Lexiphanes (21-25)

Sopolis Now, let it come. Look, look! Here comes in sooth, anon follows, close upon them quoth he, withal, sirrah, I trow, and a general sprinkling of sundry. But try again; tickle your. throat; that will help. Hard by has not come up yet, nor a-weary, nor rehearse, nor quandary. Oh, there are lots of them lurking yet, a whole stomachful. It would be well to get rid of some of them by purging; there should be an

Lycinus I will, Sopolis; and thank you for clearing the way. Now, Lexiphanes, listen to me. If you want sincere commendations upon your style, and success with popular audiences, ' give a wide berth to that sort of stuff. Make a beginning with the great poets, read them with some one to help you, then go on to the orators, and when you have assimilated their vocabulary, proceed in due time to Thucydides and Plato, not forgetting a thorough course also of pleasant Comedy and grave Tragedy. When you have culled the best that all these can show, you may reckon that you have a style. You have not realized it, but at present you are like the toymen’s dolls, all gaudy colouring outside, and inside, fragile clay.

If you will take this advice, put up for a little while with being called uneducated, and not be ashamed to mend your ways, you may face an audience without a tremor; you will not then be a laughing-stock any more; the cultivated will no longer exercise their irony upon you and nickname you the Hellene and the Attic just because you are less intelligible than many barbarians. But above all things, do bear in mind not to ape the worst tricks of the last generation’s professors; you are always nibbling at their wares; put your foot upon them once for all, and take the ancients for your model. And no dallying with unsubstantial flowers of speech; accustom yourself, like the athletes, to solid food. And let your devotions be paid to the Graces and to Lucidity, whom you have so neglected.

Further, put a stopper on bombast and grandiloquence and mannerism; be neither supercilious nor overbearing; cease to

Again, could anything be more ludicrous than for one who claims to be a purist, drawing from the undefiled fountain of antiquity, to mix in (though indeed that reverses the proportion) expressions that would be impossible to the merest schoolboy? I felt as if I should like the earth to swallow me up, when I heard you talk of a man’s chemise, and use valet of a woman; who does not know that a man wears a shirt, and that a valet is male? But you abound in far more flagrant blunders than these: I have chidden, not chode you; we do not write a friend, we write to him; we say ’onest, not honest; these usages of yours cannot claim even alien rights among us. Moreover, we do not like even poetry to read like the dictionary. But the sort of poetry to which your prose corresponds would be Dosiadas’s Altar, Lycophron’s Alexandra, or any more pestilent pedantry that may happen toexist. If you take the pains to unlearn all this, you will have done the best you can for yourself. If you let yourself be seduced by your sweet baits again, I have at least put in my word of warning, and you will have only yourseif to blame when you find yourself on the downward path. H. and