For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really
vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire
system of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we
speak of the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his
art. Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no
English equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his
intelligence of the rules of language in his freedoms with it,
addition or expansion, which like the spontaneities of manner in a
well-bred person will still further illustrate good taste.--The right
vocabulary! Translators have not invariably seen how all-important
that is in the work of translation, driving for the most part at
idiom or construction; whereas, if the original be first-rate, one's
first care should be with its elementary particles, Plato, for
instance, being often reproducible by an exact following, with no
variation in structure, of word after word, as [15] the pencil
follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only each word or syllable
be not of false colour, to change my illustration a little.

Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has
winnowed and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the
words he would select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and
still more of the words he would reject were the dictionary other
than Johnson's; and doing this with his peculiar sense of the world
ever in view, in search of an instrument for the adequate expression
of that, he begets a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own
spirit, and in the strictest sense original. That living authority
which language needs lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognising
always that every language possesses a genius, a very fastidious
genius, of its own, expand at once and purify its very elements,
which must needs change along with the changing thoughts of living