, perhaps. Perhaps he cannot help it.
It is human nature. We must go on persuading him, not losing our tempers.

None the less we should not shut our eyes to the fact that while a
language is the working instrument of scientific men there will always be
a number of them to decry any study of it for its beauty, and even any
study of it for the sake of accuracy--its beauty and its accuracy being
indeed scarcely distinguishable.

I fear, Gentlemen, you may go on from this to the dreadful conclusion
that the date 1869, when Cambridge at length came to possess a Chair of
Latin, marks definitely the hour at which Latin closed its eyes and
became a dead language; that you may proceed to a yet more dreadful
application of this to the Chair of English founded in 1910: and that
henceforward (to misquote what Mr Max Beerbohm once wickedly said of
Walter Pater) you will be apt to regard Professor Housman and me as two
widowers engaged, while the undertaker waits, in composing the features
of our beloveds.

But (to speak seriously) that is what I stand here to controvert: and I
derive no small encouragement when--as has more than once happened--A, a
scientific man, comes to me and complains that he for his part cannot
understand B, another scientific man, 'because the fellow can't express
himself.' And the need to study precision in writing has grown far more
instant since men of science have abandoned the 'universal language' and
taken to writing in their own tongues. Let us, while not on the whole
regretting the change, at least recognise some dangers, some possible
disadvantages. I will confine myself to English, considered as a
substitute for Latin. In Latin you have a language which may be thin in
its vocabulary and inelastic for modern use; but a language which at all
events compels a man to clear his thought and communicate it to other men
precisely.

Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into the narrow act

--may be all impossible of compression into the Latin speech. In English,
on the other hand, you have a language which by its very copiousness and
elasticity tempts you to believe that you can do without packing, without
compression, arrangement, order; that, with the Denver editor, all you
need is to 'get there'--though it be with all your intellectual
belongings in a jumble, overflowing the portmanteau. Rather I preach to
you that having proudly inherited English with its _copia fandi_, you
should keep your esta