[40]
There are still some critics who deny that any
form of eloquence is purely natural, except that
which closely resembles the ordinary speech of everyday life, which we use to our friends, our wives, our
children and our slaves, a language, that is to say,
which contents itself with expressing the purpose
of the mind without seeking to discover anything
in the way of elaborate and far-fetched phraseology.
[p. 473]
And they hold that whatever is added to this
simplicity lays the speaker open to the charge of
affectation and pretentious ostentation of speech,
void of all sincerity and elaborated merely for the
sake of the words, although the sole duty assigned
to words by nature is to be the servants of thought.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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