Defoe is as
plain and easy and polished as Swift, yet it is certain his amazing
activity and productiveness never permitted him to look back over a
sentence he had written. Something had happened, that is, to the English
language. The assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete
terms of speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed
form, shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of
itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it had
not possessed in Elizabethan times. When Shakespeare wrote
"What cares these roarers for the name of king,"
he was using, as students of his language never tire of pointing out to
us, a perfectly correct local grammatical form. Fifty years after that
line was written, at the Restoration, local forms had dropped out of
written English. We had acquired a normal standard of language, and
either genius or labour was polishing it for literary uses.
What they did for prose these "Classic" writers did even more
exactly--and less happily--for verse. Fashions often become exaggerated
before their disappearance, and the decadence of Elizabethan romanticism
had produced poetry the wildness and extravagance of whose images was
well-nigh unbounded.
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