Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but immortality.' The
precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly
clarity: the two parts of Johnson's antithesis come to no more than this
'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trump
our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as
it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in
everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.

What madman, then, will say 'Thus or thus far shalt thou go' to a prose
thus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years,
working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine its
range, whether of thought or of music? You have received it by
inheritance, Gentlemen: it is yours, freely yours--to direct your words
through life as well as your hearts.




LECTURE VII

SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED

Thursday, May 29


Let me begin to-day, Gentlemen, with a footnote to my last lecture. It
ended, as you may remember, upon an earnest appeal to you, if you would
write good English, to study the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; to
learn from it, moreover, how by mastering _rhythm_, our Prose overcame
the capital difficulty of Prose and attuned itself to rival its twin