That was Chatham.  For Wolfe—­he, as you know, was ever reading the classics even on campaign:  as Burke again carried always a Virgil in his pocket. Abeunt studia in mores. Moreover can we separate Chatham’s Roman morality from Chatham’s language in the passage I have just read?  No:  we cannot.  No one, being evil, can speak good things with that weight; ’for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.’ We English (says Wordsworth)

     We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
     That Shakespeare spake....

You may criticise Chatham’s style as too consciously Ciceronian.  But has ever a Parliamentary style been invented which conveys a nobler gravity of emotion? `Buskined’?—­yes:  but the style of a man.  ’Mannered’?—­yes, but in the grand manner.  ’Conscious’?—­ yes, but of what?  Conscious of the dignity a great man owes to himself, and to the assembly he addresses.  He conceives that assembly as ‘the British Senate’; and, assuming, he communicates that high conception.  The Lords feel that they are listening as Senators, since it is only thus a Senate should be addressed, as nothing less than a Senate should be addressed thus.

Let me read you a second passage; of written prose: 

Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before.  It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall.  We may enjoy the present while we are insensible of infirmity and decay:  but the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.  There are no fields of amaranth on this aide of the grave; there are no voices, O Rhodope! that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last[3].

Latin—­all Latin—­down to its exquisite falling close!  And I say to you, Gentlemen, that passages such as these deserve what Joubert claimed of national monuments, Ce sont les crampons qui unissent une generation a une autre.  Conservez ce qu’ont vu vos peres, ’These are the clamps that knit one generation to another.  Cherish those things on which your fathers’ eyes have looked.’

Abeunt studia in mores.

If, years ago, there had lacked anything to sharpen my suspicion of those fork-bearded professors who derived our prose from the stucco of Anglo-Saxon prose, it would have been their foolish deliberate practice of composing whole pages of English prose without using one word derivative from Latin or Greek.  Esau, when he sold his birthright, had the excuse of being famished.  These pedants, with a full board, sought frenetically to give it away—­ board and birthright. ’So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality’ —­almost, I say, these men had deserved to have a kind of speech more to their taste read over their coffins.