long afterwards followed in the wake of the common folk. Butler was now composing the riming couplets that are oftenest in our mouths. Our prose about this time was undergoing a great change; the stately march of Milton and Clarendon was no longer to be copied; English conjunctions and forms compounded since 1300 were to undergo the pruning knife. For instance, we were no longer to write a certain man for quidam; a man, as in the oldest times, was quite enough. Cowley and Baxter about 1650 were the heralds of a new style, that was soon to be brought to further perfection by Dryden and Temple. About that year, 1650, our spelling was settled much as it is now.[1] In 1661 our Prayer Book was revised; are was substituted for be in forty-three places. This was a great victory of the North over the South.[2]
The earlier half of the Eighteenth Century was far more admirable in its English than the latter half. Defoe, Addison, Swift, and Pope are names worthy of all honour; and I could wish that no Latinized terms had been brought in since their day; at least, without good reason given. Compare Ockley, the lion's provider, with Gibbon. Poetry was thriving; and in his Rape of the Lock, Pope beat the French on their own ground; the English Muse, forty-four years after bringing forth the Paradise Lost, showed that she could carve
