Beautiful writing

No, not an entry called Beautiful Writing, just beautiful writing in general.

The great encyclopedias were carefully crafted, edited and written by professional writers, often some of the best minds who studied a subject, but almost always the writing was beautiful.  I picked an example at random to compare with Wikipedia.

Encyclopedia Britannica
Luther, Martin (1483-1546), the great German religious reformer, was born on Nov, 10, 1483, at Eisleben, in the county of Mansfield, wither his parents, Hans Luther and Margaret Ziegler, who belonged to the free peasant class, had migrated from Mohra, in Thuringia..


Wikipedia
Martin Luther (German: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈlʊtɐ] ( listen); 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German monk, former Catholic priest, professor of theology and seminal figure of a reform movement in sixteenth century Christianity, subsequently known as the Protestant Reformation.^[1] 


I looked at many articles to compare the writing, and Wikipedia is often blunt, ugly and drab, even repulsive to read at times.  It is the language of a mob, rather than a great mind.  

Because beauty exists in the eye of the beholder, this is, of course, my opinion.  Another thing you will never find on Wikipedia.  You will however, find that I'm entitled to it.

An important classic work on writing, from George Orwell exists, and here is a link to it.  

Politics and the English Language

He uses 5 examples of terrible modern writing in the essay, and here is one of them

 I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

I know your mind must be reeling, so here is another one.

 

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)