?--yes, but in the grand manner. 'Conscious'?--
yes, but of what? Conscious of the dignity a great man owes to
himself, and to the assembly he addresses. He conceives that
assembly as 'the British Senate'; and, assuming, he communicates
that high conception. The Lords feel that they are listening as
Senators, since it is only thus a Senate should be addressed, as
nothing less than a Senate should be addressed thus.

Let me read you a second passage; of _written_ prose:

Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter,
went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than
to sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what
we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable
fall. We may enjoy the present while we are insensible of
infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in music,
is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is
to come. There are no fields of amaranth on this aide of the
grave; there are no voices, O Rhodope! that are not soon mute,
however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of
passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at
last[3].

Latin--all Latin--down to its exquisite falling close! And I say
to you, Gentlemen, that passages such as these deserve what
Joubert claimed of national monuments, _Ce sont les crampons qui
unissent une generation a une autre. Conservez ce qu'ont vu vos
peres,_ 'These are the clamps that knit one generation to
another. Cherish those things on which your fathers' eyes have
looked.'

_Abeunt studia in mores._

If, years ago, there had lacked anything to sharpen my suspicion
of those fork-bearded professors who derived our prose from the
stucco of Anglo-Saxon prose, it would have been their foolish
deliberate practice of composing whole pages of English prose
without using one word derivative from Latin or Greek. Esau, when
he sold his birthright, had the excuse of being famished. These
pedants, with a full board, sought frenetically to give it away--
board and birthright. _'So when this corruptible shall have put
on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality'_
--almost, I say, these men had deserved to have a kind of speech
more to their taste read over their coffins.

VII

What, in the next place, can I say of Greek, save that, as Latin
gave our fathers the model of prose, Greek was the source of it
all, the goddess and genius of the well-head?