The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of English prose.  The ancient and universal restraints were swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.

This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the general decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with the rise of the modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy even to our thoughts.  Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have discussed at the dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn, what is now set down for free debate at ladies’ clubs, and canvassed in the correct columns of the Guardian.

This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature deeply and diversely.  In the hands of the really great masters such as Carlyle, Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the throbbings of their hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal of their inmost souls crying in the market-place, take forcible possession of our affections, and bring them into closer touch with each one of us than was ever possible with the older restrained writers.

But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy; and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master’s hand, has unlocked for us the doors of an Aladdin’s palace!  But even if the restraint of the ancient writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.

“This, I believe,” he wrote, “is the ordinance of the firmament; and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us.  ’The earth shook, the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,’ ’He doth set His bow in the clouds,’ and thus renews, in the sound of every drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love.  ’In them hath He set a tabernacle for the sun,’ whose burning ball, which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity,