Institutio Oratoria

We borrow figures and metaphors from the most decadent poets, and regard it as a real sign of genius that it should require a genius to understand our meaning. And yet Cicero [*](de Or. I. iii. 12. ) long since laid down this rule in the clearest of language, that the worst fault in speaking is to adopt a style inconsistent with the idiom of ordinary speech and contrary to the common feeling of mankind.

But nowadays our rhetoricians regard Cicero as lacking both polish and learning; we are far superior, for we look upon everything that is dictated by nature as beneath our notice, and seek not for the true ornaments of speech, but for meretricious finery, as though there were any real virtue in words save in their power to represent facts. And if we have to spend all our life in the laborious effort to discover words which will at once be brilliant, appropriate and lucid, and to arrange them with exact precision, we lose all the fruit of our studies.

And yet we see the majority of modern speakers wasting their time over the discovery of single words and over the elaborate weighing and measurement of such words when once discovered. Even if the special aim of such a practice were always to secure the best words, such an ill-starred form of industry would be much to be deprecated, since it checks tile natural current of our speech and extinguishes the warmth of imagination by the delay and loss of self-confidence which it occasions.