Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/224

204 spirit of inquiry, distrustful of enthusiasm and distrustful of tradition, is growing active. Such an age naturally begot a rich and strong but varied prose. To a uniform and perfect medium, like that which Balzac, Descartes, and Pascal evolved in France, it did not attain. Yet the prose of the early seventeenth century has great qualities. It has the freshness of forms which have not yet become stereotyped and conventional. Its writers know how to mingle colloquial vigour with dignified and serious eloquence, racy Saxon with musical Latin polysyllables. In splendour of poetic imagery and harmony, the best prose of Donne and Taylor and Milton and Browne has been only occasionally equalled since. Bacon has hardly a rival in condensed felicity of phrase and wealth of illustration, and Hobbes's prose is as clear, forcible, and formed a style as has ever been used in philosophic exposition. The prose of the seventeenth century is not to be dismissed as unformed by Arnold's comparison of extracts from Chapman and Milton with Dryden's prefaces. Neither Chapman nor Milton is quite a characteristic writer. The seventeenth century is the first great period of modern English prose, while it was forming under classical, but independent of French, influence. The advance which it made after the Restoration in uniformity, elegance, and ease was not made without a corresponding loss in freshness, harmony, dignity, and poetic richness of phraseology.

No better proof of what has been said regarding the subordination of the purely literary to other