“The most rousing preacher in Oxford, a generation ago, was Benjamin Jowett. He never, as some preachers did, put it to two hundred healthy young men, as a quite likely thing, that they might die in the next night and have to give God, about breakfast time, an account of their stewardships. Neither did he suggest, as other preachers did, that they were all going to live to be threescore and ten. What he said was, ‘I find it set down in tables that the average duration of human life, at the age of twenty-one, is about thirty-six years. We may hope for a little more; we may fear a little less; but, speaking generally, thirty-six years, or about 13,000 days, is the time in which our task must be accomplished.’ For myself and some others, at least, I can certify this: our young minds were as electrified by this quaint piece of precision, so unexpected from a pulpit, that they were instantly opened wide for the reception of what followed — that we should be shabby fellows if we spent any serious proportion of our 13,000 days in shirking or whining or spunging on the more manful part of mankind…”
“Anything stated with complete calmness and fastidious precision in the midst of a heated controversy has almost the effect of a satiric epigram. It gains, for your mind, an odd distinctness and authority; it has a cunning touch of flattery; it seems to summon you away from the company of these brawling fellows and to bid you use the brains with which it does you the honour of crediting you. If ever the supply of headlong overstaters and understaters should run short, the effectiveness of literalism might undoubtedly languish. ‘It’s blokes like me,’ the brawlers may say to the literalists, as the burglar said to the judge of Assize, ‘that keeps blokes like you.’ But of that loss of a favourable environment there seems to be no immediate danger.” (C. E. Montague, 1930, A Writer’s Notes on His Trade).