accomplished and generally useful English prose. No
stranger instance of prejudice can be given than that Coleridge, on the
point of asking, and justly, from Dryden "a stricter grammar," should exalt
to the skies a writer compared to whom Dryden is grammatically impeccable.

But a recognition of the fact that Taylor distinctly belongs to the
antinomians of English prose, or at least to those guiltless heathens who
lived before the laws of it had been asserted, can not in any competent
critic dull the sense of the wonderful beauty of his style. It has been
said that this beauty is entirely of the florid and ornate order, lending
itself in this way easily enough to the witty and well-worded, though
unjust and ungenerous censure which South pronounced on it after the
author's death. It may or may not be that the phrases there censured, "The
fringes of the north star," and "The dew of angels' wings," and "Thus have
I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion," are not of that "apostolic
plainness" that a Christian minister's speech should have. But they and
their likes are extremely beautiful--save that in literature no less than
in theology South has justly perstringed Taylor's constant and most
unworthy affectation of introducing a simile by "so I have seen." In the
next age the phrase was tediously abused, and in the age after, and ever
since, it became and has remained mere burlesque; but it was never good;
and in the two fine specimen passages which follow it is a distinct blot:--

_The Prayers of Anger and of Lust._

"Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our
thoughts, the evenness of recollection, the seat of meditation,
the rest of our cares, and the calm of our tempest. Prayer is the
issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts; it is the daughter
of charity and the sister of meekness; and he that prays to God
with an angry--that is a troubled and discomposed--spirit, is
like him that retires into a battle to meditate and sets up his
closet in the outquarters of an army, and chooses a frontier
garrison to be wise in. Anger is a perfect alienation of the mind
from prayer, and therefore is contrary to that attention which
presents our prayers in a right line to God. For so have I seen a
lark rising from his bed of grass, soaring upwards and singing as
he rises and hopes to get to Heaven and climb above the clouds;
but the poor