English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as
'Blood is a beggar' and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a
frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls
of tragical speeches.... Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of
Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if's and and's, and others,
while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their
beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner
parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the
French _Doudie_, where they attract more infection in one minute than
they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any
authors of like argument.

This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficulties
our prose had to encounter and overcome. But no one would seriously
propose it as a model for those who would write well, which is our
present business. I have called it 'clotted.' It is, to use a word of the
time, 'farced' with conceits; it needs straining.

Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to say
something: that is, to _make_ something. It is not, like modern Jargon,
trying to dodge something. English prose, in short, just here is passing
through a period of puberty, of green sickness: and, looking at it
historically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with the
stature of the grown man to be.

These throes tear it every way. On the one hand we have Ascham,
pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue
(yet with a sure instinct he does it):--

If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or