But (to speak seriously) that is what I stand here to controvert:  and I derive no small encouragement when—­as has more than once happened—­A, a scientific man, comes to me and complains that he for his part cannot understand B, another scientific man, ’because the fellow can’t express himself.’  And the need to study precision in writing has grown far more instant since men of science have abandoned the ‘universal language’ and taken to writing in their own tongues.  Let us, while not on the whole regretting the change, at least recognise some dangers, some possible disadvantages.  I will confine myself to English, considered as a substitute for Latin.  In Latin you have a language which may be thin in its vocabulary and inelastic for modern use; but a language which at all events compels a man to clear his thought and communicate it to other men precisely.

     Thoughts hardly to be packed
     Into the narrow act

—­may be all impossible of compression into the Latin speech.  In English, on the other hand, you have a language which by its very copiousness and elasticity tempts you to believe that you can do without packing, without compression, arrangement, order; that, with the Denver editor, all you need is to ’get there’—­though it be with all your intellectual belongings in a jumble, overflowing the portmanteau.  Rather I preach to you that having proudly inherited English with its copia fandi, you should keep your estate in order by constantly applying to it that jus et norma loquendi of which, if you seek to the great models, you will likewise find yourselves inheritors.

‘But,’ it is sometimes urged, ’why not leave this new study of English to the younger Universities now being set up all over the country?’ ’Ours is an age of specialising.  Let these newcomers have something—­what better than English?—­to specialise upon.’

I might respond by asking if the fame of Cambridge would stand where it stands to-day had she followed a like counsel concerning other studies and, resting upon Mathematics, given over this or that branch of Natural Science to be grasped by new hands.  What of Electricity, for example?  Or what of Physiology?  Yes, and among the unnatural sciences, what of Political Economy?  But I will use a more philosophical argument.

Some years ago I happened on a collection of Bulgarian proverbs of which my memory retains but two, yet each an abiding joy.  In a lecture on English Literature in our Universities you will certainly not miss to apply the first, which runs, ‘Many an ass has entered Jerusalem.’

The application of the second may elude you for a moment.  It voices the impatience of an honest Bulgar who has been worried overmuch to subscribe to what, in this England of ours, we call Church Purposes; and it runs, ‘All these two-penny saints will be the ruin of the Church.’