no doubt, to bear the ills we have rather than fly to others capable
of being illustrated. I found myself engaged in following the manoeuvres
of certain well-meaning bacilli generically described as 'Antibodies.' I
do not accuse the author (who seemed to be a learned man) of having
invented this abominable term: apparently it passed current among
physiologists and he had accepted it for honest coin. I found it, later
on, in Webster's invaluable dictionary: Etymology, 'anti' up against
'body', some noxious 'foreign body' inside your body or mine.

Now gin a body meet a body for our protection and in this gallant spirit,
need a body reward him with this hybrid label? Gratitude apart, I say
that for our own self-respect, whilst we retain any sense of intellectual
pedigree, 'antibody' is no word to throw at a friendly bacillus. Is it
consonant with the high dignity of science to make her talk like a cheap
showman advertising a 'picture-drome'? The man who eats peas with his
knife can at least claim a historical throwback to the days when forks
had but two prongs and the spoons had been removed with the soup. But
'antibody' has no such respectable derivation. It is, in fact, a
barbarism, and a mongrel at that. The man who uses it debases the
currency of learning: and I suggest to you that it is one of the many
functions of a great University to maintain the standard of that
currency, to guard the _jus et norma loquendi_, to protect us from such
hasty fellows or, rather, to suppeditate them in their haste.

Let me revert to our list of the qualities necessary to good writing, and
come to the last--_Persuasiveness_; of which you may say, indeed, that it
embraces the whole--not only the qualities of propriety, perspicuity,
accuracy, we have been considering, but many another, such as harmony,
order, sublimity, beauty of diction; all in short that--writing being an
art, not a science, and therefore so personal a thing--may be summed up
under the word _Charm_. Who, at any rate, does not seek after Persuasion?
It is the aim of all the arts and, I suppose, of all exposition of the
sciences; nay, of all useful exchange of converse in our daily life. It
is what Velasquez attempts in a picture, Euclid in a proposition, the
Prime Minister at the Treasury box, the journalist in a leading article,
our Vicar in his sermon. Persuasion, as Matthew Arnold once said, is the
only true intellectual process. The mere cult of it occupied many of t