Is erit eloquens qui poterit parva summisse, modica temperate, magna graviter dicere....  Qui ad id quodcunque decebit poterit accommodare orationem.  Quod quum statuerit, tum, ut quidque erit dicendum, ita dicet, nec satura jejune, nec grandia minute, nec item contra, sed erit rebus ipsis par et aequalis oratio.

’Whatever his theme he will speak as becomes it; neither meagrely where it is copious, nor meanly where it is ample, nor in this way where it demands that; but keeping his speech level with the actual subject and adequate to it.’

I might quote another great man, Quintilian, to you on the first importance of this appropriateness, or ‘propriety’; of speaking not only to the purpose but becomingly—­though the two as (he rightly says) are often enough one and the same thing.  But I will pass on to what has ever seemed, since I found it in one of Jowett’s ‘Introductions’ to Plato, the best definition known to me of good style in literature:—­

     The perfection of style is variety in unity, freedom, ease,
     clearness, the power of saying anything, and of striking any note in
     the scale of human feelings, without impropriety.

You see, O my modest friend! that your gamut needs not to be very wide, to begin with.  The point is that within it you learn to play becomingly.

Now I started by proposing that we try together to make appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a hall-mark of anything turned out by our English School here, and I would add (growing somewhat hardier) a hall-mark of all Cambridge style so far as our English School can influence it.  I chose these four epithets accurate, perspicuous, persuasive, appropriate, with some care, of course as my duty was; and will assume that by this time we are agreed to desire appropriateness.  Now for the other three:—­

Perspicuity.—­I shall waste no words on the need of this:  since the first aim of speech is to be understood.  The more clearly you write the more easily and surely you will be understood.  I propose to demonstrate to you further, in a minute or so, that the more clearly you write the more clearly you will understand yourself.  But a sufficient reason has been given in ten words why you should desire perspicuity.

Accuracy.—­Did I not remind myself in my first lecture, that Cambridge is the home of accurate scholarship?  Surely no Cambridge man would willingly be a sloven in speech, oral or written?  Surely here, if anywhere, should be acknowledged of all what Newman says of the classics, that ’a certain unaffected neatness and propriety and grace of diction may be required of any author, for the same reason that a certain attention to dress is expected of every gentleman.’  After all, what are the chief differentiae between man and the brute creation but that he clothes himself, that he cooks his food, that he uses articulate speech?  Let us cherish and improve all these distinctions.