Each of these splits up into two kinds, according as the writer has or lacks "soul." Or, if you think "soul" the more important differentia, we will say there are artists with "soul" and artists without "soul," and that some of each sort work in prose and some in verse. But the classification is a crass one, and the English language unfortunately does not possess words to express the distinctions, while the ambiguous associations of the word "prose" increase the difficulty of inventing them. We do not even possess any equivalent of the French "prosateur," though I see no reason why "prosator" should not be used. Without neologisms, and avoiding the ambiguous adjective "prosaic," and using "poetic" to express "soulfulness" and not the handling of metres, we get 1. Poetic Verse-Artists. (Poets.) 2. Non-Poetic Verse-Artists. (Verse-Writers.) 3. Poetic Prose-Artists. (Prose Poets.) 4. Non-Poetic Prose-Artists. (Prose Writers.) Keats is a verse poet, Pope a verse writer, Buskin a prose poet, and Hallam a prose writer. * * * * * The two great writers of our day who have sinned most against the laws of writing are Browning and Meredith, the one in verse, the other in prose. I speak not merely of obscurities, to perpetrate which is in every sense to stand in one's own light, but of sheer fatuities, tweakings-of-the-nose to our reverend mother-tongue, as either might have expressed it. But what I am most concerned to suggest here is that the distinction between prose and poetry (using prose to mean artistically wrought language) will not survive investigation. The popular instinct has long ago seen that the vital thing is the _matter_--that it is profanity to call that "poetry" which is only verse; it remains to be recognised that even the distinction of form rests only on the non-recognition of the rhythm of "prose,"--a rhythm that is not metre in so far as metre has the sense of regular measure, but may for all that have laws of its own, which await the discoverer and the systematiser. The affinity of prose-rhythms is, I have hinted, with the higher developments of music, which, compared with the simple tunes of the street, are as apparently lawless and unlicensed as is prose compared to verse. And as it is not poets who follow laws, but precede them--as trochee and iambic, alcaic and hexameter, are the inventions of grammarians following on the trail of genius--so it behoves the Aristotle who would discover the laws of the rhythm of prose to study the masters of the art, masters by instinct and a faultless ear and the grace of God, and endeavour by patient induction to wrest from their sentences the secrets of their harmonies. Who will write the prosody of prose?