This is written early modern English, but is it to hard to understand?

I am not satisfied with the rhythm of my revision, but then, I did not invoke the aid of the notation of cadences, nor felt the cadences in my mind.

The last clause of the first sentence is off. The latter part of the second sentence is off.

 

Is this clear, and does it flow?

 

Your revisions seem to be working better.

I think virtuous knowledge and knowledge about virtue are essentially the same thing. They might in some cases mean something slightly different but I believe they could also be used interchangeably.

 

Do you find this sentence to be unclear or jarring?

 

It's not a sentence.

Is it clear? Mostly. The "where is no sea but she the highest beauty of all" is clear in so far as I know you're trying to say she's beautiful, but not clear in terms of the connection between the absence of sea and why that's contradicted by her being beautiful.

Is it jarring? It's jarring in terms of being overwritten and overwrought. But it's not jarring in terms of fitting in with other writing you're coming up with.

 

I'm still confused by the term "Early modern English."
Old English? Cause modern means now.

 

"Sandra, the emblem of beauty, an ocean of kindness abiding in the land of men, where is no sea but she the beauty higher than they all, surpassing in virtue the sweetest of girls in the world."

Mmm not a fan compared to the others. There's a difference between poetic and just too much. I think this falls under just too much. Maybe cut it down. And like someone else said, what's the connection between the absence of sea and her beauty? Higher than all of what?

Nope it's actually called Early Modern English, which encompasses Shakespeare and those other similar ones. If I were to give you a passage in Old English you wouldn't be able to read it at all. I made the same mistake calling it Old English once and was corrected, which is how I know that.

 

I'm defining "clear" in the context of this discussion as meaning, "After the third or fourth reading I can make a reasonably confident guess as to what it means."

By that definition:

The first example, "It hath distressed me greatly..." is not clear.

The second example, "Thou hast decreased my approval..." is almost clear.

The third example, "Sandra, the beauty..." is not clear and is also incorrect, but could probably be made both correct and somewhat clear. I believe that the main issue is the ambiguity of the word "beauty"--are we referring to Sandra's beauty (in which case it's not a sentence) or referring to Sandra as a beauty, in which case it can be made closer to correct, by converting "that" to "who":

Sandra, the beauty who exceeds the beauty of all the girls of the world, who carries the virtue of of the girls of kindness.

However, it's not a sentence.

The third example, "Call not the bobby..." is clear, but somewhat jarring, for the reasons that Minstrel mentions.

The version of "Bartibius..." in post 25 has some meaning that can be puzzled out.

The later example, "Sandra, the emblem of beauty..." is not a sentence. I don't know if, in context, it's supposed to be a sentence. The meaning is fairly decipherable.

 

I agree with @BayView's statements, and I also want to point out that "beauty higher than they all" looks like a laughable grammar error. Maybe "higher than that of all others" would work.

Can you tell us exactly why you want to write like this? I know you're aiming for the kind of beauty found in Biblical prose, but I want to make two points about that. First, few people these days read the Bible for the beauty of its prose. They read it because their religions require them to. When they discuss it, they focus on very short passages at a time. This kind of prose is digestible when treated that way, but reading long swathes of it at a sitting is tedious, difficult, and generally not a pleasurable experience.

The second point is that the appeal of Biblical prose doesn't stem from its archaic word forms (all the thees and mayests and thous and so on). It stems from the stateliness of its rhythms. You might want to read other old works to see how other authors handled this. For example, try Le Morte D'Arthur, by Thomas Malory. It has a few thees and thous, but doesn't lean on them as much as the Bible, or your examples, do. It's public domain, of course, and you can find a pdf of it here. John Steinbeck began a rewrite of Le Morte D'Arthur, called The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, in an attempt to modernize the language for today's readers, but he died before completing the project.

 

I am also curious as to the purpose of writing in Early Modern English.

Also I would like to point out, when talking about how the Bible is written we're talking about the King James Version or New King James Version translations. Modern translations of the Bible don't sound like that at all. There are some Christians that believe that KJV and NKJV are the only accurate (English) translations of the Bible, but most Christians don't believe that and don't read those translations, because they are hard to read. So yes, most people don't read the Bible because of that language, but for other reasons.

 

So basically, "thou hast friendzoned me?"