But in all his writing it is the matter, the real thing that he wanted to say, which was uppermost.

He cared how it was said, not for the sake of form or ornament, but because the force and clearness of what was said depended so much on how it was said.

Of course, what he wanted to say varied indefinitely with the various occasions of his life.

His business may merely be to write "a device" or panegyric for a pageant in the Queen's honour, or for the revels of Gray's Inn.

But even these trifles are the result of real thought, and are full of ideas--ideas about the hopes of knowledge or about the policy of the State; and though, of course, they have plenty of the flourishes and quaint absurdities indispensable on such occasions, yet the "rhetorical affectation" is in the thing itself, and not in the way it is handled; he had an opportunity of saying some of the things which were to him of deep and perpetual interest, and he used it to say them, as forcibly, as strikingly, as attractively as he could.