l writers without imagination fall into it of necessity whenever they
attempt the figurative. I take two examples from Mr. Merivale's 'History
of the Romans under the Empire,' which, indeed, is full of such. 'The
last years of the age familiarly styled the Augustan were singularly
barren of the literary glories from which its celebrity was chiefly
derived. One by one the stars in its firmament had been lost to the
world; Virgil and Horace, etc., had long since died; the charm which the
imagination of Livy had thrown over the earlier annals of Rome had
ceased to shine on the details of almost contemporary history; and if
the flood of his eloquence still continued flowing, we can hardly
suppose that the stream was as rapid, as fresh, and as clear as ever.' I
will not waste time in criticising the bad English or the mixture of
metaphor in these sentences, but will simply cite another from the same
author which is even worse. 'The shadowy phantom of the Republic
continued to flit before the eyes of the Caesar. There was still, he
apprehended, a germ of sentiment existing, on which a scion of his own
house, or even a stranger, might boldly throw himself and raise the
standard of patrician independence.' Now a ghost may haunt a murderer,
but hardly, I should think, to scare him with the threat of taking a new
lease of its old tenement. And fancy the _scion_ of a _house_ in the act
of _throwing itself_ upon a _germ of sentiment_ to _raise a standard!_ I
am glad, since we have so much in the same kind to answer for, that this
bit of horticultural rhetoric is from beyond sea. I would not be
supposed to condemn truly imaginative prose. There is a simplicity of
splendor, no less than of plainness, and prose would be poor indeed if
it could not find a tongue for that meaning of the mind which is behind
the meaning of the words. It has sometimes seemed to me that in England
there was a growing tendency to curtail language into a mere
convenience, and to defecate it of all emotion as thoroughly as
algebraic signs. This has arisen, no doubt, in part from that healthy
national contempt of humbug which is characteristic of Englishmen, in
part from that sensitiveness to the ludicrous which makes them so shy of
expressing feeling, but in part also, it is to be feared, from a growing
distrust, one might almost say hatred, of whatever is super-material.
There is something sad in the scorn with which their journalists treat
the notion of there