figurative expression, reviving or replacing its outworn or tarnished
images. Latin literature and the Latin tongue were dying of routine
and languor; and what was necessary, first of all, was to re-
establish the natural and direct relationship between thought and
expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore to words
their primitive power.

For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force,
were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forcibly
impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of
making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful,
of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but
middling, tame, or only half-true even to him--this scrupulousness of
literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of
chivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience of
execution! what research for the significant [97] tones of ancient
idiom--sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular word-
building--gravis et decora constructio! He felt the whole meaning of
the sceptical Pliny's somewhat melancholy advice to one of his
friends, that he should seek in literature deliverance from
mortality--ut studiis se literarum a mortalitate vindicet. And there
was everything in the nature and the training of Marius to make him a
full participator in the hopes of such a new literary school, with
Flavian for its leader. In the refinements of that curious spirit,
in its horror of profanities, its fastidious sense of a correctness
in external form, there was something which ministered to the old
ritual interest, still surviving in him; as if here indeed were
involved a kind of sacred service to the mother-tongue.

Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age in