The Glory of English Prose / Letters to My Grandson

ar An

he style of all of them possesses something large and resonant, something that may be said to constitute the "

Browne, who lived from 1605 to 1682-displays the development in his style of

s and commanded a wide vocabulary. There is deliberate ingenuity in the framing of his sentences, which arrests attention

have "quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three

graph of it, characte

we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls,-a good way to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others, rather than be los

prose. All that he wrote, both in verse and prose, is severely classic in its form. His Samson Agoni

s and printers of books. And it stands for all time as the first and

me, who sat on Mars Hill and made decrees and passed sentences

nest passages in this grea

them as malefactors: for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest effi

ture, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself; kills the Image of God as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a bu

great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of

books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execut

of the inviolability of

horribly malignant about a wicked book, as it must always be w

ation to generation, and they are never likely to preserve a wicked book

lovin

.