Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style’. As usual Swift cuts through the jungle of theory and finds the fact. It would be interesting to know whether the ‘Young Clergyman’ to whom he wrote benefited by the definition. Certainly clerical English is one of the most chronic of occupational diseases; the fear that, in Sydney Smith’s phrase, the intellect may be ‘improperly exposed’ leads to the swaddling bands of rhetoric and the safe generalisation. Philosophers often fare little better; and the scholarship of yesterday lies mouldering in a hundred libraries, too often unread because it is unreadable.

‘Style’ is confined by the critics to the work of the conscious artist, for whom words are tools to be chosen, sharpened, used. The scholar, understandably contemptuous of the self-important claims of the professional writer, addresses himself to those who want to learn. And learning is never easy. Yet the business of communication has its grace; and a Locke, a Hume, a Macaulay, a Newman survive in a double immortality. Or, more strictly, in them the idea and its expression are matched.

Stilus brevis, grata facundia, celsa, clara, firma sententia. One does not look for literary judgments in a breviary responsory. But this liturgical praise of St Thomas as a master of languages sums up, with something of St Thomas’s own gracious economy of speech, that union of thought and its expression which it should be any writer’s aim to reach. The identification of style with the decorative tricks of a Pater or a George Moore has confused an issue which is simple.