attitude toward language which has been lost in the intervening centuries. It is quite possible that long years of accumulated usage tend to act as a deterrent to a free and imaginative use of language. So many stereotypes have had time to form themselves, and so many manuals of usage have been issued that the choice would seem to lie between simple compliance and open rebellion. Either one uses the language as the leaders of one’s social and business world use it, or one makes a decisive break and uses it in open defiance of the conventionalized patterns. We may remember in this connection that when the new movement in modern literature got underway in the second decade of this century, its leaders proved themselves the most defiant and brash kind of rebels as they embarked upon the work of resuscitation and refurbishment, and it was to the Elizabethans especially that they looked for sanction and guidance. But the rebel with this program faces a dilemma: he cannot infuse life into the old forms that he knows are depriving expression of all vitality, and he exhausts himself in the campaign to smash and get rid of them. That is partly an historical observation, and our interest is in laying bare the movement of a great eloquence. Yet if we had to answer whether some heroic style like that of Milton cannot be formed for our own day, when millions might rejoice to hear a sonorous voice speaking out of a deep learning in our traditions, our answer would surely be, yes. And if asked how, we would begin our counsel by telling the writer to heed the advice in Emerson’s _American Scholar_—better indeed than Emerson heeded it himself—to look upon himself not as a writer but as a man writing, and to try to live in that character. As long as one does that, it is most likely that the concept will dominate the medium, and that one will use, with inventive freedom, such conventionality as is necessary to language. A timid correctness, like perfect lucidity, sometimes shows that more attention has been devoted to the form than to the thought, and this may give the writing a kind of hard surface which impedes sympathy between writer and reader. Finally, one should remember that people like to feel they are hearing of the solid fact and substance of the world, and those epithets which give us glimpses of its concreteness and contingency are the best guarantors of that. The regular balancing of abstract and concrete modifiers, which we meet regularly in Shakespeare, mirrors, indeed, the situation all of us face in daily living, where general principles are clear in theory but are conditioned in their application to the concrete world. The man of eloquence must be a lover of “the world’s body” to the extent of being able to give it a fond description.