Not that that reasonable prose
structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been
always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers
here in evidence. Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty
and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and
incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate
prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of
Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, determining
the standard of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the
prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the "great age in France":
and, again in reaction against this, the wild mixture of poetry and
prose, in our wild nineteenth century, under the influence of such
writers as Dickens and Carlyle: such are the three periods into which
the story of our prose literature divides itself. And Mr. Saintsbury
has his well-timed, practical suggestions, upon a survey of them.
[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by
the spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far
deeper than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank
verse, which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of
Dickens's otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines,
a tendency (outdoing our old friend M.
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