Prose

Latin.

The Romans obeyed the universal law by cultivating verse long before they essayed the writing of prose. The earliest historians of whom we have definite knowledge, Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus, wrote in Greek. The earliest annalist who wrote in Latin was Hemina; the works of all these historians are lost. A great deal of primitive Roman prose was occupied with jurisprudence and political oratory. By universal consent the first master of Latin prose was Cato, the loss of whose chief works is to be deplored; we possess from his pen only a treatise on agriculture. In the next generation we are told that oratory was carried to the highest point by Marcus Antonius and Licinius Crassus—"by a happy chance their styles were exactly comple mentary to one another." Unfortunately none but inconsiderable fragments survive to display their qualities. Happily, however, those qualities were combined in a man of genius, whose writings have come down to us ; this is Cicero, whose prose exhibits the Latin language to no less advantage than Plato's does the Greek. From 7o to 6o B.C. Cicero's literary work lay mainly in the field of rhetoric; after his exile he was chiefly occupied with theoretical treatises. The beautiful essays of his old age comprise two little masterpieces, De arnicitia and De senectute (45 B.c.). It is to the collection of the private letters of Cicero, published after his death by Atticus and Tiro, that we owe our intimate knowledge of the age in which he lived, and these have ever since been held models of epistolary prose. Of Cicero's greatest contemporary, Julius Caesar, much less has been preserved, and this is unfortu nate because Roman critical opinion placed him among the very chief of prose-writers; but we retain his Commentaries. The prose of Sallust, who followed Caesar, is hard, brief and sententious.

The writers who succeeded him neglected these qualities, and Latin prose became more diffuse and rhetorical. But it was wielded by one writer of the highest genius, Titus Livius, who enriched the tissue of Latin prose with ornament which hitherto had been confined to poetry; this enables him "to advance without flagging through the long and intricate narrative where a simpler diction must necessarily have grown monotonous" (Mackail). The periodic structure of Latin prose, which had been developed by Cicero, was carried even further by Livy. The style of Pollio, who wrote a History of the Civil Laws, was much admired, and the loss of this work must be deplored. A different species of prose, the plebeius sermo, or colloquial speech of the poor, is partly preserved in the fragments of a Neronian writer, Petronius Arbi ter. Of the Latin prose-writers of the silver age, Seneca, Quin tilian and Tacitus, nothing need here be said.

English.

The independence of English prose is a fact which rests on a firm basis. "The Code of Laws of King Ine" dates from the 8th century, and there are various other legal documents which may be hardly literature in themselves, but which are worded in a way that seems to denote the existence of a literary tradition. After the Danish invasion, Latin almost ceased to be known, and translations began to be required. In 887, Alfred wrote in English, with the help of scholars, his Hand-Book; this, probably the earliest specimen of finished English prose, is unhap pily lost. His English version of the Cura pastoralis was prob

ably completed in 890. Later still Alfred produced translations from Bede, Orosius, Boethius and other Latin authors, and, in 900, closing a translation from St. Augustine, we read "Here end the sayings of King Alfred." The prose of Alfred is simple and clear without pretension. After him the first name of eminence which we encounter is that of Aelfric, who, about 997, began to translate, or rather to paraphrase, certain portions of the Bible into a very finished English. A little later vigorous prose was put forth by Wulfstan, archbishop of York (d. 1023). At the Con quest, the progress of English prbse was violently checked, and, as has been said, it "was just kept alive, but only like a man in catalepsy." The Annals of Winchester, Worcester and Peter borough were carried on in English until 1154. Except in a few remote monasteries, English ceased to be used, even for religious purposes, and the literature became exclusively Latin or French. We may. perhaps say that modern English prose begins with the Testament of Love of Thomas Usk (c. 1388). To the same period belong The Tale of Melibee and The Parson's Sermon by Chaucer; the treatises of John of Trevisa, whose style in the Polychronicon has a good deal of vigour ; and the three versions of the Travels of Jean a Barbe, formerly attributed to "Sir John. Mandeville." The composite text of these last-mentioned ver sions really forms the earliest specimen of purely secular prose which can be said to possess genuine literary value, but again the fact, which has only lately been ascertained, that "Sir John Man deville" was not an original English writer robs it of much of its interest.

The anonymous compiler-translator can no longer be styled "the father of English prose." That name appears to belong to John Wyclif, who, in the course of his career as a controver sialist, more and more completely abandoned Latin for English. The translation of the English Bible was begun by Nicholas Here ford. The completion of this work is usually attributed, but on insufficient grounds, to Wyclif himself. A new version was almost immediately started by John Purvey, another Wyclifite, who completed it in 1388. We are still among translators, but towards the middle of the 15th century Englishmen began, somewhat timidly, to write original prose. Capgrave, an Augustinian friar, wrote a chronicle of English history down to 1417; Sir John Fortescue produced about 1475 a book on The Governance of England; and Reginald Pecock attacked the Lollards in his Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy (c. 145o). The prose of Pecock is sometimes strangely modern, and to know the ordinary English prose of the 15th century it is more useful to turn to The Paston Letters. The introduction of printing into England is coeval with a sudden development of English prose, a marvellous example of which is to be seen in Caxton's edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, in which the capacities of the English language for melody and sweetness were for the first time displayed. Caxton himself, Lord Berners and Lord Rivers, added an element of literary merit to their useful translations.