ABSTRACT
The study of prose, like the study of any other art, is made more interesting and often more intelligible by some idea of the history of the art. The eighteenth century has been called an age of prose and its great prose writers all have their marked individual styles, though often with a curious similarity of rhythm; this period greatly favoured the antithetical sentence. Burke is, indeed, one of the more ornate stylists of this period, in which simplicity and clarity were often regarded as principal merits. The later nineteenth century had much very ornate prose, notably that of Carlyle and Ruskin, as well as the classicism of Matthew Arnold; and it was a great age of the novel. All good twentieth-century prose is experimental, a specimen shall be taken from the work of one of the many good contemporary writers who use a more or less traditional style.
