surely to misunderstand the whole drift of the great revolution which he
brought about in English letters. The characteristics of the
pre-Johnsonian prose style--the style which Dryden first established and
Swift brought to perfection--are obvious enough. Its advantages are
those of clarity and force; but its faults, which, of course, are
unimportant in the work of a great master, become glaring in that of the
second-rate practitioner. The prose of Locke, for instance, or of Bishop
Butler, suffers, in spite of its clarity and vigour, from grave defects.
It is very flat and very loose; it has no formal beauty, no elegance, no
balance, no trace of the deliberation of art. Johnson, there can be no
doubt, determined to remedy these evils by giving a new mould to the
texture of English prose; and he went back for a model to Sir Thomas
Browne. Now, as Mr. Gosse himself observes, Browne stands out in a
remarkable way from among the great mass of his contemporaries and
predecessors, by virtue of his highly developed artistic consciousness.
He was, says Mr. Gosse, 'never carried away. His effects are closely
studied, they are the result of forethought and anxious contrivance';
and no one can doubt the truth or the significance of this dictum who
compares, let us say, the last paragraphs of _The Garden of Cyrus_ with
any page in _The Anatomy of Melancholy_. The peculiarities of Browne's
style--the studied pomp of its latinisms, its wealth of allusion, its
tendency towards sonorous antithesis--culminated in his last, though not
his best, work, the _Christian Morals_, which almost reads like an
elaborate and magnificent parody of the Book of Proverbs. With the
_Christian Morals_ to guide him, Dr. Johnson set about the
transformation of the prose of his time. He decorated, he pruned, he
balanced; he hung garlands, he draped robes; and he ended by converting
the Doric order of Swift into the Corinthian order of Gibbon. Is it
quite just to describe this process as one by which 'a whole school of
rhetorical writers' was encouraged 'to avoid circumlocution' by the