. In literature, according
to another canon, you must have a free and open mind and it has been
said: "Never be the prisoner of your own opinions." In politics you are
very lucky if you do not have the still harder fate--(and I think that
the gentlemen on the President's right hand will assent to that as
readily as the gentlemen who sit on his left) of being the prisoner of
other people's opinions. Of course no one can doubt for a moment that
the great achievements of literature--those permanent and vital works
which we will never let die--require a devotion as unceasing, as
patient, as inexhaustible, as the devotion that is required for the
works that adorn your walls; and we have luckily in our age--tho it may
not be a literary age--masters of prose and masters of verse. No prose
more winning has ever been written than that of Cardinal Newman; no
verse finer, more polished, more melodious has ever been written than
that of Lord Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne.

It seems to me that one of the greatest functions of literature at this
moment is not merely to produce great works, but also to protect the
English language--that noble, that most glorious instrument--against
those hosts of invaders which I observe have in these days sprung up. I
suppose that every one here has noticed the extraordinary list of names
suggested lately in order to designate motion by electricity; that list
of names only revealed what many of us had been observing for a long
time--namely, the appalling forces that are ready at a moment's notice
to deface and deform our English tongue. These strange, fantastic,
grotesque, and weird titles open up to my prophetic vision a most
unwelcome prospect. I tremble to see the day approach--and I am not sure
that it is not approaching--when the humorists of the headlines of
American journalism shall pass current as models of conciseness, energy,
and color of style.

Even in our social speech this invasion seems to be taking place in an
alarming degree, and I wonder what the Pilgrim Fathers of the
seventeenth century would say if they could hear their pilgrim children
of the nineteenth century who come over here, on various missions, and
among others, "On the make." This is only one of the thousand such-like
expressions which are invading the Puritan simplicity of our tongue. I
will only say that I should like, for my own part, to see in every
library and in every newspaper office that admirable passage in which