omas Browne: 124-160

"Love's Labours Lost": 161-169

"Measure for Measure": 170-184

Shakespeare's English Kings: 185-204

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 205-218

Feuillet's "La Morte": 219-240

Postscript: 241-261

APPRECIATIONS

STYLE

[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in
differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object
into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to
confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of
achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for
instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and
characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On the
other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction
between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been
tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this
again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation
of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs
make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by
anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with
which this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or
the prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language of men, are always
liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production; and while
prose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesque
with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical and
intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or
florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless to
protest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and
narrowly confined to mainly practical ends--a kind of "good
round-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch
prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as with
Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson. In
subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in
all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so
the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to
estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look
for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too
has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions,
the mixed perspectives, of L