sometimes
forgets the period altogether.

It must be remembered that Coleridge in these remarks was fighting the
battle of the recoverers of our great seventeenth century writers against
the devotees of "correctness," and that in the very same context he makes
the unpardonable assertion that Gibbon's manner is "the worst of all," and
that Tacitus "writes in falsetto as compared to Tully." This is to "fight a
prize" in the old phrase, not to judge from the catholic and universal
standpoint of impartial criticism; and in order to reduce Coleridge's
assertions to that standard we must abate nearly as much from his praise of
Taylor as from his abuse of Gibbon--an abuse, by the way, which is
strangely contrasted with praise of "Junius." It is not true that, except
by great complaisance of the reader, Jeremy Taylor's long sentences are at
once understandable. They may, of course, and generally can be understood
_kata to semaino menon_, as a telegram with half the words left out may at
the other end of the scale be understood. But they constantly withstand
even a generous parser, even one who is to the fullest extent ready to
allow for idiom and individuality. They abuse in particular the conjunction
to a most enormous extent--coupling by its means propositions which have no
logical connection, which start entirely different trains of thought, and
which are only united because carelessness and fashion combined made it
unnecessary for the writer to take the little extra trouble necessary for
their separation. Taylor will, in the very middle of his finest passages,
and with hardly so much as a comma's break, change _oratio obliqua_ to
_oratio recta_, interrupt the sequence of tenses, make his verbs agree with
the nearest noun, irrespective of the connection, and in short, though he
was, while in Wales, a schoolmaster for some time, and author of a
grammatical treatise, will break Priscian's head with the calmest
unconcern. It is quite true that these faults mainly occur in his more
rhetorical passages, in his exercises rather of spoken than of written
prose. But that, as any critic who is not an advocate must see, is no
palliation. The real palliation is that the time had not yet aroused itself
to the consciousness of the fact that letting English grammar at one moment
go to the winds altogether, and at the next subjecting it to the most
inappropriate rules and licenses of Latin, was not the way to secure the
establishment of an