Others might brutalise or neglect the native speech, that true "open field" for charm and sway over men.

He would make of it a serious study, weighing the precise power of every phrase and word, as though it were precious metal, disentangling the later associations and going back to the original and native sense of each,--restoring to full significance all its wealth of latent figurative expression, reviving or replacing its outworn or tarnished images.

Latin literature and the Latin tongue were dying of routine and languor; and what was necessary, first of all, was to re-establish the natural and direct relationship between thought and expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore to words their primitive power.
For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force, were to be the apparatus of a war for himself.

To be forcibly impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful, of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but middling, tame, or only half-true even to him--this scrupulousness of literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of chivalrous conscience.

What care for style! what patience of execution! what research for the significant [97] tones of ancient idiom--sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular word-building--gravis et decora constructio! He felt the whole meaning of the sceptical Pliny's somewhat melancholy advice to one of his friends, that he should seek in literature deliverance from mortality--ut studiis se literarum a mortalitate vindicet.