Now gin a body meet a body for our protection and in this gallant spirit, need a body reward him with this hybrid label?  Gratitude apart, I say that for our own self-respect, whilst we retain any sense of intellectual pedigree, ‘antibody’ is no word to throw at a friendly bacillus.  Is it consonant with the high dignity of science to make her talk like a cheap showman advertising a ‘picture-drome’?  The man who eats peas with his knife can at least claim a historical throwback to the days when forks had but two prongs and the spoons had been removed with the soup.  But ‘antibody’ has no such respectable derivation.  It is, in fact, a barbarism, and a mongrel at that.  The man who uses it debases the currency of learning:  and I suggest to you that it is one of the many functions of a great University to maintain the standard of that currency, to guard the jus et norma loquendi, to protect us from such hasty fellows or, rather, to suppeditate them in their haste.

Let me revert to our list of the qualities necessary to good writing, and come to the last—­Persuasiveness; of which you may say, indeed, that it embraces the whole—­not only the qualities of propriety, perspicuity, accuracy, we have been considering, but many another, such as harmony, order, sublimity, beauty of diction; all in short that—­writing being an art, not a science, and therefore so personal a thing—­may be summed up under the word Charm.  Who, at any rate, does not seek after Persuasion?  It is the aim of all the arts and, I suppose, of all exposition of the sciences; nay, of all useful exchange of converse in our daily life.  It is what Velasquez attempts in a picture, Euclid in a proposition, the Prime Minister at the Treasury box, the journalist in a leading article, our Vicar in his sermon.  Persuasion, as Matthew Arnold once said, is the only true intellectual process.  The mere cult of it occupied many of the best intellects of the ancients, such as Longinus and Quintilian, whose writings have been preserved to us just because they were prized.  Nor can I imagine an earthly gift more covetable by you, Gentlemen, than that of persuading your fellows to listen to your views and attend to what you have at heart.

Suppose, sir, that you wish to become a journalist?  Well, and why not?  Is it a small thing to desire the power of influencing day by day to better citizenship an unguessed number of men, using the best thought and applying it in the best language at your command?...  Or are you, perhaps, overawed by the printed book?  On that, too, I might have a good deal to say; but for the moment would keep the question as practical as I can.