“Cranmer could vindicate himself from the charge of being a heretic only by arguments which made him out to be a murderer.”
“The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”
Besides these elements of epigram and antithesis, there is a vast wealth of illustration, brought from the stores of a memory which never seemed to forget anything. He studied every sentence with the greatest care and minuteness, and would often rewrite paragraphs and even whole chapters, until he was satisfied with the variety and clearness of the expression. “He could not rest,” it was said, “until the punctuation was correct to a comma; until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like clear running water.” But, above all things, he strove to make his style perfectly lucid and immediately intelligible. He is fond of countless details; but he so masters and marshals these details that each only serves to throw more light upon the main statement. His prose may be described as pictorial prose. The character of his mind was, like Burke’s, combative and oratorical; and he writes with the greatest vigour and animation when he is attacking a policy or an opinion.
[ CHAPTER IX.]
THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
[1.] Science.—The second half of the nineteenth century is distinguished by the enormous advance made in science, and in the application of science to the industries and occupations of the people. Chemistry and electricity have more especially made enormous strides. Within the last twenty years, chemistry has remade itself into a new science; and electricity has taken a very large part of the labour of mankind upon itself. It carries our messages round the world—under the deepest seas, over the highest mountains, to every continent, and to every great city; it lights up our streets and public halls; it drives our engines and propels our trains. But the powers of imagination, the great literary powers of poetry, and of eloquent prose,—especially in the domain of fiction,—have not decreased because science has grown. They have rather shown stronger developments. We must, at the same time, remember that a great deal of the literary work published by the writers who lived, or are still living, in the latter half of this century, was written in the former half. Thus, Longfellow was a man of forty-three, and Tennyson was forty-one, in the year 1850; and both had by that time done a great deal of their best work. The same is true of the prose-writers, Thackeray, Dickens, and Ruskin.
[2.] Poets and Prose-Writers.—The six greatest poets of the latter half of this century are Longfellow, a distinguished American poet, Tennyson, Mrs Browning, Robert Browning,
William Morris, and Matthew Arnold. Of these, Mrs Browning and Longfellow are dead—Mrs Browning having died in 1861, and Longfellow in 1882.—The four greatest writers of prose are Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Ruskin. Of these, only Ruskin is alive.
[3.] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), the most popular of American poets, and as popular in Great Britain as he is in the United States, was born at Portland, Maine, in the year 1807. He was educated at Bowdoin College, and took his degree there in the year 1825. His profession was to have been the law; but, from the first, the whole bent of his talents and character was literary. At the extraordinary age of eighteen the professorship of modern languages in his own college was offered to him; it was eagerly accepted, and in order to qualify himself for his duties, he spent the next four years in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. His first important prose work was Outre-Mer, or a Pilgrimage beyond the Sea. In 1837 he was offered the Chair of Modern Languages and Literature in Harvard University, and he again paid a visit to Europe—this time giving his thoughts and study chiefly to Germany, Denmark, and Scandinavia. In 1839 he published the prose romance called Hyperion. But it was not as a prose-writer that Longfellow gained the secure place he has in the hearts of the English-speaking peoples; it was as a poet. His first volume of poems was called Voices of the Night, and appeared in 1841; Evangeline was published in 1848; and Hiawatha, on which his poetical reputation is perhaps most firmly based, in 1855. Many other volumes of poetry—both original and translations—have also come from his pen; but these are the best. The University of Oxford created him Doctor of Civil Law in 1869. He died at Harvard in the year 1882. A man of singularly mild and gentle character, of sweet and charming manners, his own lines may be applied to him with perfect appropriateness—
“His gracious presence upon earth