.

You do wrong, I assure you, in misprising these men of the 18th
century. They reduced life, to be sure: but by that very means
they saw it far more _completely_ than do we, in this lyrical
age, with our worship of 'fine excess.' Here at any rate, and to
speak only of its literature, you have a society fencing that
literature around--I do not say by forethought or even
consciously--but in effect fencing its literature around, to keep
it in control and capable of an orderly, a nice, even an
exquisite cultivation. Dislike it as you may, I do not think that
any of you, as he increases his knowledge of the technique of
English Prose, yes, and of English Verse (I do not say of English
Poetry) will deny his admiration to the men of the 18th century.
The strength of good prose resides not so much in the swing and
balance of the single sentence as in the marshalling of argument,
the orderly procession of paragraphs, the disposition of parts so
that each finds its telling, its proper, place; the adjustment of
the means to the end; the strategy which brings its full force
into action at the calculated moment and drives the conclusion
home upo