My lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor reposed my head on my pillow, without giving this vent to my eternal abhorrence of such preposterous and enormous principles.
That was Chatham. For Wolfe—he, as you know, was ever reading the classics even on campaign: as Burke again carried always a Virgil in his pocket. Abeunt studia in mores. Moreover can we separate Chatham’s Roman morality from Chatham’s language in the passage I have just read? No: we cannot. No one, being evil, can speak good things with that weight; “for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” We English (says Wordsworth)
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake. …
You may criticise Chatham’s style as too consciously Ciceronian. But has ever a Parliamentary style been invented which conveys a nobler gravity of emotion? “Buskined”?—yes: but the style of a man. “Mannered”?—yes, but in the grand manner. “Conscious”?—yes, but of what? Conscious of the dignity a great man owes to himself, and to the assembly he addresses. He conceives that assembly as “the British Senate”; and, assuming, he communicates that high conception. The Lords feel that they are listening as Senators, since it is only thus a Senate should be addressed, as nothing less than a Senate should be addressed thus.
Let me read you a second passage; of written prose:
Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present while we are insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come. There are no fields of amaranth on this aide of the grave; there are no voices, O Rhodopè! that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.9
Latin—all Latin—down to its exquisite falling close! And I say to you, Gentlemen, that passages such as these deserve what Joubert claimed of national monuments, Ce sont les crampons qui unissent une génération à une autre. Conservez ce qu’ont vu vos pères, “These are the clamps that knit one generation to another. Cherish those things on which your fathers’ eyes have looked.”
Abeunt studia in mores.
If, years ago, there had lacked anything to sharpen my suspicion of those fork-bearded professors who derived our prose from the stucco of Anglo-Saxon prose, it would have been their foolish deliberate practice of composing whole pages of English prose without using one word derivative from Latin or Greek. Esau, when he sold his birthright, had the excuse of being famished. These pedants, with a full board, sought frenetically to give it away—board and birthright. “So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality”—almost, I say, these men had deserved to have a kind of speech more to their taste read over their coffins.
VII
What, in the next place, can I say of Greek, save that, as Latin gave our fathers the model of prose, Greek was the source of it all, the goddess and genius of the wellhead? And, casting about to illustrate, as well as may be, what I mean by this, I hit on a minor dialogue of Plato, the “Phaedrus,” and choose you a short passage in Edward FitzGerald’s rendering:
When Socrates and Phaedrus have discoursed away the noonday under the plane trees by the Ilissus, they rise to depart toward the city. But Socrates (pointing perhaps to some images of Pan and other sylvan deities) says it is not decent to leave their haunts without praying to them, and he prays:
“O auspicious Pan, and ye other deities of this place, grant to me to become beautiful inwardly, and that all my outward goods may prosper my inner soul. Grant that I may esteem wisdom the only riches, and that I may have so much gold as temperance can handsomely carry.
“Have we yet aught else to pray for, Phaedrus? For myself I seem to have prayed enough.”
Phaedrus: “Pray as much for me also: for friends have all in common.”
Socrates: “Even so be it. Let us depart.”
To this paternoster of Socrates, reported more than four centuries before Christ taught the Lord’s Prayer, let me add an attempted translation of the lines that close Homer’s hymn to the Delian Apollo. Imagine the old blind poet on the beach chanting to the islanders the glorious boast of the little island—how it of all lands had harboured Leto in her difficult travail; how she gave birth to the Sun God; how the immortal child, as the attendant goddesses touched his lips with ambrosia, burst his swaddling bands and stood up, sudden, a god erect:
But he, the Sun-God, did no sooner taste
That food divine than every swaddling band
Burst strand by strand,
And burst the belt above his panting waist—
All hanging loose
About him as he stood and gave command:
“Fetch me my lyre, fetch me my curving bow!
And, taught by these,
