we know how ancient rhetoric ran pell-mell into preciosity. But that was an aberration that affected only those who had a thin message to convey. When men are intensely engaged in saving their fellows, speech will grow clear, and when these men are at the same time persons endowed with great intellects, their speech will take on dignity of structure and of sound. Before that contest English prose had babbled thus:[4] And in that country is an old castle that stands upon a rock, the which is cleped the Castle of the Sparrowhawk, that is beyond the city of Layays, beside the town of Pharsipee, that belongeth to the lordship of Cruk, that is a rich lord and a good Christian man, where men find a sparrowhawk upon a perch right fair and right well made, and a fair Lady of Fayrye that keepeth it, etc. This sentence rattles on unhaltingly through “and’s” and “that’s” for a solid page before it falls down to a stop from sheer exhaustion. After the battle was over we have the Authorized Version with its magnificent directness: The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the word shall be to thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Briefly, the parallel between early Latin and early English prose can be indicated thus. The prose of Ennius, like that of Chaucer, was very much inferior to his verse. Before Ennius died, however, the mighty struggle of statesmen had begun in the polemics of Cato, a contest which was destined to build up in time a dignified and versatile language. Cato represented the native, middle-class, agrarian population of Italy that feared the expensive and ambitious foreign entanglements which the philhellenic party of Scipio had incurred and hated the foreign culture which followed in the wake of philhellenism. Cato spoke incessantly. A hundred and fifty of his speeches were available in Cicero’s day. He attacked the Scipionic group in the senate, in public harangues, and in court. And not only he but his lieutenants—and of course his opponents—had constantly to be on their feet. This was the beginning of the party divisions that led through the Gracchan reforms and through the debating period of the civil wars to the final defeat of the Roman Republic a hundred years later. The contest of words was as bitter as in the England of Wycliffe, Tindall, Cranmer, Latimer, and Hooker. Here, too, the best intellects of the nation were exercised in the debate; here, too, the gravity of the theme and the demands of aristocratic audiences required dignified expression, while the constant necessity of winning the populace required entire clarity and lucidity of expression. The struggle was not indeed for eternal salvation, but it often involved the question of life and death, and always the future of the state. And from men like Cato, the Gracchi, Cicero and Brutus, the state claimed and