of which it consists, and the foundation upon which it rests, correcting its mistakes, and supplying its defects. Even the most dogmatical branches of study, grammar and mathematics, supply him with hints, and give a turn to his meditations. Reading and learning, when thus pursued, not only furnish the most valuable knowledge; but afford incitements to the mind of a thousand denominations, and add a miraculous sort of finishing to its workmanship which could have been bestowed by no other means. It furnishes, what is of all things most important, occasions for approbation and disapprobation. It creates a certain manliness of judgment, not indebted for its decisive character to partiality and arrogance, but seeing truth by its own light, even while it never divests itself of the sobriety of scepticism, and accommodated to the office of producing conviction in its intimates and hearers.

To prevent misconstruction it is perhaps necessary to observe, that the tendency of this Essay is to recommend learning. It proceeds upon the supposition that there is a class, and a numerous class of men, by whom severe and profound reading is decried. The term self-educated was defined in the beginning, to mean those who had not engaged in any methodical and persevering course of reading; and elsewhere it was said of them that they held, that the man who would be original and

impressive, must meditate rather than hear, and walk rather than read. If there be any singularity in this use of the term, it is hoped at least that the reader will not put a sense upon it in this present instance, which is foreign to the intention of the writer. He is far from thinking all men of learning respectable, and he joins most cordially in the general propensity to withhold from the mere pedant every degree of estimation. The principles intended to be maintained are, that learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius; and that he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

ESSAY XIL

OF ENGLISH STYLE.

INTRODUCTION.

THE author of this volume does not hesitate to avow that he has in several respects altered his opinion upon the subject of the following Essay, since the first appearance of his book in 1797. And he would be ashamed to continue to contribute in way to the propagation of what now appears to him to be error.

any

The object of his Essay was to shew the supe riority of the English of the present day over the English of our ancestors. In some respects he still adheres to the same opinion. He believes that on the whole the construction of the language of our best modern writers, the best writers of the age of George the Third, is closer and neater, more free from laxity of structure, and less subject to occasional incongruities, superfluities, unnaturalness and affectation, than that of their predecessors. But neatness, and a sustained equality of march, are not every thing.

Since the publication of this volume the author has been pretty extensively and habitually conversant with the productions of our elder writers. And they have certainly lost nothing with him in a more intimate acquaintance. He admires, and he loves them. They have, many of them, a splendour and an expansive richness of manner, that more than balance the perhaps more laborious exactness of their successors. There is also something in early language, and the new and unhackneyed sense and feeling of words, that is singularly delightful. In Spenser and Shakespear, there is a freshness in all they say, at least in the most admirable parts of their writings, that steals away the soul. It is like flowers, fresh gathered out of the gardens of Paradise. Our words are palled and stale; they have been used too often; we must be

content to take up with the leavings of our ancestors. We are born in too late an age, and too chilly a climate. It is as if the happiest genius among the Greeks of the age of the Antonines should have had the presumption to think he could pen an Iliad. And, worst of all, we are born in an age of criticism, where the boldest of us dares not let himself loose to be all that he might have been capable of being. We talk to learned ears, and to persons who from their infancy have been schooled in artificial laws. It would many ways be better, if we addressed hearers and readers of unstudied feelings, and who would confess themselves pleased, without the slavery and the cowardice of enquiring first whether they ought to be pleased.

A part of what I feel on the subject, is aptly expressed in the homely phraseology of Anthony Wood. It is in his article of Chapman, the translator.

"Afterwards," says Wood (that is, when he left the university), "he settled in the metropolis, and became much admired by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, William Shakespear, Christopher Marlow, &c, by all whose writings, as also by those of Sir Philip Sidney, William Warner, and of our author Chapman, the English tongue was exceedingly enriched, and made quite another thing than what it was before."

The purpose of the following pages is rather to

enable the reader to form a comparison, and to determine for himself in what respects the old English writers excelled, and in what respects they fall short of the moderns, than to deliver any thing authoritatively on the subject.

This will best be effected by producing a series of instances.

We will confine ourselves to prose examples. The licence of poetry, and the fetters of versification, have equally in all ages seduced the poets, in some degree to deviate from the received language of the age in which they wrote.

The following specimens were not originally selected with a friendly eye. But they are not on that account in some respects the less qualified to answer the purpose for which they are produced. A selection of Beauties might be calculated to mislead the judgment. The question might then be, not of style, which is the enquiry here intended, but of the genius or profundity of the author. is by taking the writers in the middle tone of composition, that we can best judge of the successive fluctuations, and improvement or otherwise, of the language in which they wrote.

SECT. I.

AGE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.

It

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY may be considered in some respects as the earliest of those writers, whom An