tences, which, to a modern ear, make far too heavy a demand on the attention, and are, at any rate, strikingly contrasted with the modest periods and unambitious structure of the most popular models of English composition. Col. Mure, in accounting for this attribute of style, traces it to the rhetorical influence dominant in Attic literature, which was cast in the mould and founded on the principles of public oratory; not, like that of modern Europe, on the forms of written narrative. The fact is undoubted, and if the reason seems paradoxical, the learned colonel* quickly reassures us. 'It is possible,' says that eminent critic, that the embarrassment which we experience in those long-drawn periods which, in the pages of the best Greek authors, so often puzzle the modern student, was but little felt by the more subtle intellect of the Attic reader. Trained from his youth to follow with intense interest the discussions of the senate or the lawcourt, through the mazes of acute argument or animated peroration, elucidated and enforced by all the aids of voice, countenance and gesture, which an accomplished Attic orator had at command, he transferred the habit thus acquired, of alternately concentrating and subdividing his attention, from his forensic attendance to his chamber studies; and found as little difficulty in apprehending an elaborately prolonged period when brought under the one sense in a written form, as when conveyed to the other from the lips of an orator.' It is, indeed, a condition of success in all literature and eloquence, that it be studiously wrought into unison with the aesthetical qualities of its audience. Very recent experience will supply an illustration. Every Englishman is familiar with the transition from the proverbial eloquence of the unreformed Parlia

* Lit. of Greece, vol. iv. p. 128.

ment to the sober array of facts and figures which become the sedate and business-like tone in which Mr. John Bull loves to transact his affairs. The late Sir Robert Peel soon descried the altered sympathies of the house, and adjusted his oratory to the new exigencies of debate, so happily sketched in a fragment which survives among his memoirs. He no longer defended unpopular institutions by the analogy of the Roman Tribunate; and scarcely deserved the sarcastic sneer which Mr. D'Israeli, some fourteen years after the consummation of that great political change, directed against his 'Virgilian quotations,' which, indeed, were few and far between. And now the listening senate rarely hangs on lips eloquent in historical parallel, and rich in classic imagery and illustration. We will not underrate the highly-wrought argumentative cast of Mr. Gladstone's masterpieces; but, Sir Edward Bulwer and Mr. D'Israeli are, perhaps, the only speakers whose refinement of thought and brilliancy of style carry us back to the orators of other days-to the classic eloquence of Canning, and the immortal tones of the elder Pitt. It is otherwise in that illustrious assembly in which the patrician order is embodied. The lords rarely engage in debate, unless qualified by aptitude as well as ambition: they are not required to conciliate a bustling throng of popular representatives; and they address themselves to the subject, not to the interest-still less to constituents out of doors.

But this is a digression. Aristotle's† injunctions for the structure of periods nearly approach the rules of Cicero,

* See Sir R. Peel's speech against the Reform Bill. HANSARD, Parl. Deb. He quotes at length the celebrated passage in which the Tribunate is surveyed as a political instrument flexible to evil but mightier for good. CICERO, de Legg. iii. 10.

+ Rhet. iv. 8, 9.

who sometimes translates and often cites the Stagyrite, though he accords him no invariable deference. His precepts must be construed as applying to the Periodic style; for they do not square with his own definition of the Sententious order, which, he remarks, was rather unfashionable in his own days. He prefers the Period, because its balanced clauses are grateful to the ear, and, possessing the charm of number, are easy of remembrance. Style, he says, must be founded on the laws of harmony: it must, therefore, be rhythmical,+ but not metrical, or it will excite suspicion of artifice, and encroach on the poetical domain. For this last reason, too, not every kind of rhythm is appropriate the Heroic he discards as too stately, the Iambic as too familiar, the Trochaic‡ as too tripping. The Pæon he recommends, because its rhythm is irreducible to metre: the first Pæon [~~~~] he would place at the commencement, the fourth [] at the end of a sentence. For the first syllable, which is long, affords a natural pause; and thus the rhthym of itself warns the reader of the fall of the period. He insists on the balance of proportion in the various members of the sentence; for if, he says, the legitimate dimensions of a clause are amputated, the reader feels an unpleasant hitch: while long-drawn periods leave him behind, like desultory dithyrambic odes. He mentions, without any expression of

:

* The sententious structure is in obvious unison with the didactic style, and many an Aristotelian passage illustrates Aristotle's definition. Even the connexion of his sentences is not always clear. 'Magna contentio animi adhibenda est,' says Tully, 'in explicando Aristotele.' The poet Gray likened his style to a table of contents. + e.g. The rhythm of a dactyl and an anapæst is the same: the metre is different.

'Jolly mortals, fill your glasses; noble deeds are done by wine.'

disfavour or regard, the well-known figure Parisosis-the favorite ornament of Isocrates, which measures with the exactitude of a tailor the corresponding clauses of a sentence. Like our Gibbon, he evidently leans too strongly towards an antithetical structure: and it is much to be feared, from his copious illustrations of Paromoiosis, that he was disposed to patronise that odious vulgarity— alliteration.

If the sententious style has suffered in ancient criticism, it has indemnified itself by the patronage of a great historian. We are much mistaken if Aristotle would not have applied the epithet 'jointed' to many a passage in Macaulay's History of England. It is invidious

'Egregio inspersos reprendere corpore nævos.'

Who, indeed, but another Macaulay, can do justice to his affluent imagery and profuse eloquence, and to the magical felicity with which he brings out the historical picturesque? a trait in which he is inferior to none but Livy. Still, it is curious to observe the systematic straining after perspicuity* which, at some expense both of coherency of structure and of condensation, induces him constantly to repeat+ the subject instead of employing the pronoun, and to reduce so many of his sentences to the expression of a simple idea, stripped of those accessory members which are as the foliage of composition, and whose harmonious embodiment fills the orbit of a period. Such qualities of style are the more open to remark, as they are by no means common either in the earlier his

* 'The sententious Greek style is also noted,' says Col. Mure, 'by ancient critics for its perspicuity.' DION. HAL. Jud. de Thucyd. 23.

In a letter to Sir E. L. Bulwer, shown to the author by the courtesy of the honorable baronet, Mr. Macaulay defends this and similar traits of style on the ground of their exemption from all liability to mistake.

torians of England, or in contemporary authorship abroad. The sentences of Clarendon are often as prolonged and as intricate as any in Thucydides; and Sir Archibald Alison justly complains of the interminable length and tortuous involution of sentences in German composition, especially in the writings of Kant.

The translator of Thucydides, and especially of the speeches interwoven with the thread of his narrative, not unfrequently finds it essential to break up a period into several sentences, for the long involution of clauses in which the subordinate ideas are arranged, demands too sustained an effort of attention for the English reader. Conversely, the rule holds to a certain extent, in rendering English into Greek: for the Greek surpasses the English language in flexibility, and in the concise embodiment of ideas, though not, perhaps, in copiousness of terms. Much must depend on the character of the passage, whether historical, oratorical, or didactic; much also on the student's taste and resources, whether of idiom or arrangement.

II. CONNECTION OF SENTENCES.-English composition is not inferior to Greek, in the real or logical connection of sentences. But the Greek idiom possesses a great advantage in its capacity of giving a more clear, concise and flexible expression to the terms of relation-whether copulative, concessive, adversative, causal, or negative-subsisting between the clauses and sentences which constitute the links of a paragraph. For instance, if we look at the copulative conjunctions, we shall find that their merely connexive is clearly distinguished from their incressive force. Thus, Tè- Té, which, however, is not so common in Prose as in Poetry, signifies that the clauses it connects are parallel to each other-as-so: on the other hand, where Tè alone is used, the connection is less close; while,