the extract which follows, and much that is stimulating. He has expressed himself more directly and systematically on the subject in his essay on Style, an essay largely given to a consideration of words, and the right use of words, so largely, indeed, that it shows the paramount importance that Pater attached to our present topic. That essay is well worth your reading just now. But the following extract is taken from Marius the Epicurean, from the sixth chapter, that account so suggesting and inspiring of the young Roman who might have become a great man of letters had he not been too early cut off. Pater has been telling how Flavian and Marius had read The Metamorphoses of Apuleius.

"Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practical one: it stimulated the literary ambition, already so strong a motive with him, by a signal example of success, and made him more than ever an ardent, indefatigable student of words, of the means or instrument of the literary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression itself, of that through which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within one can actually take effect upon others to overawe or charm them to one's side, presented themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate connection with that desire for predominance, for the satisfaction of which another might have relied on the acquisition and display of brilliant military qualities. In him a fine instinctive sentiment of the exact value and power of words was connate with the eager longing for sway over his fellows. He saw himself already a gallant and effective leader, innovating or conservative as occasion might require, in the rehabilitation of the mother tongue, then fallen so tarnished and languid; yet the sole object, as he mused within himself, of the only sort of patriotic feeling proper or possible for one born of slaves. The popular speech was gradually departing from the form and rule of literary language—a language always

and increasingly artificial. While the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousand chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or at least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time was coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understand Cicero; though there were some indeed like this new writer, Apuleius, who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek which had been a fashionable affectation among the sprightliest wits since the days of Hadrian, had written in the vernacular. . .

"For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force, were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forcibly impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful, of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but middling, tame, or only half-true even to him-this scrupulousness of literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of chivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience of execution! what research for the significant tones of ancient idiom-sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular word-building-gravis et decora constructio!"-Marius the Epicurean, ch. vi.

Now of course that is written of a Roman boy sixteen centuries ago. But it has its bearing here. The point here is this much: the best use of words is not a natural or an easy thing, it is not the possession of every one; it is something to be worked for, in other words it is an opportunity. The finding just the right words-there you have a chance. And now look at it from the other side. Here is an extract from Emerson's Journal:

"The secret of eloquence is to realize all you say. Do not give us counters of base coin, but every word a real value. Only whilst it has new values does it warm and

invite and enable to write. The essential mark of poetry is that it betrays in every word instant activity of mind. A man is sometimes enervated as much by words as by any other luxury. A thing represents nature and aboriginal force; but men transformed by books become impotent praters.

"Expression is what we want; not knowledge, but vent. But an utterance, whole, generous, sustained, equal, graduated at will, such as Montaigne, such as Beaumont and Fletcher, so habitually and easily attain, I miss in myself most of all, but also in my contemporaries. I don't know but I value the name of a thing, that is, the true poet's name for it, more than the thing. If I can get the right word for the moon, or for its manners and influences, the word that suggests to me and to all men its humane and universal beauty and significance, then I have what I want of it; for I have no desire that a road be made from my garden to the moon, or that a deed of its acres and square miles be made over to me."-Cabot's Memoir, i. 293.

There are two ideas. Have a word for every impression and have an impression for every word. We need not stop now for more than the suggestion, although it is well worth thinking over.

Emerson and Pater, the two men were very different, but they each had this zeal for the right words. This is what Lowell says of Emerson's vocabulary: "For choice and pith of language he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne,-though he does use that abominable word reliable. His eye for a fine telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as his I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like a homespun cloth of gold."-Lowell, Works, i. 351.

We can easily see, I think, the value to ourselves in a careful and accurate use of words, over and above the help we get in expressing our thoughts. I sometimes think that of all the means of expression, this one has the strongest moulding, formative influence upon the one who uses it. Let me call your attention to some things said by Coleridge in his essay on Wordsworth's poetry. It is in the Biographia Literaria (iii. 485), but too long to quote here. Some of his phrases haunt the memory: 66 an austere purity of language," "the result and pledge . . . of fine and luminous distinction," "fanaticism which masters the feelings more especially by indistinct watchwords." Good is the remark that "to a youth led from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and the reason for its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names." So, too, the hint at "the close connection between veracity and mental accuracy."

54. Methods Suggested for the Increase of the Vocabulary. The question now is, How to obtain any such mastery of words as has been here hinted at. Of course we must be careful and rigorous in excision, in pruning away everything that is not of the best. But how to get anything that will bear pruning? Well, of course, what you really want is to have at command all the words in the language. Then you can refine to your heart's content. But since this is impossible you must content yourself with something less. You cannot have at command all there are, but you can doubtless get at more than you are

now familiar with. You can increase the number of words you have to choose from, and you can cultivate yourself carefully in the principles of choice. To these two ends, then, we will direct our attention.

The best way of cultivating the vocabulary would doubtless lie in a broad and systematic cultivation of our power of thought. Campbell in discussing Reputable Use re

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marks of the greater number of mankind that their range of ideas is necessarily limited, and proceeds to note that as the ideas which occupy their minds are few, the portion of the language known to them must be very scanty. It is impossible that our knowledge of words should outstrip our knowledge of things. It may, and often doth, come short of it" (Rhetoric, p. 165). And Emerson says in a passage of The American Scholar which is worth turning to at this point, “If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar should be covetous of action" (p. 98). And one would hardly doubt the pre-eminent excellence of a vocabulary got together by pertinacious inquiry into the facts of life, always with a view to the expression of them. But such a course of study and observation can hardly be conducted in a college class-room, nor, indeed, if it could would it be especially the function of the teacher of English composition. We must seek for some other means of reaching the same end, or rather of using the means at our control in such a way as to get as far ahead as we can. Other writers on Rhetoric have made suggestions of a somewhat more practical nature or rather have suggested plans which, being more particular, are more easily put into practice. Wendell, for instance, says:

"The way to increase your vocabulary is very like the way to increase your personal acquaintance. Put yourself in the way of meeting as many different phases of expression as you can,-read widely, talk with clever people,and whenever you come across a new word or expression train yourself, so far as possible, to understand it, just as you would train yourself to classify and remember people you meet, gentle and vulgar, good, bad, or indifferent. Each one has its place in that great composite fact— human nature and human life.

"Some such process as this is consciously or unconsciously followed by pretty much everybody who has had