all sorted
into rhetorical classes, and named, it would "dizzy the arithmetic of
memory" to run through their names.

The only divisions on this score that I shall attempt to speak of are
those called the Period and the Loose Sentence. Everybody knows, I
presume, that in a periodic sentence, when rightly fashioned, the
sense is not completed till you reach the close; so that the whole has
to be formed in thought before any part is set down. The beginning
forecasts the end, the end remembers the beginning, and all the
intermediate parts are framed with an eye to both beginning and end.
And the nearer it comes to a regular circle, the better it is held to
be. This style of writing, then, may be not unfitly said to go on
wheels. It is naturally rolling and high-sounding, or at least may
easily be made so, and therefore is apt to be in favour with geniuses
of a swelling, oratorical, and elocutionary order. Besides, it is a
style easily imitated, and so is not unfavourable to autorial
equality. On the other hand, the Loose Sentence begins without any
apparent thought of how it is to end, and proceeds with as little
apparent thought of how it began: the sense may stand complete many
times before it gets through: it runs on seemingly at random, winding
at its "own sweet will," though the path it holds is much nearer a
straight line than a circle; and it stops, not where the starting
foresaw, but where the matter so carries it. Thus it is a sort of
lingual straggler, if you please, and may be said to wander with
little or no conscience of the rhetorical toilet.

Shakespeare has many periodic sentences: at first he seems to have
rather affected that structure: in the more serious parts of the plays
written in his earlier style it is so common as to be almost
characteristic of them. But, on the whole, he evidently much preferred
writing in straight lines to writing in circles; and this preference
grew stronger as he ripened in his art; so that in his later
workmanship the periodic construction becomes decidedly rare: and the
reason of his so preferring the linear to the circular structure seems
to have been, not only because the former is the more natural and
spontaneous way of speaking, but also because it offers far more scope
for the proper freedom and variety of English colloquial speech. He
has numberless sentences of exquisite beauty of structure; many indeed
of the circular kind, but far more of the linear; and the beaut