The stylistic aspect of the Romancer’s problem is well illustrated by the _Apologie_ prefaced to his _Aretina_ (1660) by Sir George Mackenzie. This is the critical exercise of a young man in search of a style. Sidney, Scudéry, Barkley and Broghill are his saints and patrons if only because they had shown a distaste for “things impracticable ... above the reach of man’s power” such as filled the pages of _Amadis de Gaulle_. But _serious_ Romance (and _Aretina_ is that) can “strain the christal streams of vertue from the puddle of interest”; it allures “lazy Ladies and luxurious Gallants ... to spend in their Chambers some hours, which else, the one would consecrate to the bed and the other to the Bordell.” The one real contribution he makes, however, is in his insistence on avoiding “the style which because of its soaring pitch was inimitable.” In his own writing there is much that savours of copy-book conceits but a style “flourished with similies,” such as “Barrasters” use, is by no means to be condemned. Mackenzie seems to be in two minds, pulled this way and that in response to two guiding notions and allegiances. In his _Idea Eloquentiae Forensis Hodierna_ (1681) he maintains that “Eloquence is not only allowable, but necessary ... where Passions are to be excited.” To “the profluvium Asiaticum” of the Codex and the (so-called) novels of the lawyers, he opposes the narrowness of “the short or Laconick Way” which was the only excellence of judges. In his condemnation of bombastic periphrasis and the “carminated” hyperbole of Browne and Charlton, he would have included some, at least, of the pretty effects so carefully studied by “a ridiculous caball of Ladies at Paris.” Nevertheless the one style he recommends is that “where the cadence is sweet, and the epithets well adapted ... and this is that style which is used at Court, and is paterned to us by eloquent Scuderie.” He never attained to that kind of writing himself in _Aretina_ but the new style, for all that, was presently to be succinctly catalogued in all its essentials by the members of the Royal Society and was to provide the staple of the English novel when it ventured outside “the circumference of wit” and attained popularity in Defoe and Fielding.