an exhibition of power very different in kind from any thing of their own. No jealousy arises. Milton preferred Ovid too, and I dare say he admired both as a man of sensi And, starting from the genial bed, They led me to the sounding shore- I saw - I saw and wept no more, They lay my country low: Their love - no love! but some dark spell, In vengeance breath'd, by spirit fell. Rise, hoary sea, in awful tide, And whelm that vessel's guilty pride; Nor e'er, in high Mycene's hall, Let Helen boast in peace of mighty Ilion's fall." J. T. C. ED. bility admires a lovely woman, with a feeling into which jealousy or envy cannot enter. With Eschylus or Sophocles he might perchance have matched himself. In Euripides you have oftentimes a very near approach to comedy, and I hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and dignified conversation. STYLE. July 3. 1833. CAVALIER SLANG. — JUNIUS. PROSE AND VERSE. IMITATION AND COPY. THE collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare and Milton that you may as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages.* "The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture." - Quarterly Review, No. CIII. p. 7. A good lecture upon style might be composed, by taking on the one hand the slang of L'Estrange, and perhaps, even of Roger which became so fashionable after the Restoration as a mark of loyalty; and on the other, the Johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of Junius; and then showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds. * But Mr. Coleridge took a great distinction between North and the other writers commonly associated with him. In speaking of the Examen and the Life of Lord North, in the Friend, Mr. C. calls them " two of the most interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the matter, and the incuriosa felicitas of the style. The pages are all alive with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. A fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the Restoration of Charles the Second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not sought for, as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and their imitators. North never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational English.” — Vol. II. p. 307.- ED. It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in the divines of Charles the Second's time. Barrow could not of course adopt such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even Barrow not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there in the regular Roger North way—much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this, his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it. The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real antithesis of images or thought but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more than verbal. -- The definition of good Prose is proper words in their proper places;-of good Verse -the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication; it is as if he had been speaking to you all the while. But in verse you must do more;—there the words, the media, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the media may be proper; proper; and some verse may border more on mere |