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A HISTORY OF

ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO
DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO

OF

ENGLISH PROSE

RHYTHM

BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY

M.A. OXON.; HON. LL.D. ABERD.; HON. D.LITT. DURH.

FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY; HONORARY FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE

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PREFACE

THE work which I am now attempting, and which was, in an indirect fashion, promised or aspired to in the History of English Prosody (iii. 20 and elsewhere), may be said to be a carrying out of lines laid down a good deal earlier than those of the History of Prosody itself. It is now some six and thirty years since Lord Morley of Blackburn, then editor of the Fortnightly Review, after most kindly honouring a draft at sight which I had drawn upon him, uninvited and unintroduced, in the shape of a paper on Charles Baudelaire, asked me to write something else on " English Prose Style,"1 a matter on which, though always interested in it from the time when, as a mere boy, I read De Quincey, I had never yet formulated any very precise ideas. About this time, or shortly after, I came into abundant practice as a reviewer, and had to keep the subject before me; while, some years later still, the late Mr. Kegan Paul asked me to deal still more elaborately with it in the Preface to a collection of Extracts. By this time I had systematised my ideas on the subject to some not inconsiderable extent, and the idea of formal scansion of English prose (if I had known of Bishop Hurd's attempts I certainly had forgotten all about them) first regularly suggested itself. Of this I

1 "Modern English Prose," F.R., February 1876.

2 Specimens of English Prose Style (London, 1885). Both this paper and the preceding are reprinted in Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1892).

3 I did not know Mason's book, v. inf., till much later.

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