In chapters 2 and 3 the word “low” was applied to early eighteenth-century prose; and lowness was associated with a certain vocabulary, certain kinds of metaphors, “homely,” rural, everyday, and common: Lane's “blunt end of the Wedg,” Swift's house on fire that neighbors “run with Buckets to quench.” Chapter 4 investigated some of the uses that periodic sentences can be put to, including the high eloquence of Burke and Gibbon. “High” and “low” describe the end points of a hierarchy of styles constructed according to the rules of decorum; these are concepts that sometimes dominated and always influenced the prose compositions of educated persons from classical times at least until 1800. As chapter 4 explored the expressive potential of loose and periodic styles, so chapter 5 will inventory some of the variations played on high and low language in the eighteenth century. My thesis is that as English prose became more written and more obviously “rhetorical,” it was able to exploit the two extremes of high and low more effectively. We find this capacity most completely realized not in Johnson, who wrote grand prose and understood tragedy, but in Johnson's biographer, whose literary instincts were comic and anecdotal.

Boswell's Life of Johnson splendidly embodies the verbal energies implicit in the separation of styles. Language and style in this long, lopsided work illuminate contradictions that turn out to be essential to Boswell's biography. It seems to me that the mix of “high” and “low” language in Boswell's Life would not have been possible for writers of the first half of the century.