In all the despotisms of the East, it has been observed that the further any part of the empire is removed from the capital, the more do its inhabitants enjoy some sort of rights and privileges:  the more inefficacious is the power of the monarch; and the more feeble and easily decayed is the organisation of the government.

You perceive that Brougham has transferred Burke’s thought to his own page:  but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke’s vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold on the mind?

‘This particularising style,’ comments Mr Payne, ’is the essence of Poetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy it produces.  Brougham’s passage is excellent in its way:  but it pales before the flashing lights of Burke’s sentences.  The best instances of this energy of style, he adds, are to be found in the classical writers of the seventeenth century.  ’When South says, “An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise,” he communicates more effectually the notion of the difference between the intellect of fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermons put together.’

You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this passage is expounding trash; but you will agree with Mr Payne and me that he uttered it vividly.

Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of writing, a passage from Dr John Donne far beyond and above anything that ever lay within South’s compass:—­

The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell.  The dust of great persons’ graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing.  As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirle-wind hath blown the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran?  So is the death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed.  They shall not say This is Iesabel; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it should be; but they shall not say, they shall not know, This is Iesabel.

Carlyle noted of Goethe, ’his emblematic intellect, his never-failing tendency to transform into shape, into life, the feeling that may dwell in him.  Everything has form, has visual excellence:  the poet’s imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, and his pen turns them into shape.’

Perpend this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will not hereafter set it down to my reproach that I wasted an hour of a May morning in a denunciation of Jargon, and in exhorting you upon a technical matter at first sight so trivial as the choice between abstract and definite words.