In the effort to trace lines of demarcation you may little by little be drawn into the heart of subjects the most instructive; for only as you have thoroughly mastered a subject, and all which is most characteristic about it, can you hope to trace these lines with accuracy and success. Thus a Roman of the higher classes might bear four names: 'praenomen,' 'nomen,' 'cognomen,' 'agnomen'; almost always bore three. You will know something of the political and family life of Rome when you can tell the exact story of each of these, and the precise difference between them. He will not be altogether ignorant of the Middle Ages and of the clamps which in those ages bound society together, who has learned exactly to distinguish between a 'fief' and a 'benefice.' He will have obtained a firm grasp on some central facts of theology who can exactly draw out the distinction between 'reconciliation,' 'propitiation,' 'atonement,' as used in the New Testament; of Church history, who can trace the difference between a 'schism' and a 'heresy.' One who has learned to discriminate between 'detraction' and 'slander,' as Barrow has done before him, [Footnote: 'Slander involveth an imputation of falsehood, but detraction may be couched in truth, and clothed in fair language. It is a poison often infused in sweet liquor, and ministered in a golden cup.' Compare Spenser, _Fairy Queen_, 5. 12. 28-43.] or between 'emulation' and 'envy,' in which South has excellently shown him the way, [Footnote: _Sermons_, 1737, vol. v. p. 403. His words are quoted in my _Select Glossary_, s. v 'Emulation.'] or between 'avarice' and 'covetousness,' with Cowley, will have made no unprofitable excursion into the region of ethics.
How effectual a help, moreover, will it prove to the writing of a good English style, if instead of choosing almost at hap-hazard from a group of words which seem to us one about as fit for our purpose as another, we at once know which, and which only, we ought in the case before us to employ, which will prove the exact vesture of our thoughts. It is the first characteristic of a well-dressed man that his clothes fit him: they are not too small and shrunken here, too large and loose there. Now it is precisely such a prime characteristic of a good style, that the words fit close to the thoughts. They will not be too big here, hanging like a giant's robe on the limbs of a dwarf; nor too small there, as a boy's garments into which the man has painfully and ridiculously thrust himself. You do not, as you read, feel in one place that the writer means more than he has succeeded in saying; in another that he has said more than he means; in a third something beside what his precise intention was; in a fourth that he has failed to convey any meaning at all; and all this from a lack of skill in employing the instrument of language, of precision in knowing what words would be the exactest correspondents and aptest exponents of his thoughts. [Footnote: La propriété des termes est le caractère distinctif des grands écrivains; c'est par là que leur style est toujours au niveau de leur sujet; c'est à cette qualité qu'on reconnaît le vrai talent d'écrire, et non à l'art futile de déguiser par un vain coloris les idées communes. So D'Alembert; but Caesar long before had said, Delectus verborum, eloquentiae origo.]