It meant for England the disuse of the turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician Sir Thomas Browne.
But genius like Bunyan's apart, there is nothing in the world more difficult than to write with the easy and forthright simplicity of talk, as any one may see who tries for himself--or even compares the letter-writing with the conversation of his friends.

So that this desire of simplicity, of clarity, of lucidity led at once to a more deliberate art.

Dryden and Swift and Addison were assiduous in their labour with the file; they excel all their predecessors in polish as much as the writers of the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same quality.
Not that it was all the result of deliberate art; in a way it was in the air, and quite unlearned people--journalists and pamphleteers and the like who wrote unconsciously and hurriedly to buy their supper--partook of it as well as leisured people and conscious artists.

Defoe is as plain and easy and polished as Swift, yet it is certain his amazing activity and productiveness never permitted him to look back over a sentence he had written.

Something had happened, that is, to the English language.