Matters of Style

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J. Mitchell Morse’s textbook on English prose style. * INTRODUCTION: Good Tea, Good Mayonnaise, Good Prose, 3 * BALANCED STYLES, 13 ** Symmetry, Balance, Antithesis, Parallelism, 15 ** Ancient, Medieval, and Early English-Renaissance Classicists, 21 *** Isocrates, 22 *** Cicero, 24 *** Sallust, 26 *** Seneca, 27 *** Tacitus, 27 *** St. Ambrose, 28 *** St. Augustine, 28 *** St. Anselm of Canterbury, 31 *** Bishop Hugh Latimer, 33 *** Thomas Lever, 34 *** Roger Ascham, 35 *** EXERCISES, 36 ** Euphuism, 38 *** John Lyly, 39 *** Robert Greene, 43 *** Thomas Lodge, 4 *** Henry Chettle, 48 *** Jobn Florio, 49 *** EXERCISE, 50 ** Neo-Classicism, 50 *** Isaac Newton, 55 *** Samuel Johnson, 59 *** Edward Gibbon, 63 *** Edmund Burke, 66 *** Thomas Paine, 69 *** Thomas Babington Macaulay, 70 *** P. T. Barnum, 71 *** EXERCISES, 72 * VARIETIES OF POETIC PROSE, 77 ** The King James Bible, 86 ** Lafcadio Hearn, 88 ** Oscar Wilde, 93 ** Francis W. Bain, 95 ** Sir Thomas Malory, 97 ** James Joyce, 99 ** Isak Dinesen, 101 ** Vladimir Nabokov, 102 ** Samuel Beckett, 103 ** EXERCISES, 105 * RABELAISIAN STYLES, 109 ** Francois Rabelais, 114 ** William Shakespeare, 122 ** Thomas Dekker, 125 ** Laurence Sterne, 127 ** Herman Melville, 134 ** James Joyce, 137 ** EXERCISES, 138 * SOME VICTORIAN STYLES, 141 ** Thomas Carlyle, 147 ** Charles Dickens, 152 ** John Ruskin, 180 ** Henry James, 185 ** EXERCISES, 188 * SOME TWENTIETH-CENTURY STYLES, 191 ** James Joyce, 198 ** Gertrude Stein, 204 ** Ernest Hemingway, 242 ** William Faulkner, 245 ** John Dos Passos, 249 ** Samuel Beckett, 261 ** Vladimir Nabokov, 264 ** Thorstein Veblen, 266 ** EXERCISES, 269 * APPENDICES, 273 1. “The Prankquean”: A Fairy Tale from FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, 275 2. “The Ear and the Mouth,” by André Spire, 279 3. “Calder’s Mobiles,” by Jean-Paul Sartre, 312 * POSTSCRIPT, 317