Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to whose volumes?

>>24462871 (OP)
Tennyson.

>>24462871 (OP)
From what little I have read, I can vouch for Walter Scott as meeting your criteria

>>24462871 (OP)
Walter Pater

>>24462871 (OP)
Richard Rolle
Geoffrey Chaucer
Thomas Elyot
Roger Ascham
Sir Walter Raleigh
Edmund Spenser
Philip Sidney
Richard Hooker
John Lyly
Francis Bacon
Thomas Nash
Ben Jonson
Robert Burton
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Browne
John Milton
Jeremy Taylor
Abraham Cowley
Algernon Sidney
John Bunyan
John Dryden
Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift
Joseph Addison
Samuel Johnson
Laurence Sterne
Edward Gibbon
Thomas Taylor
Sir Walter Scott
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Jane Austen
William Hazlitt
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Carlyle
John Henry Newman
Charles Dickens
Walter Pater
Henry James
James Joyce

>>24462871 (OP)
>Scriptorum catalogus. Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equalled to their empire. Ingenium par imperio. We have had many, and in their several ages (to take in but the former seculum) Sir Thomas More, the elder Wiat, Henry Earl of Surrey, Chaloner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were for their times admirable; and the more, because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nicolas Bacon was singular, and almost alone, in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s time. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr. Hooker (in different matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and in whom all vigour of invention and strength of judgment met. The Earl of Essex, noble and high; and Sir Walter Raleigh, not to be contemned, either for judgment or style. Sir Henry Savile, grave, and truly lettered; Sir Edwin Sandys, excellent in both; Lord Egerton, the Chancellor, a grave and great orator, and best when he was provoked; but his learned and able (though unfortunate) successor is he who hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. In short, within his view, and about his times, were all the wits born that could honour a language or help study. Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows backward; so that he may be named and stand as the mark and ακμη of our language.

That is, Sir Thomas More, Sir Thomas Wiat, Henry Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Chaloner, Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Thomas Eliot, Bishop Gardiner, Sir Nicolas Bacon L.K., Sir Philip Sidney, Master Richard Hooker, Robert Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Henry Savile, Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Thomas Egerton L.C., Sir Francis Bacon L.C.

>>24462954
from the thumbnail I thought this was jon tron

>>24462871 (OP)
Be Dryden and Pope's works your study and delight,. Read them by day, and meditate by night.

>>24462999
wrong jon

>>24463116
Pope wasn't really known as an exemplary prose writer, and basing one's prose on verse is always something that should be cautioned against.