ease and directness were the aims the society set before its members where their writing was concerned.  “The Royal Society,” wrote the Bishop of Rochester, its first historian, “have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear sense, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars.”  Artisans, countrymen, and merchants—­the ideal had been already accepted in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word that was not in the vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, Moliere making his washerwoman first critic of his comedies.  It meant for England the disuse of the turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician Sir Thomas Browne.

But genius like Bunyan’s apart, there is nothing in the world more difficult than to write with the easy and forthright simplicity of talk, as any one may see who tries for himself—­or even compares the letter-writing with the conversation of his friends.  So that this desire of simplicity, of clarity, of lucidity led at once to a more deliberate art.  Dryden and Swift and Addison were assiduous in their labour with the file; they excel all their predecessors in polish as much as the writers of the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same quality.  Not that it was all the result of deliberate art; in a way it was in the air, and quite unlearned people—­journalists and pamphleteers and the like who wrote unconsciously and hurriedly to buy their supper—­partook of it as well as leisured people and conscious artists.  Defoe is as plain and easy and polished as Swift, yet it is certain his amazing activity and productiveness never permitted him to look back over a sentence he had written.  Something had happened, that is, to the English language.  The assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete terms of speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed form, shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it had not possessed in Elizabethan times.  When Shakespeare wrote

“What cares these roarers for the name of king,”

he was using, as students of his language never tire of pointing out to us, a perfectly correct local grammatical form.  Fifty years after that line was written, at the Restoration, local forms had dropped out of written English.  We had acquired a normal standard of language, and either genius or labour was polishing it for literary uses.