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And now Gentlemen (as George Herbert said on a famous occasion), let us tune our instruments.

Before discussing with you another and highly important question of style in writing, I will ask you to look back for a few moments on the road we have travelled.

We have agreed that our writing should be appropriate:  that it should fit the occasion; that it should rise and fall with the subject, be grave where that is serious, where it is light not afraid of what Stevenson in “The Wrong Box” calls ‘a little judicious levity.’  If your writing observe these precepts, it will be well-mannered writing.

To be sure, much in addition will depend on yourself—­on what you are or have made yourself, since in writing the style can never be separated from the man.  But neither can it in the practice of virtue:  yet, though men differ in character, I do not observe that moralists forbear from laying down general rules of excellence.  Now if you will recall our further conclusion, that writing to be good must be persuasive (since persuasion is the only true intellectual process), and will test this by a passage of Newman’s I am presently to quote to you, from his famous ‘definition of a gentleman,’ I think you will guess pretty accurately the general law of excellence I would have you, as Cambridge men, tribally and particularly obey.

Newman says of a gentleman that among other things: 

He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out....  If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better perhaps, but less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they found it.  He may be right or wrong in his opinion:  but he is too clear-sighted to be unjust.  He is simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.

Enough for the moment on this subject:  but commit these words to your hearts, and you will not only triumph in newspaper controversy.  You will do better:  you will avoid it.

To proceed.—­We found further that our writing should be accurate:  because language expresses thought—­is, indeed, the only expression of thought—­and if we lack the skill to speak precisely, our thought will remain confused, ill-defined.  The editor of a mining paper in Denver, U.S.A., boldly the other day laid down this law, that niceties of language were mere ‘frills’:  all a man needed was to ‘get there,’ that is, to say what he wished in his own way.  But just here, we found, lies the mischief.  You will not get there by hammering away on your own untutored