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among every people, are those which are pointed at rival countries. They expose some prevalent folly, or allude to some disgrace which the natives have incurred. In France, the Burgundians have a proverb Mieux vaut bon repas que bel habit; Better a good dinner than a fine coat.' good people are great gormandizers, but shabby dressers; they are commonly said to have 'bowels of silk and velvet;" that is, all their silk and velvet goes for their bowels! Thus Picardy is famous for hot heads,' and the Norman for son dit et son dedit, his saying and his unsaying! In Italy the numerous rival cities pelt one another with proverbs: Chi ha a fure con Tosco non convien esser losco, He who deals with a Tuscan must not have his eves shut.' A Venetia chi vi nasce, mal vi si pasce, Whom Venice breeds, she poorly feeds.'-Among ourselves, hardly has a county escaped from some popular quip; even neighbouring towns have their sarcasms, usually pickled in some unlucky rhyme. The egotism of man eagerly seizes on whatever serves to depreciate or to ridicule his neighbour : nations = proverb each other; counties flout counties; obscure towns sharpen their wits on towns as obscure as themselves the same evil principle lurking in poor human nature, if it cannot always assume predominance, will meansly gratify itself by insult or contempt.

There is another source of national characteristics, frequently producing strange or whimsical combinations; a = people, from a very natural circumstance, have drawn their proverbs from local objects, or from allusions to peculiar customs. The influence of manners and customs over the ideas and language of a people would form a subject of extensive and curious research. There is a Japanese proverb, that A fog cannot be dispelled with a fan!' Had we not known the origin of this proverb, it would be evident that it could only have occurred to a people who had constantly before them fogs and fans; and the fact appears that fogs are frequent on the coast of Japan; and that from the age of five years both sexes of the Japanese carry fans. The Spaniards have an odd proverb to describe those who teaze and vex a person before they do him the very benefit which they are about to confer-acting kindly, but speaking roughly; Mostrar primero la horca que el lugar, To show the gallows before they show the town a circumstance alluding to their small towns, which have a gallows placed on an eminence so that the gallows breaks on the eye of the traveller before he gets a view of the town itself.

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The Cheshire proverb on marriage, 'Better wed over the mixon than over the moor,' that is, at home or in its Vicinity; mixon alludes to the dung, &c, in the farm-yard, while the road from Chester to London is over the moorland in Staffordshire; this local proverb is a curious instance of provincial pride, perhaps of wisdom, to induce the gentry of that county to form intermarriages; to prolong their own ancient families, and perpetuate ancient friendships between them.

In the Isle of Man a proverbial expression forcibly indicates the object constantly occupying the minds of the inhabitants. The two Deemsters or judges, when appointed to the chair of judgment, declare they will render justice between man and man as equally as the herring bone lies between the two sides: an image which could not have occurred to any people unaccustomed to herringfishery. There is a Cornish proverb, Those who will not be ruled by the rudder must be ruled by the rock' the strands of Cornwall, so often covered with wrecks, could not fail to impress on the imaginations of its inhabitants the two objects from whence they drew this salutary proverb, against obstinate wrong-heads.

When Scotland, in the last century, felt its allegiance to England doubtful, and when the French sent an expedition to the land of cakes, a local proverb was revived, to show the identity of interests which affected both na

tions.

If Skiddaw hath a cap

Scruffel wots full well of that.'

These are two high hills, one in Scotland and one in England; so near, that what happens to the one will not be long ere it reach the other. If a fog lodges on the one, it is sure to rain on the other; the mutual sympathies of the two countries were hence deduced in a copious dissertation, by Oswald Dyke, on what was called The Unionproverb, which local proverbs of our country, Fuller has interspersed in his Worthies,' and Ray and Grose have collected separately.

I was amused lately by a curious financial revelation which I found in an opposition paper, where it appears that 'Ministers pretend to make their load of taxes more portable, by shifting the burden, or altering the pressure, without however, diminishing the weight; according to the Italian proverb, Accommodare le bisaccie nella strada, To fit the load on the journey-it is taken from a custom of the mule-drivers, who placing their packages at first but awkwardly on the backs of their poor beasts, and seeing them ready to sink, cry out, Never mind! we must fit them better on the road!' I was gratified to discover, by the present and some other modern instances, that the taste for proverbs was reviving, and that we were returning to those sober times, when the aptitude of a simple proverb would be preferred to the verbosity of politicians, Tories, Whigs, or Radicals!

There are domestic proverbs which originate in incidents known only to the natives of their province. Italian literature is particularly rich in these stores. The lively proverbial taste of that vivacious people was transferred to their own authors; and when these allusions were obscured by time, learned Italians, in their zeal for their national literature, and in their national love of story-telling, have written grave commentaries even on ludicrous, but popular tales, in which the proverbs are said to have originated. They resemble the old facetious contes, whose simplicity and humour still live in the pages of Boccaccio, and are not forgotten in those of the Queen of Navarre.

The Italians apply a proverb to a person who while he is beaten, takes the blows quietly :

Per beato ch' elle non furon pesche! Luckily they were not peaches!' And to threaten to give a man

the court.

Una pesca in un occhio,

A peach in the eye'

means to give him a thrashing. This proverb, it is said, originated in the close of a certain droll adventure. The community of the Castle Poggibonsi, probably from some jocular tenure observed on St Bernard's day, pay a tribute of peaches to the court of Tuscany, which are usually shared among the ladies in waiting, and the pages of It happened one season, in a great scarcity of peaches, that the good people at Poggibonsi, finding them rather dear, sent, instead of the customary tribute, a quantity of fine juicy figs, which was so much disapproved of by the pages, that as soon as they got hold of them, they began in rage to empty the baskets on the heads of the ambassadors of the Poggibonsi, who, in attempting to fly as well as they could from the pulpy shower, half-blinded, and recollecting that peaches would have had stones in them, cried out

Per beato ch' elle non furon pesche!
Luckily they were not peaches!

Fare le scalée di Sant' Ambrogio; To mount the stairs of Saint Ambrose,' a proverb allusive to the business of the school of scandal. Varchi explains it by a circuinstance so common in provincial cities. On summer evenings, for fresh air and gossip, the loungers met on the steps and landing places of the church of St Ambrose; whoever left the party, they read in his book,' as our commentator expresses it; and not a leaf was passed over! All liked to join a party so well informed of one another's concerns, and every one tried to be the very last to quit it, -not to leave his character behind! It became a proverbial phrase with those who left a company, and were too tender of their backs, to request they would not 'mount the stairs of St Ambrose.' Jonson has well described such a company:

'You are so truly fear'd, but not beloved
One of another, as no one dares break
Company from the rest, lest they should fall
Upon him absent.'

Two

There are legends and histories which belong to proverbs; and some of the most ancient refer to incidents which have not always been commemorated. Greek proverbs have accidentally been explained by Pausanias: He is a man of Tenedos to describe a person of unquestionable veracity; and To cut with the Tenedian axe;' to express an absolute and irrevocable refusal. The first originated in a king of Tenedos, who decreed that there should always stand behind the judge a man holding an axe, ready to execute justice on any one convicted of falsehood. The other arose from the same king, whose father having reached his island, to supplicate the

son's forgiveness for the injury inflicted on him by the arts of a step-mother, was preparing to land; already the ship was fastened by its cable to a rock; when the son came down and sternly cutting the cable with an axe, sent the ship adrift to the mercy of the waves: hence, 'to cut with the Tenedian axe,' became proverbial to express an absolute refusal. Business to-morrow!' is another Greek proverb, applied to a person ruined by his own neglect. The fate of an eminent person perpetuated the expression which he casually employed on the occasion. One of the Theban polemarchs, in the midst of a convivial party, received despatches relating a conspiracy: flushed with wine, although pressed by the courier to open them immediately, he smiled, and in gaiety laying the letter under the pillow of his couch, observed, 'Business to-morrow!' Plutarch records that he fell a victim to the twenty-four hours he had lost, and became the author of a proverb which was still circulated among the Greeks.

The philosophical antiquary may often discover how many a proverb commemorates an event which has escaped from the more solemn monuments of history, and is often the solitary authority of its existence. A national event in Spanish history is preserved by a proverb. Y vengar quiniento sueldos; And revenge five hundred pounds! An odd expression to denote a person being a gentleman! But the proverb is historical. The Spaniards of Old Castile were compelled to pay an annual tribute of five hundred maidens to their masters, the Moors; after several battles, the Spaniards succeeded in compromising the shameful tribute, by as many pieces of coin; at length the day arrived when they entirely emancipated themselves from this odious imposition. The heroic action was perforined by men of distinction, and the event perpetuated in the recollections of the Spaniards, by this singular expression, which alludes to the dishonourable tribute, was applied to characterize all men of high honour, and devoted lovers of their country.

Pasquier, in his Recherches sur la France, reviewing the periodical changes of ancient families in feudal times, observes, that a proverb among the common people conveys the result of all his inquiries: for those noble houses, which in a single age declined from nobility and wealth to poverty and meanness, gave rise to the proverb, Cent ans bannieres et cent ans civieres! One hundred years a banner, and one hundred years a barrow! The Italian proverb, Con l'Evangilio si diventa heretico, Witi. the gospel we become heretics,'-reflects the policy of the court of Rome; and must be dated at the time of the Reformation, when a translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue encountered such an invincible opposition. The Scotch proverb, He that invented the maiden first hanselled it; that is, got the first of it! The maiden is that well-known beheading engine, revived by the French surgeon Guillotine. This proverb may be applied to one who falls a victim to his own ingenuity; the artificer of his own destruction! The inventor was James, Earl of Morton, who for some years governed Scotland, and afterwards, it is said, very unjustly suffered by his own invention. It is a striking coincidence, that the same fate was shared by the French reviver; both alike sad examples of disturbed times! Among our own proverbs a remarkable incident has been commemorated Hand over head, as men took the Covenant! This preserves the manner in which the Scotch covenant, so famous in our history, was violently taken by above sixty thousand persons about Edinburgh, in 1638 a circumstance at that time novel in our own revolutionary history, and afterwards paralleled by the French in voting by acclamation. An ancient English proverb preserves a curious fact concerning our comage. Testers are gone to Oxford, to study at Brazen-nose. When Henry the Eighth debaved the silver coin, called testers, from their having a head stamped on each side; the brass, breaking out in red pimples on their silver faces, provoked the ill humour of the people to vent itself in this punning proverb, which has preserved for the historical antiquary, the popular feeling which lasted about fifty years, till Elizabeth reformed the state of the coinage. A northern proverb among us has preserved the remarkable idea which seems to have once been prevalent; that the metropolis of England was to be the city of York: Lincoln was, London is. York shall be! Whether at the time of the union of the crowns, under James the First, when England and Scotland became Great Britain, this city, from its cen

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trical situation, was considered as the best adapted for the seat of government, or from some other cause which I have not discovered, this notion must have been prevalent to have entered into a proverb. The cuef magistrate of York is the only provincial one who is allowed the title of Lord Mayor; a circumstance which seems connected with this proverb.

The Italian history of its own small principalities, whose well-being so much depended on their prudence and sagacity, affords many instances of the timely use of a proverb. Many an intricate negotiation has been contracted through a good-humoured proverb,-many a sarcastic one has silenced an adversary; and sometimes they have been applied on more solemn, and even tragical occasions. When Rinaldo degli Albizzi was banished by the vigo rous conduct of Cosmo de' Medici, Machiavel, tells us, the expelled man sent Cosmo a menace, in a proverb, La gallina covava! The hen is brooding! said of one meditating vengeance. The undaunted Cosmo replied by another, that There was no brooding out of the nest!'

I give an example of peculiar interest; for it is perpetuated by Dante, and is connected with the character of Milton.

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When the families of the Amadei and the Uberti felt their honour wounded in the affront the younger Buondelmonte had put upon them, in breaking off his match with a young lady of their family, by marrying another, a council was held, and the death of the young cavalier was proposed as the sole atonement for their injured honour. But the consequences which they anticipated, and which afterwards proved so fatal to the Florentines, long sus pended their decision. At length Moscha Lamberti suddenly rising, exclaimed, in two proverbs, That those who considered every thing would never conclude on any thing! closing with an ancient proverbial saying-cosa fatta capa ha! a deed done has an end! This proverb sealed the fatal determination, and was long held in mournful remembrance by the Tuscans; for, according to Villam, it was the cause and beginning of the accursed factions of the Guelphs and the Ghibellins. Dante has thus immor talized the energetic expression in a scene of the Inferno.'

Ed un ch 'avea l'unna e l'altra man mozza
Levando i moneherin per l'aura fosca;
Si che 1 sangue facca la faccia sozza
Grido-Ricorderati ancor del Mosca
Che disse, lasso capo a, cosa fatte;
Che fu'l mal seme, della gente Tosca.'
Then one

Maim'd of each hand, uplifted in the gloom
The bleeding stumps, that they with gory spots
Sullied his face, and cried- Remember thee
Of Mosca too--I who, alas! exclaim'd,
"The deed once done, there is an end”—that proved
A seed of sorrow to the Tuscan race.'

Cary's Dante. deeply engaged in writing the Defence of the Peop',' This Italian proverb was adopted by Milton; for when and warned that it might terminate in his blindness, he resolvedly concluded his work, exclaiming with great magnanimity although the fatal prognostication had been accompanied, cosa fatta capo ha! Did this proverb also in fluence his awful decision on that great national event, when the most honest-minded fluctuated between doubts and fears?

Of a person treacherously used, the Italian proverb says that he has eaten of

Le frutte di fratre Alberigo,
The fruit of brother Alberigo.

Landino, on the following passage of Dante, preserves the tragic story:

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Among these historical proverbs none are more intersting than those which perpetuate national events, conected with those of another people. When a French

ian would let us understand that he has settled with his
reditors, the proverb is, J'ai payé tous mes Anglois : 'I
ave paid all my English.' This proverb originated when
John, the French king, was taken prisoner by our Black
Prince. Levies of money were made for the king's ran-
som, and for many French lords; and the French people
have thus perpetuated the military glory of our nation,
and their own idea of it, by making the English and their
creditors synonymous terms.
Another relates to the same
event-Ore le Pape est devenu François, et Jesu Christ
Anglais: Now the Pope is become French and Jesus
Christ English; a proverb which arose when the Pope,
exiled from Rome, held his court at Avignon in France;
and the English prospered so well, that they possessed
more than half the kingdom. The Spanish proverb con-
cerning England is well known-

Con todo el mondo guerra,

Y paz con Inglaterra!
War with the world,
And peace with England!"

Whether this proverb was one of the results of their me morable armada, and was only coined after their conviction of the splendid folly which they had committed, I cannot ascertain. England must always have been a desirable ally to Spain against her potent rival and neighbour. The Italians have a proverb, which formerly, at least, was strongly indicative of the travelled Englishman in their country, Inglese Italianato é un diavolo incarnato; 'The Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate.' Formerly there existed a closer intercourse between our country and Italy than with France. Before and during the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, that land of the elegant

arts modelled our taste and manners; and more Italians travelled into England, and were more constant residents, from commercial concerns, than afterwards when France assumed a higher rank in Europe by her political superiority. This cause will sufficiently account for the number of Italian proverbs relating to England, which show an intimacy with our manners which could not else have occurred. It was probably some sarcastic Italian, and, perhaps, horologer, who, to describe the disagreement of persons, proverbed our nation- They agree like the clocks of London! We were once better famed for merry Christmasses and their pies; and it must have been Italians who had been domicilated with us who gave currency to the proverb Ha piu du fare che i forni di natale in Inghilterra; He has more business than English ovens at Christmas.' Our pie-loving gentry were notorious, and Shakespeare's folio was usually laid open in the great halls of our nobility to entertain their attendants, who devoured at once Shakespeare and their pastry. Some of those volumes have come down to us, not only with the stains, but enclosing even the identical pie-crusts of the Elizabethan age.

I have thus attempted to develop the art of reading proverbs; but have done little more than indicate the theory, and must leave the skilful student to the delicacy of the practice. I am anxious to rescue from prevailing prejudices these neglected stores of curious amusement, and of deep insight into the ways of man, and to point out the bold and concealed truths which are scattered in these collections. There seems to be no occurrence in human affairs to which some proverb may not be applied. All knowledge was long aphoristical and traditional, pithily contracting the discoveries which were to be instantly comprehended, and easily retained. Whatever be the revolutionary state of man, similar principles and like occurrences are returning on us; and antiquity, whenever it is justly applicable to our times, loses its denomination, and becomes the truth of our own age. A proverb will often cut the knot which others in vain are attempting to untie. Johnson, palled with the redundant elegancies of modern composition, once said, I fancy mankind may come in time to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.' Many a volume in

deed has often been written to demonstrate what a lover of proverbs could show had long been ascertained by a single one in his favourite collections.

Än insurmountable difficulty which every paræmiographer has encountered, is that of forming an apt, a ready, and a systematic classification: the moral Linnæus of such a systema naturæ,' has not yet appeared. Each discovered his predecessor's mode imperfect, but each was doomed to meet the same fate. The arrangement of proverbs has baffled the ingenuity of every one of their collectors. Our Ray, after long premeditation, has chosen a system with the appearance of an alphabetical order; but, as it turns out, his system is no system, and his alphabet is no alphabet. After ten years' labour, the good man could only arrange his proverbs by common-places -by complete sentences-by phrases or forms of speechby proverbial similes-and so on. All these are pursued in alphabetical order, by the first letter of the most "material word," by that which usually stands foremost.' The most patient or, if there be more words" equally material," the collector to discover that word which is the most maexaminer will usually find that he wants the sagacity of terial,' or 'the words equally material.' We have to search through all that multiplicity of divisions, or conjuring-boxes, in which this juggler of proverbs pretends to hide the ball.

A still more formidable objection against a collection of proverbs, for the impatient reader, is their unreadableness. Taking in succession a multitude of insulated proverbs, their slippery nature resists all hope of retaining one in a hundred; the study of proverbs must be a frequent recurrence to a gradual collection of favourite ones, which we ourselves must form. The experience of life will throw a perpetual freshness over these short and simple texts; every day may furnish a new commentary; and we may grow old, and find novelty in proverbs by their perpetual application.

There are, perhaps, about twenty thousand proverbs among the nations of Europe: many of these have spread ancients, chiefly the Greeks, who themselves largely took in their common intercourse; many are borrowed from the from the Eastern nations. Our own proverbs are too often deficient in that elegance and ingenuity which frequently enliven conversation, or enter into the business are often found in the Spanish and the Italian. Proverbs of life in those countries, without any feeling of vulgarity being associated with them; they are too numerous, too witty, and too wise, to cease to please by their poignancy and their aptitude. I have heard them fall from the lips of men of letters and of statesmen. When recently the disorderly state of the manufacturers of Manchester menaced an insurrection, a profound Italian politician observed to me, that it was not of a nature to alarm a great nation; for that the remedy was at hand, in the proverb of the Lazzaroni of Naples, Meta consiglio, meta esempio, meta denaro! Half advice, half example, balf money!' The result confirmed the truth of the proverb, which, had it fears of a great part of the nation. been known at the time, might have quieted the honest

Proverbs have ceased to be studied, or employed in conversation, since the time we have derived our knowledge from books; but in a philosophical age they appear to offer infinite subjects for speculative curiosity: originating in various eras, these memorials of manners, of events, and of modes of thinking, for historical as well as for moral purposes, still retain a strong hold on our attention. The people, must always enter into some part of our own! collected knowledge of successive ages, and of different

Truth and nature can never be obsolete.

Proverbs embrace the wide sphere of human existence, they take all the colours of life, they are often exquisite strokes of genius, they delight by their airy sarcasm or their caustic satire, the luxuriance of their humour, the playfulness of their turn, and even by the elegance of their give a deep insight into domestic life, and open for us the imagery, and the tenderness of their sentiment. They heart of man, in all the various states which he may occureadings: and although they are no longer the ornaments py-a frequent review of proverbs should enter into our of conversation, they have not ceased to be the treasures of Thought!

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history, in morals, in law, in physic, and in divinity, be
careful of equivocal terms. One of the ancients wrote a
book to prove that there was no word which did not con-
vey an ambiguous and uncertain meaning. If we pos-
sessed this lost book, our ingenious dictionaries of 'sy-
nonyms' would not probably prove its uselessness. When-
ever the same word is associated by the parties with dif-
ferent names, they may converse, or controverse, till the
crack of doom! This, with a little obstinacy and some
agility in shifting his ground, makes the fortune of an op-
ponent. While one party is worried in disentangling a
meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding about
him with another, a word of the kind we have mentioned,
carelessly or perversely slipped into an argument, may
prolong it for a century or two-as it has happened!
Vaugelas, who passed his whole life in the study of words,
would not allow that the sense was to determine the mean-
ing of words; for, says he, it is the business of words to
explain the sense. Kant for a long while discovered in
this way a facility of arguing without end, as at this mo-
ment do our political economists. 'I beseech you,' ex-
claims a poetical critic, in the agony of a confusion of
words,' not to ask whether I mean this or that! Our
critic, convinced that he has made himself understood,
grows immortal by obscurity! for he shows how a few
simple words, not intelligible, may admit of volumes of
vindication. Throw out a word, capable of fifty senses,
and you raise fifty parties! Should some friend of peace
enable the fifty to repose on one sense,
that innocent
word, no longer ringing the tocsin of a party, would lie in
forgetfulness in the Dictionary. Still more provoking when
an identity of meaning is only disguised by different modes
of expression, and when the term has been closely sifted,
to their mutual astonishment, both parties discover the
same thing lying under the bran and chaff after this heated
operation. Plato and Aristotle probably agreed much
better than the opposite parties they raised up imagined;
their difference was in the manner of expression, rather
than in the points discussed. The Nominalists ard the
Realists, who once filled the world with their brawls, and
who from irregular words came to regular blows, could
never comprehend their alternate nonsense; though the
Nominalists only denied what no one in his senses would
affirm; and the Realists only contended for what no one
in his senses would deny; a hair's breadth might have
joined what the spirit of party had sundered!

ployed by Reid. The removal of a solitary word may cast a luminous ray over a whole body of philosophy: f we had called the infinite the indefinite,' says Condillac, in his Traité des Sensations, by this small change of a word we should have avoided the error of imagining that we have a positive idea of infinity, from whence so many false reasonings have been carried on, not only by meta physicians, but even by geometricians.' The word reason has been used with different, meanings by different writers; reasoning and reason have been often confounded; a man may have an endless capacity for reasoning, without being much influenced by reason, and to be reasonable, perhaps differs from both! So Moliere tells us, Raisonner est l'emploi de toute maison;

Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison! In this research on 'confusion of words,' might enter the voluminous history of the founders of sects, who have usually employed terms which had no meaning attached to them, or were so ambiguous that their real notions have never been comprehended; hence the most chimerical opinions have been imputed to founders of sects. We may instance that of the Antinomians, whose remarkable denomination explains their doctrine, expressing that they were against law! Their founder was John Agricola, a follower of Luther, who, while he lived, had kept Agrico la's follies from exploding, which they did when he asserted that there was no such thing as sin, our salvation depending on faith, and not on works; and when he declaimed against the Law of God. To what lengths some of his sect pushed this verbal doctrine is known; but the real notions of this Agricola probably never will be! Bayle considered him as a harmless dreamer in theology, who had confused his head by Paul's controversies with the Jews; but Mosheim, who bestows on this early reformer the epithets of ventosus and versipellis, windy and crafty! or, as tion, and artifice,' tells us by the term 'law, Agricola only his translator has it, charges him with vanity, presump meant the ten commandments of Moses, which he considered were abrogated by the Gospel, being designed for the Jews and not for the Christians. Agricola then, by the words the Law of God,' and that there was no such thing as sin,' must have said one thing and meant another! This appears to have been the case with most of the divines of the sixteenth century; for even Mosheim complains of their want of precision and consistency in ex. Do we flatter ourselves that the Logomachies of the pressing their sentiments, hence their real sentiments have Nominalists and the Realists terminated with these scoldbeen misunderstood.' There evidently prevailed a great ing schoolmen? Modern nonsense, weighed against the 'confusion of words' among them! The grace suffisante, and the grace efficace of the Jansenists and the Jesuits, obsolete, may make the scales tremble for awhile, but it show the shifts and stratagems by which nonsense may be will lose its agreeable quality of freshness, and subside into an equipoise. We find their spirit still lurking among dignified. Whether all men received from God sufficient grace for their conversion! was an inquiry some unhappy our own metaphysicians. Lo! the Nominalists and the Realists again! exclaimed my learned friend, Sharon metaphysical theologist set afloat: the Jesuits according Turner, alluding to our modern doctrines on abstract ideas, affirmed it; but the Jansenists insisted, that this suficient to their worldly system of making men's consciences easy, on which there is still a doubt, whether they are any thing grace would never be efficacious, unless accompanied by more than generalising terms.* Leibnitz confused his philosophy by the term sufficient reason: for every existspecial grace. Then the sufficient grace, which is not efficacious, is a contradiction in terms, and worse, a heresy! ence, for every event, and for every truth, there must be a sufficient reason. This vagueness of language produced triumphantly cried the Jesuits, exulting over their adver saries. This confusion of words' thickened, till the Jea perpetual misconception, and Leibnitz was proud of his equivocal triumphs in always affording a new interpreta- pal bulls, royal edicts, and a regiment of dragoons! The suits introduced in this logomachy with the Jansenists, pation! It is conjectured that he only employed his term of sufficient reason, for the plain simple word of cause. Even Jansenists, in despair, appealed to miracles and prodigies, Locke, who has himself so admirably noticed the 'abuse which they got up for public representation; but, above of words,' has been charged with using vague and indefi- all, to their Pascal, whose immortal satire the Jesuits renite ones; he has sometimes employed the words reflec-ally felt was at once sufficient and efficacious, though tion, mind, and spirit, in so indefinite a way, that they the dragoons, in settling a 'confusion of words,' did not have confused his philosophy; thus by some ambiguous indeed, witnessed even a more melancholy logomachy, in boast of inferior success to Pascal's. Former ages had, expressions, our great metaphysician has been made to the Homoousion and the Homoiousion! An event which establish doctrines fatal to the immutability of moral disBoileau has immortalized by some fine verses, which, in tinctions. Even the eagle-eye of the intellectual Newton grew dim in the obscurity of the language of Locke. We his famous satire on L'Equivoque, for reasons best known are astonished to discover that two such intellects should to the Sorbonne, were struck out of the text. not comprehend the same ideas; for Newton wrote to Locke, 'I beg your pardon for representing that you struck at the root of morality in a principle laid down in your book of Ideas-and that I took you for a Hobbist "'† The difference of opinion between Locke and Reid is in consequence of an ambiguity in the word principle, as em.

Turner's Hist of England, i, 514.

We owe this curious unpublished letter to the zeal and care of Professor Dugald Stewart, in his excellent Dissertations.

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D'une syllabe impie un saint mot augmentè Remplit tous les espirits d'aigreures, si meurtieresTu fis dans une guerre et si triste et si longue Perir tant de Chretiens, Martyrs d'une dipthongue Whether the Son was similar to the substance of the Father, or of the same substance, depended on the diph thong oi, which was alternately rejected and received. Had they earlier discovered what at length they agreed on, that the words denoted what was incomprehensible, it would have saved thousands, as a witness describes, 'from

earing one another to pieces.' The great controversy between Abelard and Saint Bernard, when the saint accused the scholastic of maintaining heretical notions of the Trinity, long agitated the world-yet, now that these confusers of words can no longer inflame our passions, we wonder how these parties could themselves differ about words to which we can attach no meaning whatever. There have been few councils, or synods, where the omission or addi tion of a word or a phrase might not have terminated an interminable logomachy! at the council of Basle, for the convenience of the disputants, John de Secubia drew up a treatise of undeclined words, chiefly to determine the signification of the particles from, by, but, and except, which it seems were perpetually occasioning fresh disputes among the Hussites and the Bohemians. Had Jerome of Prague known, like our Shakspeare, the virtue of an IF, or agreed with Hobbes, that he should not have been so positive in the use of the verb Is-he might have been spared from the flames. The philosopher of Malmsbury has declared, that 'Perhaps Judgment was nothing else but the composition or joining of two numes of things, or modes, by the verb Is. In modern times the popes have more skilfully freed the church from this confusion of words.' His holiness, on one occasion, standing in equal terror of the court of France, who protected the Jesuits, and of the court of Spain, who maintained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived a phrase, where a comma or a full stop placed at the beginning or the end purported that his holiness tolerated the opinions which he condemned; and when the rival parties despatched deputations to the court of Rome to plead for the period, or advocate the comma; his holiness, in this confusion of words,' flung an unpunctuated copy to the parties; nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if the rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that of the other close by a full period!

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In jurisprudence much confusion has occurred in the uses of the term Rights; yet the social union and human happiness are involved in the precision of the expression. When Montesquieu laid down as the active principle of a republic virtue, it seemed to infer that a republic was the best of governments. In the defence of this great work he was obliged to define the term, and it seems that by virtue, he only meant political virtue, the love of the country.

In politics, what evils have resulted from abstract terms to which no ideas are affixed! Such as The Equality of Man-the Sovereignty or the Majesty of the PeopleLoyalty-Reform-even Liberty herself!-Public opinion -Public interest'-and other abstract notions, which have excited the hatred or the ridicule of the vulgar. Abstract ideas, as sounds, have been used as watchwords; the combalants will be usually found willing to fight for words to which, perhaps, not one of them have attached any settled signification. This is admirably touched on by Locke, in his chapter of Abuse of Words.' Wisdom, Glory, Grace, &c., are words frequent enough in every man's mouth; but if a great many of those who use them should be asked what they mean by them, they would be at a stand, and know not what to answer-a plain proof that though they have learned those sounds, and have them ready at their tongue's end, yet there are no determined ideas laid up in their minds which are to be expressed to others by them.'

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When the American exclaimed that he was not represented in the House of Commons, because he was not an elector, he was told that a very small part of the people of England were electors. As they could not call this an actual representation, they invented a new name for it, and called it a virtual one. It imposed on the English nation, who could not object that others should be taxed rather than themselves; but with the Americans it was a sophism! And this virtual representation instead of an actual one, terminated in our separation; which,' says Mr Flood, at the time appeared to have swept away most of our glory and our territory: forty thousand lives, and one hundred millions of treasure!

That fatal expression which Rousseau had introduced, L'Egalité des hommes, which finally involved the happiness of a whole people; had he lived, he had probably shown how ill his country had understood. He could only have referred in his mind to political equality, but not an equality of possessions, of property, of authority, destructive of social order and of moral duties, which must exist among every people. Liberty,' Equality,' and Reform,' innocent words! sadly ferment the brains of those

who cannot affix any definite notions to them; they are like those chimerical fictions in law, which declare the sovereign immortal; proclaim his ubiquity in various places; and irritate the feelings of the populace, by assuming that the king can never do wrong! In the time of James II., it is curious,' says Lord Russel, 'to read the conference between the Houses on the meaning of the words "deserted" and "abdicated," and the debates in the Lords, whether or no there is an original contract between king and people.'

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The people would necessarily decide that 'kings derived their power from them; but kings were once maintained by a right divine,'-a confusion of words,' derived from two opposite theories! and both only relatively true. When we listen so frequently to such abstract terms as the majesty of the people'-the sovereignty of the people'-whence the inference that all power is derived from the people,' we can form no definite notions: it is a confusion of words,' contradicting all the political experience which our studies or our observations furnish; for sovereignty is established to rule, to conduct, and to settle the vacillations and quick passions of the multitude. Public opinion expresses too often the ideas of one party in place, and public interest those of another party out! Political axioms, from the circumstance of having the notions attached to them unsettled, are applied to the most opposite ends! In the time of the French Directory,' observes an Italian philosopher of profound views, in the revolution of Naples, the democratic faction pronounced that "Every act of a tyrannical government is in its origin illegal" a proposition which at first sight seems self-evident, but which went to render all existing laws impracticable. The doctrine of the illegality of the acts of a tyrant was proclaimed by Brutus and Cicero, in the name of the Senate, against the populace, who had favoured Cæsar's perpetual dictatorship; and the populace of Paris availed themselves of it, against the National Assembly.'

This 'confusion of words,' in time-serving politics, has too often confounded right and wrong; and artful men, driven into a corner, and intent only on its possession, have found no difficulty in solving doubts, and reconciling contradictions. Our own history, in revolutionary times, abounds with dangerous examples from all parties; of specious hypotheses for compliance with the government of the day, or the passions of parliament. Here is an instance in which the subtile confuser of words, pretended to substitute two consciences, by utterly depriving a man of any! When the unhappy Charles the First pleaded, that to pass the bill of attainder against the Earl of Strafford was against his conscience, that remarkable character of boldness and impiety, as Clarendon characterizes Williams, Archbishop of York, on this argument of conscience (a simple word enough,) demonstrated that there were two sorts of coscience, public and private; that his public conscience as a king might dispense with his private conscience as a man! Such was the ignominious argument which decided the fate of that great victim of state! It was an impudent 'confusion of words,' when Prynne (in order to quiet the consciences of those who were uneasy at warring with the king) observed, that the statute of 25th Edward III, ran in the singular number-If a man shall levy war against the king,' and, therefore, could not be extended to the houses, who were many and public persons. Later, we find Sherlock blest with the spirit of Williams, the Archbishop of York, whom we have just left. When some did not know how to charge and discharge themselves of the oaths to James the Second and to William the Third, this confounder of words discovered that there were two rights, as the other had that there were two consciences; one was a providential right, and the other a legal right; one person might very righteously claim and take a thing, and another as righteously hold and keep it but that whoever got the better had the providential right by possession; and since all authority comes from God, the people were obliged to transfer their allegiance to him as a king of God's making; so that he who had the providential right necessarily had the legal one! a very simple discovery, which must, however, have cost him some pains; for this confounder of words was himself, confounded by twelve answers by non-jurors!

A French politician of this stam recently was suspended from his lectureship, for asserting that the possession of the soil was a right; by which principle, any king

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