Let but our pupil be well furnished with things, words will follow but too fast; he will pull them after him if they do not voluntarily follow.

I have observed some to make excuses, that they cannot express themselves, and pretend to have their fancies full of a great many very fine things, which yet, for want of eloquence, they cannot utter; 'tis a mere shift, and nothing else.

Will you know what I think of it?
I think they are nothing but shadows of some imperfect images and conceptions that they know not what to make of within, nor consequently bring out; they do not yet themselves understand what they would be at, and if you but observe how they haggle and stammer upon the point of parturition, you will soon conclude, that their labour is not to delivery, but about conception, and that they are but licking their formless embryo.

For my part, I hold, and Socrates commands it, that whoever has in his mind a sprightly and clear imagination, he will express it well enough in one kind of tongue or another, and, if he be dumb, by signs-- "Verbaque praevisam rem non invita sequentur;" ["Once a thing is conceived in the mind, the words to express it soon present themselves." ("The words will not reluctantly follow the thing preconceived.")--Horace, De Arte Poetica.v.

311] And as another as poetically says in his prose: "Quum res animum occupavere, verbs ambiunt," ["When things are once in the mind, the words offer themselves readily." ("When things have taken possession of the mind, the words trip.")--Seneca, Controvers., iii.