Coleridge says: “To write or talk concerning any subject, without having previously taken the pains to understand it, is a breach of the duty which we owe to ourselves, though it may be no offence against the law of the land. The privilege of talking, and even publishing, nonsense, is necessary in a free state; but the more sparingly we make use of it, the better.”[86] Much reading and good company are supposed to be the best methods of getting at the niceties and elegancies of a language; but this road is long and irksome. The great point is to acquire our most usual Anglicisms; all those phrases and peculiarities which form the characteristics of our language. Nearly eighty years since, Mr. Sharp took upon himself to say that we had no grammar capable of teaching a foreigner to read our authors; adding, “but of this I am sure, that we have none by which he can be enabled to understand our conversation.” What an annoyance are long speakers, long talkers, and long writers—people who will not take time to think, or are not capable of thinking accurately! Once when Dr. South had preached before Queen Anne, her majesty observed to him, “You have given me a most excellent discourse, Dr. South; but I wish you had had time to make it longer.” “Nay, madam,” replied the doctor, “if I had had time, I should have made it shorter.” Method in treating your subject is of great importance. Southey has well illustrated the absence of this quality. A Quaker, by name Benjamin Lay (who was a little cracked in the head, though sound at the heart), took one of his compositions to Benjamin Franklin, that it might be printed and published. Franklin, having looked over the manuscript, observed that it was deficient in arrangement: “It is no matter,” replied the author; “print any part thou pleaseth first.” Many are the speeches, and the sermons, and the treatises, and the poems, and the volumes, which are like Benjamin Lay’s book: the head might serve for the tail, and the tail for the body, and the body for the head; either end for the middle, and the middle for either end; nay, if you could turn them inside out, like a polypus or a glove, they would be no worse for the operation.[87] * * * * * Free Translation is a rare accomplishment. Sir John Denham, who is declared by Johnson “to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines and interpreting single words,” gives the same praise to Sir Richard Fanshawe, whom he addresses thus: That servile path thou nobly dost decline, Of tracing word by word and line by line; A new and nobler way thou dost pursue, To make translations and translators too: They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame.