Miscellaneous Essays Author:George Saintsbury Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill MODERN ENGLISH PROSE [I876]1 IN the days when I had to study the two great Histories of Greece which England English produced in the last generation, a... more » Prose thought, which has most probably often ' '' presented itself to other students, frequently occurred to me. Much as the two works differ in plan, in views, and in manner of execution, their difference never struck me so much as in the point of style. And the remarkable feature of this difference is, that it is not by any means the natural variation which we allow for, and indeed expect, in the productions of any two men of decided and distinct literary ability. It is not as the difference between Hume and Gibbon, or the difference between Clarendon and Taylor. In the styles of these great writers, and in those of many others, there is the utmost conceivable diversity; but at the same time they are all styles. We can see (we see it, indeed, so clearly that we hardly take the trouble to think about it)that each of them made a distinct effort to arrange 1 See Preface and Essay I. G his words into their clause, his clauses ... Modern into their sentence, and his sentences En.glish into their paragraph according to certain Prose forms, and that though these forms varied in the subtle and indescribable measure of the taste and idiosyncrasy of each writer, the effort was always present, and was only accidentally if inseparably connected with the intention to express certain thoughts, to describe certain facts, or to present certain characters. But when we come to compare Thirl wall with Grote, we find not a variation of the kind just mentioned, but the full opposition of the presence of style on the one hand and the absence of it on the other. The late Bishop of St. David's will probably never be cited among ...« less