f his language, which
through the associations of literary history have become a part of its
nature, prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license,
many a gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive.
His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in
literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed
illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned.
Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and renunciation,
having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minute
consideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail,
being a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive too,
that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and
therefore, indirectly, with the reader himself also, that he has the
science of the instrument he plays on, perhaps, after all, with a
freedom which in such case will be the freedom of a master.

For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really
vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system
of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of
the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art.
Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English
equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the
rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which
like the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will still
further illustrate good taste.--The right vocabulary! Translators have
not invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of
translation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction;
whereas, if the original be first-rate, one's first care should be with
its elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible
by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after
word, as [15] the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only
each word or syllable be not of false colour, to change my illustration
a little.

Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed
and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would
select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of the
words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and
doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search
of an instrument