There is no need to condemn these phrases, for language has a vast deal of inferior work to do.  The expression of thought, temperament, attitude, is not the whole of its business.  It is only a literary fop or doctrinaire who will attempt to remint all the small defaced coinage that passes through his hands, only a lisping young fantastico who will refuse all conventional garments and all conventional speech.  At a modern wedding the frock-coat is worn, the presents are “numerous and costly,” and there is an “ovation accorded to the happy pair.”  These things are part of our public civilisation, a decorous and accessible uniform, not to be lightly set aside.  But let it be a friend of your own who is to marry, a friend of your own who dies, and you are to express yourself—­the problem is changed, you feel all the difficulties of the art of style, and fathom something of the depth of your unskill.  Forbidden silence, we should be in a poor way indeed.

Single words too we plagiarise when we use them without realisation and mastery of their meaning.  The best argument for a succinct style is this, that if you use words you do not need, or do not understand, you cannot se them well.  It is not what a word means, but what it means to you, that is of the deepest import.  Let it be a weak word, with a poor history behind it, if you have done good thinking with it, you may yet use it to surprising advantage.  But if, on the other hand, it be a strong word that has never aroused more than a misty idea and a flickering emotion in your mind, here lies your danger.  You may use it, for there is none to hinder; and it will betray you.  The commonest Saxon words prove explosive machines in the hands of rash impotence.  It is perhaps a certain uneasy consciousness of danger, a suspicion that weakness of soul cannot wield these strong words, that makes debility avoid them, committing itself rather, as if by some pre-established affinity, to the vaguer Latinised vocabulary.  Yet they are not all to be avoided, and their quality in practice will depend on some occult ability in their employer.  For every living person, if the material were obtainable, a separate historical dictionary might be compiled, recording where each word was first heard or seen, where and how it was first used.  The references are utterly beyond recovery; but such a register would throw a strange light on individual styles.  The eloquent trifler, whose stock of words has been accumulated by a pair of light fingers, would stand denuded of his plausible pretences as soon as it were seen how roguishly he came by his eloquence.  There may be literary quality, it is well to remember, in the words of a parrot, if only its cage has been happily placed; meaning and soul there cannot be.  Yet the voice will sometimes be mistaken, by the carelessness of chance listeners, for a genuine utterance of humanity; and the like is true in literature.  But writing cannot be luminous and great save in