ntury we find the
prose far surpassing the poetry. Dryden, almost immediately after the
Restoration, shows noteworthy advance in modern prose style. He avoids
a Latinized inversion, such as the following, with which Milton begins
the second sentence of his _Areopagitica_ (1644):--

"And me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was
whereon I entered, may have at other times variously affected ..."

Here, the object "me" is eighteen words in advance of its predicate.
The sentence might well have ended with the natural pause at
"affected," but Milton adds fifty-one more words. We may easily
understand by comparison why the term "modern" is applied to the prose
of Dryden and of his successors Addison and Steele. To emphasize the
precedence of these writers in the development of modern prose is no
disparagement to Bunyan's style, which is almost as quaint and as
excellent as that of the 1611 version of the _Bible_.

French influence was cumulative in changing the cumbersome style of
Milton's prose to the polished, neatly-turned sentences of Addison.
Matthew Arnold says: "The glory of English literature is in poetry,
and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth century does not lie.
Nevertheless the eighteenth century accomplished for us an immense
literary progress, and its very shortcomings in poetry were an
instrument to that progress, and served it. The example of Germany may
show us what a nation loses from having no prose style... French prose
is marked in the highest degree by the qualities of regularity,
uniformity, precision, balance... The French made their poetry also
conform to the law which was molding their prose... This may have been
bad for French poetry, but it was good for French prose."

The same influence which gave vigor, point, and definiteness to the
prose, necessary for the business of the world, helped to dwarf the
poetry. If both could not have advanced together, we may be thankful
that the first part of the eighteenth century produced a varied prose
of such high excellence.

The Classic School.--The literary lawgivers of this age held that a
rigid adherence to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of
producing a masterpiece. Indeed, the belief was common that a
knowledge of rules was more important than genius.

The men of this school are called _classicists_ because they held that
a study of the best works of the ancients would disclose the necessary
guiding rules. No