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Elsewhere, in his great treatise, referring to what was all-essential in oratorical delivery, according to Demosthenes, Tully, by a bold and luminous phrase, declares Action to be, as it were, the speech of the body, "quasi sermo corporis."
Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits of prose thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they should form the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of those qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just the quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris.
From this time he was frequently afflicted with returns of his distemper, which yet did not so far subdue him, as to make him lay aside his studies or his lectures, till, in 1726, he found himself so worn out, that it was improper for him to continue any longer the professorships of botany or chymistry, which he, therefore, resigned, April 28, and, upon his resignation, spoke a "Sermo academicus," or oration, in which he asserts the power and wisdom of the creator from the wonderful fabrick of the human body; and confutes all those idle reasoners, who pretend to explain the formation of parts, or the animal operations, to which he proves, that art can produce nothing equal, nor any thing parallel.
Most humanists wrote indeed in that style. Was Erasmus aware that he here attacked his own past? After all, was it not exactly the same thing which he had done, to the indignation of his opponents, when translating Logos by Sermo instead of by Verbum?
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