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378 logical argument, how much a creature of tastes and prejudices. And the method he adopted in the Provinciales, as he proceeded, was that which he thought most likely to appeal to the average man. To combat prejudice he evoked prejudice. To the help of argument he brought irony and eloquence. Before Addison and Steele, he realised that, even on religious matters, the man of the world must be addressed in a different tone from that which suits the savant. Pascal made French prose a fit instrument, at once for the precise expression of scientific thought and for the more delicate and varied uses of social intercourse and letters.

The history of English prose, and of the less important Dutch prose, of the period, is not quite the same as that of French. It was not till later that rationalism and classicism united in the shaping of modern English prose; and Van Effen's Hollandsche Spectator is generally regarded as the first work in Dutch prose that is distinctly modern. For England on a large, for Holland on a smaller scale, the earlier seventeenth century is a period of enrichment rather than of settling and uniformity; and the chief influence in each is Latin oratorical and historical prose. Hooker and Bacon, Donne and Taylor, Milton and Browne, enriched the resources of English prose in vocabulary, in structure, and in harmony, so much that, despite the work done by Dryden and his followers, the greatest prose writers, from Johnson to Ruskin, have never failed to go back to the study of these great models. On a much smaller scale,