that within it you learn to play becomingly.

Now I started by proposing that we try together to make appropriate,
perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a hall-mark of anything turned
out by our English School here, and I would add (growing somewhat
hardier) a hall-mark of all Cambridge style so far as our English School
can influence it. I chose these four epithets _accurate, perspicuous,
persuasive, appropriate_, with some care, of course as my duty was; and
will assume that by this time we are agreed to desire _appropriateness_.
Now for the other three:--

_Perspicuity._--I shall waste no words on the need of this: since the
first aim of speech is to be understood. The more clearly you write the
more easily and surely you will be understood. I propose to demonstrate
to you further, in a minute or so, that the more clearly you write the
more clearly you will understand yourself. But a sufficient reason has
been given in ten words why you should desire perspicuity.

_Accuracy._--Did I not remind myself in my first lecture, that Cambridge
is the home of accurate scholarship? Surely no Cambridge man would
willingly be a sloven in speech, oral or written? Surely here, if
anywhere, should be acknowledged of all what Newman says of the classics,
that 'a certain unaffected neatness and propriety and grace of diction
may be required of any author, for the same reason that a certain
attention to dress is expected of every gentleman.' After all, what are
the chief differentiae between man and the brute creation but that he
clothes himself, that he cooks his food, that he uses articulate speech?
Let us cherish and improve all these distinctions.

But shall we now look more carefully into these twin questions of
perspicuity and accuracy: for I think pursuing them, we may almost reach
the philosophic kernel of good writing. I quoted Newman playfully a
moment ago. I am going to quote him in strong earnest. And here let me
say that of all the books written in these hundred years there is perhaps
none you can more profitably thumb and ponder than that volume of his in
which, under the title of "The Idea of a University," he collected nine
discourses addressed to the Roman Catholics of Dublin with some lectures
delivered to the Catholic University there. It is fragmentary, because
its themes were occasional. It has missed to be appraised at its true
worth, partly no doubt by reason of the colour it derives from a religion
stil