In its origin, prose is in no sense an art, and it never has and never will become an art, strictly speaking, as verse is, or painting, or music. Gradually it has found out its capacities; it has discovered how what is useful in it can be trained to beauty; it has learned to set limits to what is unbounded in it, and to follow, at a distance, some of the laws of verse. Gradu ally it has developed laws of its own, which, however, by the nature of its existence, are less definite, less peculiar to it as a form, than those of verse. Everything that touches literature as literature affects prose, which has come to be the larger half of what we call literature.