the banner of Hugo, imparted colour and brilliance. Yet all the great artists who have wrestled with French speech for a century have never been able to restore the scent and the savour and the substance which Villon and Montaigne without visible effort could once find within its borders. In this as in other matters what we call Progress means the discovery of new desirable qualities, and therewith the loss of other qualities that were at least equally desirable. Then there is yet another warning which, especially in recent times, is issued at frequent intervals, and that is against the use of verbal counters, of worn or even worn-out phrases, of what we commonly fall back on modern French to call _clichés_. We mean thereby the use of old stereotyped phrases—Goethe called them “stamped” or _gestempelt_—to save the trouble of making a new living phrase to suit our meaning. The word _cliché_ is thus typographic, though, it so happens, it is derived from an old French word of phonetic meaning, _cliqueter_ or _cliquer_ (related to the German _klatschen_), which we already have in English as to “click” or to “clack,” in a sense which well supplements its more modern technical sense for this literary end. Yet the warning against _clichés_ is vain. The good writer, by the very fact that he is alive and craves speech that is vivid, as _clichés_ never are, instinctively avoids their excessive use, while the nervous and bad writer, in his tremulous anxiety to avoid these tabooed _clichés_, falls into the most deplorable habits, like the late Mr. Robert Ross, who at one time was so anxious to avoid _clichés_ that he acquired the habit of using them in an inverted form and wrote a prose that made one feel like walking on sharp flints; for, though a macadamized road may not be so good to walk in as a flowered meadow, it is better than a macadamized road with each stone turned upside down and the sharp edge uppermost. As a matter of fact it is impossible to avoid the use of _clichés_ and counters in speech, and if it were possible the results would be in the highest degree tedious and painful. The word “_cliché_” itself, we have seen, is a _cliché_, a worn counter of a word, with its original meaning all effaced, and even its secondary meaning now only just visible. That, if those folk who condemn _clichés_ only had the intelligence to perceive it, is a significant fact. You cannot avoid using _clichés_, not even in the very act of condemning them. They include, if we only look keenly enough, nearly the whole of language, almost every separate word. If one could avoid them one would be unintelligible. Even those common phrases which it is peculiarly meet to call counters are not to be absolutely condemned. They have become so common to use because so fit to use, as Baudelaire understood when he spoke of “the immense depth of thought in vulgar locutions.”[56] There is only one rule to follow here,—and it is