In some authors of the period we find this desire for unornamented style degenerating into coarseness and ugliness. Such a one is =Jeremy Collier (1650–1726)=, whose _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage_ (1698) caused a great commotion in its day. It attacked the vices of the stage with such vigor that it is said to have driven some of the playwrights from their evil courses. The style of this famous book is so colloquial that it becomes in places ungrammatical. =Thomas Sprat (1635–1713)= was another disciple of the same school. He wrote on the newly formed Royal Society, which demanded from its members, “a close, naked, natural way of speaking.” This expresses the new development quite well. A greater man than Sprat but a fellow-member of the Royal Society, was =John Locke (1632–1704)=, who in his famous _Essay concerning Human Understanding_ (1690) put the principle into practice. Locke’s style is bare to baldness, but it is clear. We give an example: Some men are remarked for pleasantness in raillery; others, for apologues, and apposite, diverting stories. This is apt to be taken for the effect of pure nature, and that the rather, because it is not got by rules, and those who excel in either of them, never purposely set themselves to the study of it as an art to be learnt. But yet it is true, that at first some lucky hit, which took with somebody, and gained him commendation, encouraged him to try again, inclined his thoughts and endeavours that way, till at last he insensibly got a facility in it without perceiving how; and that is attributed wholly to nature, which was much more the effect of use and practice. I do not deny that natural disposition may often give the first rise to it; but that never carries a man far without use and exercise, and it is practice alone that brings the powers of the mind as well as those of the body to their perfection. Many a good poetic vein is buried under a trade, and never produces anything for want of improvement. We see the ways of discourse and reasoning are very different, even concerning the same matter, at court and in the university. And he that will go but from Westminster Hall to the Exchange, will find a different genius and turn in their ways of talking; and one cannot think that all whose lot fell in the city were born with different parts from those who were bred at the university or inns of court. TABLE TO ILLUSTRATE THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY FORMS