the quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris.
Acting on language, those qualities generate a specific and unique
beauty--"that other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these
specimens, which the reader needs hardly be told, after what has been
now said, are far from being a collection of "purple patches."

Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
rhythm. Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done
in English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly
prosaic merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a
structure primarily reasonable. Not that that reasonable prose
structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been
always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers
here in evidence. Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty
and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and
incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate
prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of
Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, determining
the standard of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the
prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the "great age in France":
and, again in reaction against this, the wild mixture of poetry and
prose, in our wild nineteenth century, under the influence of such
writers as Dickens and Carlyle: such are the three periods into which
the story of our prose literature divides itself. And Mr. Saintsbury
has his well-timed, practical suggestions, upon a survey of them.