Lastly, we saw how, by experimenting with rhythm, our prose ’broke its birth’s invidious bar’ and learnt to scale the forbidden heights.

Now by attending to the few plain rules given above you may train yourselves to write sound, straightforward, work-a-day English.  But if you would write melodious English, I fear the gods will require of you what they ought to have given you at birth—­something of an ear.  Yet the most of us have ears, of sorts; and I believe that, though we can only acquire it by assiduous practice, the most of us can wonderfully improve our talent of the ear.

If you will possess yourselves of a copy of Quintilian or borrow one from any library (Bohn’s translation will do) and turn to his 9th book, you will find a hundred ways indicated, illustrated, classified, in which a writer or speaker can vary his Style, modulate it, lift or depress it, regulate its balance.

All these rules, separately worth studying, if taken together may easily bewilder and dishearten you.  Let me choose just two, and try to hearten you by showing that, even with these two only, you can go a long way.

Take the use of right emphasis.  What Quintilian says of right emphasis—­or the most important thing he says—­is this:—­

There is sometimes an extraordinary force in some particular word, which, if it be placed in no very conspicuous position in the middle part of a sentence, is likely to escape the attention of the hearer and to be obscured by the words surrounding it; but if it be put at the end of the sentence is urged upon the reader’s sense and imprinted on his mind.

That seems obvious enough, for English use as well as for Latin.  ’The wages of sin is Death’—­anyone can see how much more emphatic that is than ‘Death is the wages of sin.’  But let your minds work on this matter of emphasis, and discover how emphasis has always its right point somewhere, though it be not at all necessarily at the end of the sentence.  Take a sentence in which the strong words actually repeat themselves for emphasis:—­

     Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.

Our first impulse would be to place the emphasis at the end:—­

     Babylon, that great city, is fallen, is fallen.

The Latin puts it at the beginning:—­

     Cecidit, cecidit, Babylonia illa magna. 
     Fallen, fallen, is Babylon, that great city.

The forty-seven preserved the ‘falling close’ so exquisite in the Latin; the emphasis, already secured by repetition, they accentuated by lengthening the pause.  I would urge on you that in every sentence there is just a right point of emphasis which you must train your ears to detect.  So your writing will acquire not only emphasis, but balance, and you will instinctively avoid such an ill-emphasised sentence as this, which, not naming the author, I will quote for your delectation:—­