The great Homer wrote not in Latin, for he was a Greek; and Virgil wrote not in Greek, because he was a Latin.  In brief, all the ancient poets wrote in the tongue which they sucked in with their mother’s milk, nor did they go forth to seek for strange ones to express the greatness of their conceptions:  and, this being so, it should be a reason for the fashion to extend to all nations.

Does the difference, then, perchance lie in ourselves?  Will you tell me, ’Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well’?  Can he, indeed?...  Can you, sir?  Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.

Indeed, when we try to speak prose without having practised it the result is apt to be worse than our own vernacular.  How often have I heard some worthy fellow addressing a public audience!—­say a Parliamentary candidate who believes himself a Liberal Home Ruler, and for the moment is addressing himself to meet some criticism of the financial proposals of a Home Rule Bill.  His own vernacular would be somewhat as follows:—­

     Oh, rot!  Give the Irish their heads and they’ll run straight enough. 
     Look at the Boers, don’t you know.  Not half such a decent sort as
     the Irish.  Look at Irish horses, too.  Eh?  What?

But this, he is conscious, would hardly suit the occasion.  He therefore amends it thus:—­

Mr Chairman—­er—­as regards the financial proposals of His Majesty’s Government, I am of the deliberate—­er—­opinion that our national security—­I may say, our Imperial security—­our security as—­er—­a governing people—­lies in trusting the Irish as we did in the—­er —­case of the Boers—­H’m Mr Gladstone, Mr Chairman—­Mr Chairman, Mr Gladstone——­

and so on.  You perceive that the style is actually worse than in the sample quoted before; it has become flabby whereas that other was at any rate nervous?  But now suppose that, having practised it, our candidate was able to speak like this:—­

’But what (says the Financier) is peace to us without money?  Your plan gives us no revenue.’  No?  But it does—­for it secures to the subject the power of Refusal, the first of all Revenues.  Experience is a cheat, and fact is a liar, if this power in the subject of proportioning his grant, or of not granting at all, has not been found the richest mine of Revenue ever discovered by the skill or by the fortune of man.  It does not indeed vote you 152,750 pounds 11 shillings 2 3/4 pence, nor any other paltry limited sum—­but it gives you the strong box itself, the fund, the bank, from whence only revenues can arise among a people sensible of freedom:  Posita luditur arca....  Is this principle to be true in England, and false everywhere else?  Is it not true in Ireland?  Has it not hitherto been true in the Colonies?