Let the reader begin with
the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what Mr. Ainger
especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his sister
Mary.
The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely
to adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and
limited, [15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne. Yet Mr.
Saintsbury is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style,
English literature has much to do. Well, the good quality of an age,
the defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it
is well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
prose. A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness.
Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned
language; and completing that correction of style which had only gone
a certain way in the last century, raise the general level of
language towards their own. If there be a weakness in Mr.
Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in a tendency to regard style a
little too independently of matter.
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