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Excerpt from Nineteenth Century Prose Both eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are largely inuenced by a foreign standard. It was the French writing with its definite rules and the fixed balance of its sentences which in Queen Anne's time set its mark on English prose and poetry. Pope's ideal was Boileau's, a logical order and neatness of expression which is natural to Latin-derived languages, but is not wholly congenial to the English genius. The beauty of Addison's style, charming, graceful, and exible, shows the quality of such prose in perfection. Johnson and Gibbon, by relying overmuch on the Latin elements of our speech, added weight and sonority, but with a decided loss of exibility. Gibbon's majestic sentences are all on the same pattern, though in his prose there is a grandeur as of a Roman aqueduct, where every arch, perfect in proportion and detail, is the exact replica of the next; the whole im presses by its very regularity. Later imitators degraded this regularity to a tameness and monotony in Structure, which inevitably brought reaction in its train. Poetry, with Wordsworth, was the first to escape from tradition, and to set up new models. Wordsworth's theory that the language of simplest speech was the right language for poetry, could be applied more easily to prose. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.