upon a word by which good use has agreed with reasonable approximation to name the idea he wishes to arouse. It is equally, if not more, to make sure that the word he chooses shall not only name the idea distinctly enough to identify it, but also name it by a name if such a name is to be found which shall arouse in the minds of whoever read or hear it a set of suggestions as nearly as possible akin to those which it arouses in his own. Otherwise it must, in all probability, fail to produce the effect he has in mind.

How hard this is we can see by thinking for a moment of the various associations which in various companies cluster about those most definitely specific of words, proper names. Every school-boy, I will assume, has known who Brutus was, any time these fifteen hundred years. He was the Roman gentleman who had been a close personal friend of Julius Cæsar, but whose devotion to the old constitution of the Roman republic led him to join in the conspiracy which put Cæsar to death. Shakspere's tragedy makes Brutus, to English-speaking people, something of a hero, -a man not to be imitated, perhaps, but surely to be admired for whole-hearted devotion to the highest ideals he knows. In the "Divine Comedy " of Dante, on the other hand, Brutus appears in a very different light. If I am not in error, Dante believed passionately in the divine right of the Roman empire; to him Brutus was the first and chiefest of the sinners who had raised their hands against it. In

the very lowest depth of hell he found him suffering the penalty of the gravest but one of human crimes; the worst torture of all only a shade worse than his was reserved for Judas Iscariot. Now, if there be school-boys trained in the "Divine Comedy as most of us have been trained in Shakspere, the name "Brutus" would suggest to them anything but our heroic ideal. Each set would know who Brutus was; but the one set would think of him as a hero, the other as one who deserved worse execration than ever Yankee vented on Benedict Arnold.

After all, the analogy of such proper names as I have just mentioned is perhaps the most instructive to which I can now call your attention. If we understand a proper name at all, we know to what human being it applies. In general, his outward and visible form, lovely or unlovely, rises before our eyes when we hear the arbitrary syllables by which men have agreed to name him. But what set of emotions rises. in our minds along with this imaginary figure varies almost as much as we ourselves vary from one another. In private life it is often hard to guess what these emotions will be. With public figures the case is a little different: it is safe to assume, I think, that the name of Mr. Jefferson Davis, calling up a slim figure with a slight beard under the chin, would arouse one set of emotions in a citizen of Massachusetts, and quite another in a citizen of Mississippi. Sensible people, wishing to produce distinct rhetorical effects, should govern their use of the name Jefferson Davis

accordingly. And here we may see, as distinctly as anywhere, the two functions that every word, every name of an idea, must perform: in the first place, it names something in such a way as to identify it; in the second, it suggests along with it a very subtile and variable set of associated ideas and emotions.

These two functions, hardly ever quite distinct in style, must both be kept in mind by whoever would use words and, as we shall see later, by whoever would compose words-with any approach to certainty. It is worth while, then, to name them now distinctly. The names I give them are, I believe, sanctioned by no small amount of usage; but even were there no usage behind them at all, I should feel at liberty, with such definition as I hope I have given them, to use them in this book. A word may be said, then, to denote the idea it identifies; Jefferson Davis denotes the slim gentleman with a slight chinbeard. A word may be said to connote the thoughts and emotions that it arouses in the hearer or reader, in whose mind these thoughts and emotions habitually cluster about the precise idea it denotes: in the North, for example, the name Jefferson Davis connotes the idea of treason; in the South, the idea of patriotism. What we have seen true of this proper name I shall ask you to believe true, in greater or less degree, of every word we use.

Now, the effect which we may wish at any moment to produce is a matter not of denotation alone, nor of connotation, but of both together. Nor is it a matter

of what a given word may denote or may connote to us alone; it is a matter of what that fine perception of fact which marks the distinction between what we call sanity and what we call folly, leads us to believe that the word will at once denote and connote in the minds of those whom we address. And this is the consideration that must govern us in our choice of words, Latin or Saxon, big or little, general or specific, figurative or literal; and in our choice of number of words, many or few. A very fine question this proves to be, -depressing, perhaps, at first sight, for it is clear that ideal perfection is as unattainable in the use of words as in other phases of our conduct of life. But what is unattainable is not for that unapproachable; and I believe that there are few things in this world more constantly, more increasingly stimulating than unceasing, earnest effort to approach more and more nearly an ideal which is all the more worth striving for when we are sure that it will never repay us with the fatal satiety of full possession.

III.

SENTENCES.

A SENTENCE I may define as a series of words so composed as to make complete sense. In its simplest form it consists of a subject - the thing concerning which a completely sensible assertion is made --and a predicate, the assertion made. There may or may not be objects and modifiers. I study, is a sentence; so is, I study Rhetoric; so is, I study Rhetoric with pleasure in spite of its apparent dulness; and so on. But a true sentence may always, I think, be analyzed into subject, or sometimes subjects, and predicate, or sometimes predicates, with occasional modifiers, - objects, adjectives, adverbs, what not. For various purposes, it may take various forms, — positive, negative, interrogative, exclamatory, but so long as it remains a composition of words, and of nothing but words, which makes complete sense, it is a sentence.

I need hardly remind you that sentences are as old as language itself. Until a child is able to put words together we do not, unless blinded by affection, pretend that the child can really talk. The moment he can put words together, the moment he begins to ex