stituted, and the taxation which supported them was imposed, because Cromwell could not, or would not, work in harmony with parliament. After September 1656 this state of things was altered. Parliament and the Protector found out ways of being at peace with one another; English arms were successful against the Spaniard, and parliament took heart to vote a subsidy of £400,000, which was enough to meet all instant emergencies. When Sindercomb's plot again put the state in jeopardy, parliament proposed to make the threatened chief magistrate a king. The hour for military government seemed to have passed away, and the time seemed to have come for the state to feel its way back to some at least of the old and tried paths, though the shrewdest observer then living can hardly have foreseen how soon and how completely the return was to be made.

THE SECRETS OF PROSE STYLE,

MAN

OR

PROSE RHYTHMS.

ANY signs indicate that English prose is being called to reveal its secrets. It is none too soon. The place left by the decease of Rhetoric, as Blair, Campbell, and Whately understood it, has long been empty. The science of Style, founded so mightily by Aristotle, Dionysius, Longinus and Quintilian, must some day be completed. That progress has been so long delayed may be strange but is not inexplicable. So far as England is concerned, the ghostly presence of the Whatelyan Rhetoric has been something of a hindrance. A more troublesome one is the differences between poetry and prose, and the difficulty of bringing them both under one rationale. Thus, though even Aristotle recognised that the essence of expression was the same in verse and prose,' critical analysis seemed to give no confirmation of his words, and he himself spoke elsewhere in another sense. Poetry has at least metre, about which much may be determined. But what is there in prose besides meaning and grammatical skeleton, what but irregularity and caprice, a mystery of individuality vastly powerful, indeed, but as indeterminable as winds or lightnings?

A significant portent is the revived interest in Ciceronian structure associated with such scholars as Zielinski and Bornecque on the Continent, and in England with the name of Mr. A. C. Clarke of Queen's College, Oxford, whose Fontes Prosae Numerosae are

a mine of interest to the student of Style. The definite ascertainment and formulation of long recognized prosodic structure in the prose of Cicero and others makes an epoch in scholarship. Another portent is Mr. John Shelly's suggestive article on Rhythmical Prose in Latin and English in the Church Quarterly Review for April, 1912. Last, but not least, there is Professor Saintsbury's learned and vivacious work. The problems of prose are evidently tempting, and ripe.

What are the secrets of English prose style? Is there one, or are there several? Professor Saintsbury fully recognizes that the Prose Rhythm about which he has so much to say is not the whole of prose style. Yet the analogy with poetry may mislead, if not him, at all events his readers. There is a sense, and a very important sense, in which metre is the secret of poetry. Metre is not only the formal differentia of poetry, it is its only differentia. All other qualities of poetry may invade and flood prose; yet, so long as metre is held back, it remains prose. Verse may be as 'prosaic' as it is possible for human utterance to be; yet it remains verse, and verse is what we distinctively mean by poetry. Metre and the prosody which expounds it are the essential part of poetry considered as actual, as a finished product.

The moment, however, that we recognize the differential importance of metre, we realize how important is mere logical definition to explain art. Poetry, we know, is something infinitely beyond metre, and prosody is not the whole of poetic style. Much less, of course, is prose rhythm the whole of prose style. Yet the temptation to make something called prose rhythm' nearly as differential as metre, to regard literary prose as mainly characterized by a kind of lax irregular prosody, is very strong: and there are some signs, perhaps, that our scholars are inclined to yield to it. We are learning that much in expression is deliberate, optional, explicable; that

the fitness, felicity, beauty, grandeur of prose, for ear as well as for eye, may, at least partially, be demonstrated. There is clear evidence of metrical arrangement in the prose of many Greek and Latin writers. How convenient, how satisfactory, if we could find similar arrangement in English writers, and use it as a master-key to their style.

Mr. Shelly and Professor Saintsbury seem to believe in such a key; but they differ in their use of it. Both regard rhythm' as an important feature of literary prose; both treat it as akin or approaching to metre, and as the subject of a kind-of prosody. But Mr. Shelly (whose main object is to compare and contrast Latin and English prose rhythms) concerns himself solely with stresses, and talks much of ' cadence' as well as rhythm. Professor Saintsbury is much more thoroughgoing. For him Prose Rhythm is a thing of ' feet'; and, according to him, in order to appreciate fine English prose, at least on its rhythmical side, all you have to do is to scan it exactly (mutatis mutandis) as you would scan Greek or Latin verse. Mr. Shelly's conclusions, therefore, are slighter than Professor Saintsbury's. They are, in fact, summed up in his version of a dictum by Cicero that particular cadences (common ex hypothesi to Cicero and Newman) are sounds which, apart from the meaning conveyed, afford peculiar pleasure to the ear and satisfy its cravings.' Professor Saintsbury's conclusions occupy one long chapter and an appendix consisting of a kind of Athanasian Creed of axioms, inferences, and suggestions' which no diffidence of their author (and he dwells becomingly on their merely provisional value) can deprive of a definite if not mildly damnatory character. To some of these I shall return later. Meanwhile it is enough to cite the first of them as a general conclusion, viz., that the Rhythm of Prose, like the Metre of Verse, can, in English as well as in the classical languages, be best expressed by applying the foot-system, or