Consuetudo.--Perspicuitas, Venustas.--Authoritas.--Virgil.--
Lucretius.--Chaucerism.--Paronomasia.--Custom is the most certain
mistress of language, as the public stamp makes the current money.
But we must not be too frequent with the mint, every day coining,
nor fetch words from the extreme and utmost ages; since the chief
virtue of a style is perspicuity, and nothing so vicious in it as to
need an interpreter. Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of
majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes; for
they have the authority of years, and out of their intermission do
win themselves a kind of grace like newness. But the eldest of the
present, and newness of the past language, is the best. For what
was the ancient language, which some men so dote upon, but the
ancient custom? Yet when I name custom, I understand not the vulgar
custom; for that were a precept no less dangerous to language than
life, if we should speak or live after the manners of the vulgar:
but that I call custom of speech, which is the consent of the
learned; as custom of life, which is the consent of the good.
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