But I have lingered too long with this favourite poet of mine and left myself room only to hand you the thread by following which you will come to the melodious philosophising of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—­

     Let me not to the marriage of true Minds
       Admit impediment.  Love is not love
     Which alters where it alteration finds
       Or bends with the remover to remove.

Note the Latin words ‘impediment,’ ‘alteration,’ ‘remove.’  We are using the language of philosophy here or, rather, the ‘universal language,’ which had taken over the legacy of Greek.  You may trace the use of it growing as, for example, you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books:  and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare the miracle.

The education of Prose was more difficult, and went through more violent convulsions.  I suppose that the most of us—­if, after reading a quantity of Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain truth, undaunted by the name of a great epoch—­would confess to finding the mass of it clotted in sense as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment almost intolerable after the simple melodious clarity of Malory and Berners.  I, at any rate, must own that the most of Elizabethan prose pleases me little; and I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of such stuff as disgraced the already disgraceful Martin Marprelate Controversy, but of such as a really ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe could write at his average.  For a sample:—­

English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as ‘Blood is a beggar’ and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches....  Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if’s and and’s, and others, while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the city, and spend two or three hours in turning over the French Doudie, where they attract more infection in one minute than they can do eloquence all the days of their life by conversing with any authors of like argument.

This may be worth studying historically, to understand the difficulties our prose had to encounter and overcome.  But no one would seriously propose it as a model for those who would write well, which is our present business.  I have called it ‘clotted.’  It is, to use a word of the time, ‘farced’ with conceits; it needs straining.

Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, fumbling, to say something:  that is, to make something.  It is not, like modern Jargon, trying to dodge something.  English prose, in short, just here is passing through a period of puberty, of green sickness:  and, looking at it historically, we may own that its throes are commensurate with the stature of the grown man to be.