History of Eighteenth Century Literature Author:Edmund Gosse 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: CHAPTER III PROSE AFTER THE RESTORATION The prose of the last forty years of the seventeenth century is not one of the most attractive sections of literatu... more »re to the common reader. It is eminently pecjestrjan- in character, unimaginative, level, neutral. It has neither the disordered beauties of the age that preceded it, nor the limpid graces of that which followed it. It is tentative and transitional; and its experiments, like its changes, are in the direction of common sense and conventionality. There is, moreover, a peculiarity about its history which has, doubtless, served to consign it to comparative neglect. Neither of its two greatest names, neither Dryden nor Temple, though both of them men of genius and influence, and one of them a master of English, has left a single volume in prose which is in household use; while its best-known book, if we set aside The Pilgrim's Progress, is Locke's Human Understanding—a work particularly unengaging in its mere style and delivery. English prose between 1660 and 1700 is exhibited in a great variety of examples, many of them—nay, the majority of them—unimportant to any but an antiquarian reader, and displaying a talent so uniform, that it is not very easy to define the orders of merit. We meet nothing here like the genius with which Hooker or Swift, Bacon or Fielding, towers above all minor contemporaries. The period, however, is misjudged if we regard its merits as negative merely. It had extraordinary positive qualities. It isnotable as the age in which educated Englishmen in the mass began to use their native tongue more or less as we use it now. The interminable sentences which had preserved the awkward forms of the sixteenth century, the affected and excessive use of imagery, the abuse of parenthesis; all these vices of sty...« less