ABSTRACT
Ornament in style may be of many kinds. A piece of prose may be enriched by many figures of speech which are classified in various ancient and modern books on rhetoric. Real simplicity is not at all easy to achieve; the greatest simple styles have a directness that few of us can hope to imitate. The greatest period for very ornate style was probably the Elizabethan and Jacobean period; but there have been writers of ornate style at all periods. A concise style is not necessarily without ornament; there is a kind of very epigrammatical style in which the conciseness itself is not only the individuality of the style but its decoration. The simple style is preferred for ordinary light literature and for the newspapers, which are, all too exclusively, the models for style studied unconsciously, by people who read little else.
