ttle auxiliary its's and was's, and its participles getting into the
light of your adjectives, which should be few. For, as a rough law, by
his use of the straight verb and by his economy of adjectives you can
tell a man's style, if it be masculine or neuter, writing or
'composition.'_

The authors of that capital handbook "The King's English," which I have
already recommended to you, add two rules:--

(4) _Prefer the short word to the long._
(5) _Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance._

But these two precepts you would have to modify by so long a string of
exceptions that I do not commend them to you. In fact I think them false
in theory and likely to be fatal in practice. For, as my last lecture
tried to show, you no sooner begin to philosophise things instead of
merely telling a tale of them than you must go to the Mediterranean
languages: because in these man first learnt to discuss his 'why' and
'how,' and these languages yet guard the vocabulary.

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 surroun