trageous crime, you should not inveigh against it with a
comparable violence of diction until your audience has achieved such a
notion of the crime as will not be at odds with such force and
violence.

Thus Vergil begins in the best way with simple diction:

Arms and the man I sing who first from Troy
Banished by fate came to the Italian shore.

And Homer, too, who was praised for this by Horace:

Speak to me, Muse, of him, when Troy had fallen,
Who saw the ways of many and their cities.

But Statius begins badly, and sweeps the reader away too suddenly in
these verses:

Fraternal arms, and alternate rule by hate
Profane contested, and the guilt of Thebes
I sing, moved by the fiery Muse.

Claudian is even more at fault, and thrusts these bombastic lines on
our unprepared attention:

The horses of Hell's rapist, the stars blown
By the Taenarian chariot, chambers dark
Of lower Juno ...

But this rule should particularly be observed in the use of
adjectives, which are always ill-joined with their noun when they
disaccord with the impression the reader has in his mind. I have seen
the opening of Lucan censured on this point:

Wars through Emathian fields, wars worse than civil,
And crime made legal is my song.

The critics urge that the epithet _worse than civil_ could justly be
employed after the depiction of the slaughter at Pharsalia, but that
here it is out of order and suddenly attacks the reader who was
thinking of no such thing. It offends against the precept of Horace:

Not smoke from brightness is his aim, but light
He gives from smoke.[5]

_In what way diction should answer to man's inner nature. First, the
grounds of the natural disaffection with unusual diction: how far this
should be observed._

But it is not sufficient that diction answer to the subject-matter
unless it also answers to the nature of man, in which may be discerned
a kind of aversion to obsolete, low, and inappropriate words. I prefer
to call this aversion a natural one rather than a result of opinion,
though it is in a way based on opinion. For although the feeling that
a particular word is more in common use and more civilized than
another is purely a matter of men's judgement, nevertheless it is as
natural to be displeased by the unusual and inappropriate as it is to
be pleased with the usual and proper. Whatever is contrary to reason
offends by the very fact that