From the New York Times review of the book In Search of Sir Thomas Browne by Jim Holt:
The history of English prose can be seen as a dialectical struggle between two tendencies: plain versus grand. The plain style aims at ease and lucidity. It favors simply structured sentences, short words of Saxon origin and a conversational tone. It runs the risk of being flat. By contrast, the grand style — also called (by Cyril Connolly) “mandarin” — aims at rhetorical luxuriance. It is characterized by rolling periods decked with balanced subordinate clauses, a polysyllabic Latinate vocabulary, elaborate rhythms, stately epithets, sumptuous metaphors, learned allusions and fanciful turns of phrase. It runs the risk of being ridiculous.
Partisans of the plain style include Dryden, Swift, Shelley (in his letters), Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, Orwell, Hemingway, E.B. White, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, Michael Lewis and The New Yorker. Partisans of the mandarin style include — in addition to its begetters, the scribes of the King James Bible — Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, Addison, Carlyle, Pater, Ruskin, Nabokov, William F. Buckley Jr., Elizabeth Hardwick, Lewis Lapham and Time magazine. (It is an amusing parlor game to extend and modify these lists.)
But the all-time standard-bearer for the mandarin style…
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