July 20. — I sometimes like to make clear to
myself what are the great sentences in English
that appeal to me most. As to Raleigh's in-



GREAT ENGLISH SENTENCES 201

vocation of Death, as the most magnificent, I
seldom vary. It may not be a perfect sentence,
one touch more to its grandiosity and it
might topple over into absurdity. But the
most magnificent it still remains. The most
beautiful to me is Temple's sentence on Life :
" When al,l is done, human life is, at the greatest
and the best but like a froward child, that
must be played with and humoured a little, to
keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the
care is over." There is a cadence there to
thrill along the nerves as in no other sentence
I can recall. (One might find others perhaps
in Saintsbury's History of English Prose Bhythm,
a delightful book by an author with a wonder-
ftdly large and miscellaneous appetite for litera-
ture.) Is it strange, or is it not strange, I ask
myself, that the two writers who thus summed
up Death, and Life were not men of letters
but a man of action, a man of affairs ? They
never twice approached that height, though
Temple, at all events, made other attempts to
say the same thing, as when he wrote : " After
all, life is but a trifle, that should be played
with till we lose it, and then it is not worth
regretting." As the greatest masters of sen-
tences, however, others nearly followed — leav-
ing aside our translators of the Bible, who were



202 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS

superb — and I would name first Bacon and
Landor, again a man of affairs and a man who
would, if he could, have been a man of action.
