ancient cities, or the "mean white" of American plantations—one of the least respectable and the least workmanlike of mankind.

Happily this full-grown form of slavery is exceedingly frail. We have ourselves seen in America how completely it collapses at an extrinsic attack; how easy it is to destroy it, how impossible to revive it. And much of the weakness of ancient civilisation was also so caused. Any system which makes the mass of a society hate the constitution of that society, must be in unstable equilibrium. A small touch will overthrow it, and scarcely any human power will reestablish it. And this is the necessary effect of capitalistic slavery, for it prevents all other labourers, makes slaves the "many" of the community, and fills their minds with grief and hatred. Capitalistic slavery is, as history shows, one of the easiest things to efface, as domestic slavery is one of the hardest. But capitalistic slavery has vitally influenced most of the greatest civilisations; and as domestic slavery has influenced nearly all of them, the entire effect of the two has been prodigious.

We see then that there are at least four conditions to be satisfied before this axiom of our English Political Economy is true within a nation. Before labour can move easily and as it pleases from employment to employment there must be such employments for it to move between ;-there must be an effectual Government capable of maintaining peace and order during the transition and not requiring itself to be supported by fixity of station in society as so many governments have been ;-the nation must be capable of maintaining its independent existence against other nations without a military system dependent on localised and immovable persons; and there must be no competing system of involuntary labour limiting the number of employments or moving between them more perfectly than contemporary free labour. These are not indeed all the conditions needful for the truth of the axiom, but the others can be explained better when some other matters have been first discussed. WALTER BAgehot.

MODERN ENGLISH PROSE.

In comparing for purposes of study the two great Histories of Greece which England produced in the last generation, a thought, which has most probably often presented itself to other students, has frequently occurred to me. Much as the two works differ in plan, in views, and in manner of execution, their difference has never struck me so much as in the point of style. And the remarkable feature of this difference is, that it is not by any means the natural variation which we allow for, and indeed expect, in the productions of any two men of decided and distinct literary ability. It is not as the difference between Hume and Gibbon, and the difference between Clarendon and Taylor. In the styles of these great writers, and in those of many others, there is the utmost conceivable diversity; but at the same time they are all styles. We can see (see it, indeed, so clearly that we hardly take the trouble to think about it) that each of them made a distinct effort to arrange his words into their clause, his clauses into their sentence, and his sentences into their paragraph according to certain forms, and that though these forms varied in the subtle and indescribable measure of the taste and idiosyncrasy of each writer, the effort was always present, and was only accidentally if inseparably connected with the intention to express certain thoughts, to describe certain facts, or to present certain characters. But when we come to compare Thirlwall with Grote, we find not a variation of the kind just mentioned, but the full opposition of the presence of style on the one hand and the absence of it on the other. The late Bishop of St. David's will probably never be cited among the greatest masters of English prose style, but still we can see without difficulty that he has inherited its traditions. It would be difficult, on the other hand, to persuade a careful critic that Grote ever thought of such things as the cadence of a sentence or the composition of a paragraph. That he took so much trouble as might suffice to make his meaning clear and his language energetic is obvious; that in no case did he think of looking beyond this is I think certain.

But the difference between these two great historians is very far from being a mere isolated fact, of little more interest or significance than a parallel between Macedon and Monmouth. It marks with extraordinary precision the date and nature of a change which has affected English literature to a degree and in a manner worthy of the most serious consideration. What this change is, and whether it amounts to an actual decay or to a mere temporary neglect of style in English prose writing, are questions which are certainly of importance, and the answers to which should not, as it seems to me, lack interest.

If, then, we take up almost any book of the last century, we shall find that within varying limits the effort of which I have just spoken is distinctly present. The model upon which the writer frames his style may be and probably is faulty in itself, and still more probably is faultily copied; there may be too much Addison in the mixture, or too much Johnson; but still we shall see that an honest attempt at style, an honest endeavour at manner as apart from matter, has been made, however clumsy the attempt may be, and however short of success it may fall. But if we take up any book of the last forty or fifty years, save a very few, the first thing that will strike us is the total absence of any attempt or endeavour of the kind. The matter will, as a rule, have been more or less carefully attended to, and will be presented to the reader with varying degrees of clearness and precision. But the manner, except in so far as certain peculiarities of manner may be conducive or prejudicial to clearness and precision of statement—sometimes perhaps to apparent precision with any sacrifice of clearness-will in most cases be found to have been totally neglected, if a thing may be said to be neglected which does not appear to have even presented itself within the circumference of the field of view. In other words, and to adopt a convenient distinction, though there may be a difference of manner, there is usually no difference of style, for there is no style at all.

Before going any further, it may be well to adopt a commendable, if antiquated and scholastic practice, and to set down accurately what is here meant by style, and of what it consists. Style is the choice and arrangement of language with only a subordinate regard to the meaning to be conveyed. Its parts are the choice of the actual words to be used, the further selection and juxtaposition of these words, the structure of the clauses into which they are wrought, the arrangement of the clauses into sentences, and the composition of the sentences into paragraphs. Beyond the paragraph style can hardly be said to go, but within that limit it is supreme. The faults incident to these parts (if I may be allowed still to be scholastic) are perhaps also worthy of notice. Every one can see, though every one is by no means careful to put his knowledge into practice, that certain words are bad of themselves, and certain others to be avoided wherever possible. The mere grammar of style teaches us not to say commence" where we can say begin," or "reliable" where we can say "trustworthy." The next stage introduces difficulties of a higher order, though these also are more or less elementary. Most people can see the faults in the following sentences:

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"Had he always written upon the level we behold here there could be little question that the author would have taken his place amongst the front rank of dramatists." Here "writing upon the level we behold here" is a combination of the most obviously incon

gruous notions. Again, "They did reject him of course, but his speech remains as a model for all true men to follow, as a warning to all who may adopt another course," &c. Here the unintentional repetition of the word "course" in an entirely different sense within "in the compass of a couple of lines is unpardonable. But these are mere rudiments; it is in the breach or neglect of the rules that govern the structure of clauses, of sentences, and of paragraphs that the real secret of style consists, and to illustrate this breach or observation is less easy. The task will be perhaps made easier if we consider first in the rough how the prevalent English style of the present day differs from that of past times.

Some five-and-thirty years ago De Quincey had already noticed and deplored the deterioration of which we speak. In his Essay on Style (reprinted in the sixth volume of his collected works) he undertakes to discuss at some length the symptoms and causes of the disease. De Quincey, as any one who is at all acquainted with his works is aware, gave considerable attention to the subject of style, and professed to be no mean authority thereon. There were, indeed, two peculiarities about him which prevented him from deserving a very high place as a referee on such matters. The first was his mistaken idea that extremely ornate prose-the prose which his ally John Wilson called "numerous," and which others have called Asiatic-was the highest form attainable, and that any writer who did not aim at this fell naturally into a lower class. The other was his singular crotchetiness, which made him frequently refuse to see any good in the style of writers to whom, for some reason or for no reason, he had taken a dislike. It will probably be allowed, not merely by persons who hold traditional opinions, but by all independent students of literature, that we must look with considerable distrust on the dicta of a critic who finds fault with the styles of Plato and of Conyers Middleton. The Essay on Style, however (at least its first part, for the latter portions go off into endless digressions of no pertinence whatever), is much more carefully written and much more carefully reasoned than most of De Quincey's work. The purport of it is, that the decay of style is to be attributed partly to the influence of German literature, but chiefly to the prevalence of journalism. No one will deny that the influence of newspaper writing is in many ways bad, and that to it is due much of the decadence in style of which complaint is made. But either the prevalent manner of journalism has undergone a remarkable change during the past generation, or else the particular influence which De Quincey supposes it to have had was mistaken by him. I do not myself pretend to a very intimate acquaintance with the periodical literature of thirty or forty years ago, and I am afraid that not even in the pursuit of knowledge could I be tempted to plunge into such a dreary and unbuoyant mare mortuum. With respect to the papers

of to-day it is certainly not difficult to discern a peculiarity in their styles, or in what does duty for style in them. A large volume, for instance, might be profitably written, if, perhaps, not so profitably read, on the various stylistic peculiarities of the Times. There used to be the famous and memorable affectation of peculiar spelling, or what one might perhaps, after the story of King Sigismund, call the super-orthographicam style. Then, some ten years ago, there came the great "Queen of Sheba" style, which consisted in opening an article with some fact or allusion which had the remotest (or not the remotest) connection with the subject. Of late, perhaps, there has been less unity; but one style has never been lacking-a style which might be called the magisterial, but which I (having been once informed by a great master thereof, with whom I presumed to differ, that "all persons of common sense and morality" thought as he did) prefer to call the common-sense-and-morality style. This style is convenient for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness. If you approve, you can point out not too enthusiastically that the view or proceeding in question is the only one which common sense and morality allow; if (which is possible) you do not understand, common sense, by not understanding also, will help you out of the difficulty; and if you disapprove, morality will be as violently outraged as you like. Of the weekly papers, it is impossible not to admire the free-and-easy doctrinaire-ism of the Spectator, which is almost entirely an affair of style depending on a sedulous avoidance of ornate language, and a plentiful use of colloquial words and phrases about the least colloquial matters. Then there is the style of the Saturday Review in its political articles, a style which appears to be framed on the principle that thoughts and words economise weight by being meted out in small doses, and that a pound of buckshot will go farther than a pound of bullets. Lastly, the inquirer into such things will not neglect the peculiar aridity of certain of the older Quarterlies, which seem to have retained the ponderous clauses of other days, while neglecting the form which saved those clauses from being cumbrous. But in most of all this we shall find little to bear out De Quincey's verdict. Long and involved sentences, unduly stuffed with fact and meaning, are what he complains of; and though there is no doubt that we should not have to go far in order to find such at the present day, yet it does not appear, to me at least, that the main fault of contemporary English style is of this kind. On the contrary, the sin of which I should chiefly complain is the sin of over-short sentences, of mere gasps instead of balanced periods. Such a paragraph as the following will illustrate what I "That request was obeyed by the massacre of six out of the surviving princes of the imperial family. Two alone escaped. With such a mingling of light and darkness did Constantine close his

mean: