Page:The Golden Ass of Apuleius.djvu/14

 not but be conscious of his diction, should ever deviate from artifice. His style, in truth, he put on as a garment, and it fitted the matter without a crease. His exotic vocabulary was the fruit of the widest research. He ransacked the ancient plays for long-forgotten words. He cared not where he picked up his neologisms, so they were dazzling and bizarre. Greece, his own Carthage, the gutters of Rome, contribute to the wealth of his diction, for he knew naught of that pedantry which would cramp expression for authority's sake. The literary use of slang was almost his own invention. He would twist the vulgar words of every day into quaint, unheard-of meanings, nor did he ever deny shelter to those loafers and footpads of speech which inspire the grammarian with horror. On every page you encounter a proverb, a catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant redundancy. One quality only was distasteful to him: the commonplace. He is ever the literary fop, conscious of his trappings and assured of a handsome effect. In brief, he belonged to the African School, for which elaboration was the first and last law of taste. He may even have been a pupil of Fronto, the prime champion of the elocutio novella, the rhetorician who condemned Cicero in that he was not scrupulous in his search for effect, and urged upon his pupils the use of insperata atque inopinata verba. No wonder poor Adlington, whose equipment of Latin was of the lightest, hesitated for a while! No wonder he complained that 'the Author had written his work in so darke and high a stile, in so strange and absurd words, and in such new invented phrases, as hee seemed rather to set it forth to shew his magnificencie of prose, than to participate his doings to