--Now that I have informed you in the
knowing of these things, let me lead you by the hand a little
farther, in the direction of the use, and make you an able writer by
practice. The conceits of the mind are pictures of things, and the
tongue is the interpreter of those pictures. The order of God's
creatures in themselves is not only admirable and glorious, but
eloquent: then he who could apprehend the consequence of things in
their truth, and utter his apprehensions as truly, were the best
writer or speaker. Therefore Cicero said much, when he said, Dicere
recte nemo potest, nisi qui prudenter intelligit. {124a} The shame
of speaking unskilfully were small if the tongue only thereby were
disgraced; but as the image of a king in his seal ill-represented is
not so much a blemish to the wax, or the signet that sealed it, as
to the prince it representeth, so disordered speech is not so much
injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and
incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed.
Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jar;
nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous; nor his
elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance breaks itself into
fragments and uncertainties.
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