Why should you presume that in any country a body duly constituted for any function will neglect to perform its duty and abdicate its trust?  Such a presumption would go against all Governments in all nations.  But in truth this dread of penury of supply, from a free assembly, has no foundation in nature.  For first, observe that, besides the desire which all men have naturally of supporting the honour of their own Government, that sense of dignity, and that security to property, which ever attend freedom, have a tendency to increase the stock of a free community.  Most may be taken where most is accumulated.  And what is the soil or climate where experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the politic machinery in the world?

That, whether you agree or disagree with its doctrine, is great prose.  That is Burke.  ‘O Athenian stranger,’ said the Cretan I quoted in my first lecture,—­’inhabitant of Attica I will not call you, since you deserve the name of Athene herself, because you go back to first principles!’

But, you may object, ’Burke is talking like a book, and I have no wish to talk like a book.’  Well, as a fact, Burke is here at the culmen of a long sustained argument, and his language has soared with it, as his way was—­logic and emotion lifting him together as upon two balanced majestic wings.  But you are shy of such heights?  Very well again, and all credit to your modesty!  Yet at least (I appeal to that same modesty) when you talk or write, you would wish to observe the occasion; to say what you have to say without impertinence or ill-timed excess.  You would not harangue a drawing-room or a subcommittee, or be facetious at a funeral, or play the skeleton at a banquet:  for in all such conduct you would be mixing up things that differ.  Be cheerful, then:  for this desire of yours to be appropriate is really the root of the matter.  Nor do I ask you to accept this on my sole word, but will cite you the most respectable witnesses.  Take, for instance, a critic who should be old enough to impress you—­Dionysius of Halicarnassus.  After enumerating the qualities which lend charm and nobility to style, he closes the list with ’appropriateness, which all these need’:—­

As there is a charming diction, so there is another that is noble; as there is a polished rhythm, so there is another that is dignified; as variety adds grace in one passage, so in another it adds fulness; and as for appropriation, it will prove the chief source of beauty, or else of nothing at all.

Or listen to Cicero, how he sets appropriateness in the very heart of his teaching, as the master secret:—­