but a gentleman, let us
leave them to abuse their leisure; our business lies elsewhere. Let but
our pupil be well furnished with things, words will follow but too fast;
he will pull them after him if they do not voluntarily follow. I have
observed some to make excuses, that they cannot express themselves, and
pretend to have their fancies full of a great many very fine things,
which yet, for want of eloquence, they cannot utter; 'tis a mere shift,
and nothing else. Will you know what I think of it? I think they are
nothing but shadows of some imperfect images and conceptions that they
know not what to make of within, nor consequently bring out; they do not
yet themselves understand what they would be at, and if you but observe
how they haggle and stammer upon the point of parturition, you will soon
conclude, that their labour is not to delivery, but about conception, and
that they are but licking their formless embryo. For my part, I hold,
and Socrates commands it, that whoever has in his mind a sprightly and
clear imagination, he will express it well enough in one kind of tongue
or another, and, if he be dumb, by signs--

"Verbaque praevisam rem non invita sequentur;"

["Once a thing is conceived in the mind, the words to express it
soon present themselves." ("The words will not reluctantly follow the
thing preconceived.")--Horace, De Arte Poetica. v. 311]

And as another as poetically says in his prose:

"Quum res animum occupavere, verbs ambiunt,"

["When things are once in the mind, the words offer themselves
readily." ("When things have taken possession of the mind, the
words trip.")--Seneca, Controvers., iii. proem.]

and this other.

"Ipsae res verbs rapiunt."

["The things themselves force the words to express them."
--Cicero, De Finib., iii. 5.]

He knows nothing of ablative, conjunctive, substantive, or grammar, no
more than his lackey, or a fishwife of the Petit Pont; and yet these will
give you a bellyful of talk, if you will hear them, and peradventure
shall trip as little in their language as the best masters of art in
France. He knows no rhetoric, nor how in a preface to bribe the
benevolence of the courteous reader; neither does he care to know it.
Indeed all this fine decoration of painting is easily effaced by the
lustre of a simple and blunt truth; these fine flourishes serve only to
amuse the vulg