Of course, modern times have not given us any oratory superior to that of Demosthenes and Cicero; nor any plain statement of historical fact superior to that of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Tacitus. But art in conversational prose, reduced to writing and made literature, may fairly be said to date from the essayists of Queen Anne’s time--Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, and their fellows; and it was brought to perfection by Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, Irving, and others of their day. In most of this prose we find a new element--humour. The original, characteristic, typical essay is whimsical, sympathetic, kindly, amusing, suggestive, and close to reality. The impassioned appeal of oratory has been adapted to the requirements of reading prose by such writers as De Quincey and Macaulay; but the humorous essay has been by far the more popular. And what is humour? It would be hard to say that it is either beauty, nobility, or truth. The fact is poetry, with its lofty atmosphere, rarefied, artificial, and emotional, is in danger of becoming morbid, unhealthy, and impractical. Humour is the sanitary sea salt that purifies and saves. No one with a sense of humour can get very far away from elemental and obvious facts. Humour is the corrective, the freshener, the health-giver. Its danger is the trivial, the commonplace, and the inconsequent. The primary object of prose is to represent the truth, but in so far as prose is true literature, it must make its appeal to the emotions. The humorous essay must make us feel healthier and more sprightly, the impassioned oratorical picture must fire us with desires and inspire us with courage of a practical and specific kind. Mere logical demonstration, or argumentative appeal, are not in themselves literature because their appeal is not emotional, and so not a part of the vibrating electric fluid of humanity; and beauty plays the subordinate part of furnishing suggestive and illustrative images for the illumination of what is called “the style.” Gradually prose has absorbed all the powers and useful qualities of poetry not inconsistent with its practical and unartificial character. So the characteristics of a good prose style are in many respects not unlike the characteristics of a good poetic style. First, good prose should be rhythmical and musical, though never measured. As prose is never to be sung, the artificial characteristics of music should never be present in any degree; but as poetry in its more highly developed forms has lost its qualities of simple melody and attained characteristics of a more beautiful harmony, so prose, starting with mere absence of roughness and harshness of sound, gradually has attained to something very near akin to the musical harmony of the more refined poetry. Almost the only difference lies in the presence or absence of measure; but this forms a clear dividing line between poetry (reaching down from above) and prose (rising up from below).