Locke's intervention had plainly reinforced the traditional expectation that commonplacing should focus upon the organised preservation of reading experiences. Other factors, however, unconnected with Enlightenment philosophy of mind and educational theory, also affected the outward appearance of the Georgian commonplace book. Above all, there was a widespread understanding, rooted in Greek antiquity, that because commonplacing served essentially didactic purposes, it ought to concentrate upon one kind of textual form in particular. Happily, this was easy enough for the reader to identify. For it was invariably distinguished by an especially adept and pleasing use of language to articulate valuable truths and insights, this precious quality contriving to combine eloquence with economy so as to make possible the maximum wisdom in the fewest and most apposite words. To borrow the slightly sarcastic phraseology of the literary antiquarian Thomas Hayward, who was describing the compilers of those Elizabethan printed miscellanies of which eighteenth-century English commonplace books contained so many striking echoes, when thinking about the most suitable material for inclusion, and so often alighting upon these highly condensed bon mots, modern commonplacers still tended to make it ‘[their] invisible rule to admit no quotation of more than one line, or a couplet of ten syllables’.