Excerpt from A History of English Prose Rhythm The work which I am now attempting, and which was, in an indirect fashion, promised or aspired to in the History of English Prosody (iii. 20 and elsewhere), may be said to be a carrying out of lines laid down a good deal earlier than those of the History of Prosody itself. It is now some six and thirty years since Lord Morley of Blackburn, then editor of the Fortnightly Review, after most kindly honouring a draft at sight which I had drawn upon him, uninvited and unintroduced, in the shape of a paper on Charles Baudelaire, asked me to write something else on "English Prose Style," a matter on which, though always interested in it from the time when, as a mere boy, I read De Quincey, I had never yet formulated any very precise ideas. About this time, or shortly after, I came into abundant practice as a reviewer, and had to keep the subject before me; while, some years later still, the late Mr. Kegan Paul asked me to deal still more elaborately with it in the Preface to a collection of Extracts. By this time I had systematised my ideas on the subject to some not inconsiderable extent, and the idea of formal scansion of English prose (if I had known of Bishop Hurd's attempts I certainly had forgotten all about them) first regularly suggested itself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.