ON
THE STUDY OF WORDS
BY
RICHARD CHENEV-IX TRENCH, B.D.,,ICAR OF ITCHENSTOKE, HANTS; EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOPI
OF OXFORD; AND PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON.
FROM THIE SECOND LONDON EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED.
REDFIELD,
110 AND 112 NASSAU STREET, NEW  YORK.
Nuitii    Edition.]         185-5.








PREFACE
TO
THE FIRST EDITION.
THESE lectures will not, I trust, be found anywhere
to have left out of sight seriously, or for long, the
peculiar needs of those for whom they were originally
intended, and to whom  they were primarily addressed. I am conscious indeed, here and there, of
a certain departure from my first intention, having
been in part seduced to this by a circumstance which
I had not in the least contemplated when I obtained
permission to deliver them, by finding, namely, that
I should have other hearers besides the pupils of the
training school.  Some matter adapted for those
rather than for these I was thus led to introduce
which afterward I was unwilling in preparing for the
press, to remove; on the contrary adding to it rather,
in the hope of obtaining thus a somewhat wider circle of readers than I could have hoped, had I more




4                   PREFACE.
rigidly restricted myself in the choice of my materials. Yet I should greatly regret to have admitted
so much of this as should deprive these lectures of
their fitness for those whose profit in writing and in
publishing I had mainly in view, namely, schoolmasters and those preparing to be such.
Had I known any book entering with any fullness,
and in a popular manner, into the subject-matter of
these pages, and making it its exclusive theme, I
might still have delivered these lectures, but should
scarcely have sought for them a wider audience than
their first, gladly leaving the matter in their hands,
whose studies in language had been fuller and riper
than my own. But abundant and ready to hand, as
are the materials for such a book, I did not; while
yet it seems to me that the subject is one to which it
is beyond measure desirable that their attention, who
are teaching, or shall have hereafter to teach, others
should be directed; so that they shall learn to regard
language as one of the chiefest organs of their own
education and that of others. For I am persuaded
that I have used no exaggeration in saying, that for
many a young man " his first discovery that words
are living powers, has been like the dropping of scales
from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or
the introduction into a new world," -while yet all




PREFACE.                   5
this may be indefinitely deferred, may, indeed,
never find place at all, unless there is some one at
hand to help for him and to hasten the process; and
he who so does, will ever after be esteemed by him
as one of his very foremost benefactors. Whatever
may be Home Tooke's shortcomings, whether in occasional details of etymology, or in the philosophy
of grammar, or in matters more serious still, yet, with
all this, what an epoch in many a student's intellectual life has been his first acquaintance with The
Diversions of Purley. And they were not among
the least of the obligations of the young men of our
time to Coleridge, that he so often himself weighed
words in the balances, and so earnestly pressed upon
all with whom his voice went for anything, the profit
which they would find in so doing. Nor, with the
certainty that I am inticipating much in my little
volume, can I refrain from quoting some words which
were not present with me during its composition, although I must have been familiar with them long
ago, words which express excellently well why it is
that these studies profit so much, and which will also
explain the motives which induced me to add my
little contribution to their furtherance:"A language will often be wiser, not merely than
the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who




6                   PREFAiCE.
speak it. Being like amber in its efficacy to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber
in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient
wisdom, although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents.  Sometimes it locks up truths,
which were once well known, but which, in the course
of ages, have passed out of sight and been forgotten.
In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which,
though they were never plainly discerned, the genius
of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment
of divination. A meditative man can not refrain
from wonder, when he digs down to the deep thought
lying at the root of many a metaphorical term, employed for the designation of spiritual things, even
of those with regard to which professing philosophers
have blundered grossly; and often it would seem as
though rays of truths, which were still below the intellectual horizon, had dawned upon the imagination
as it was looking up to heaven. Hence they who
feel an inward call to teach and enlighten their countrymen, should deem it an important part of their
duty to draw out the stores of thought which are al
ready latent in their native language, to purify it
from the corruptions which time brings upon all
things, and from which language has no exemption,
and to endeavor to give distinctness and precision to




PREFACE.                    7
whatever in it is confused, or obscure, or dimly
seen.*
I will only add, that if I have not owned one by
one my obligations to each writer who has helped
me here —obligations which readers familiar with
the subject will recognise at once-this has arisen
from no desire to escape the acknowledgment, but
only from the popular character of these lectures, in
which multiplied references would have been plainly
out of place.
ITCHENSTOKE, Oct. 9, 1851.
* Guesses a Truth First Series, p. 295.




PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
I HAVE availed myself of the opportunities which
a second edition has afforded me, for the correcting
of some few errors in the first, which either I had
myself discovered, or which publicly or privately had
been pointed out to me. I have also added a sixth
lecture to the five which at first composed this
series; and by other additions, as once or twice by
omission, have sought to render this little volume
less unworthy of the favor which it has found.
ITCHENSTOKE, Feb. 4, 1852.




ON
THE STUDY OF WORDS,
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
THERE are few who would not readily acknowledge
that in worthy books is laid up and hoarded the
greater part of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which the world has accumulated; and that
chiefly by aid of these they are handed down from
one generation to another. My purpose in the present, and in some succeeding lectures, which by the
kindness of your principal, I shall have the opportunity of addressing to you here, is to urge on you
something different from this; namely, that not in
books only, which all acknowledge, nor yet in connected oral discourse, but often also in words contemplated singly, there are boundless stores of moral
and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid up-lessons of infinite worth which we
may derive from them, if only our. attention is awakened to their existence. I would urge on you, though
with teaching such as you enjoy, the subject will not
be new to you, how well it will repay you to study
1-'




10           INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
the words which you are in the habit of using or of
meeting, be they such as relate to highest spiritual
things, or our common words of the shop and the
market, and all the familiar intercourse of life. It
will indeed repay you far better than you can easily
believe. I am sure, at least, that for many a young
man his first discovery of the fact that words are
living powers, has been like the dropping of scales
from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or
the introduction into a new world; he is never able
to cease wondering at the moral marvels that surround him on every side, and ever reveal themselves
more and more to his gaze.
We indeed hear it not seldom said that ignorance
is the mother of admiration.  A  falser word was
never spoken, and hardly a more mischievous one;
for it seems to imply that this healthiest exercise of
the mind rests, for the moAt part, on a deceit and
illusion and that with better knowledge it would
cease. For once that ignorance leads us to admire
that which with fuller insight we should perceive
to be a common thing, and one demanding therefore
no such tribute from us, a hundred, nay, a thousand
times, it prevents us from admiring that which is admirable indeed. This is true, whether we are moving in the region.of nature, which is the region of
God's wonders, or even in the region of art, which
is the region of man's wonders; and nowhere truer
than in this sphere and region of language, which is




STUDY OF WORDS NOT TEDIOUS.        11
about to claim us now. Oftentimes here we move
up and down in the midst of intellectual and moral
marvels with vacant eye and with careless mind,
even as some traveller passes unmoved over fields of
fame, or through cities of ancient renown -unmoved
because utterly unconscious of the great deeds which
there have been wrought, of the great hearts which
spent themselves there. We, like him, wanting the
knowledge and insight which would have served to
kindle admiration in us, are oftentimes deprived of
this pure and elevating excitement of the mind, and
miss no less that manifold teaching and instruction
which ever lie about our path, and nowhere more
largely than in our daily words, if only we knew how
to put forth our hands and make it our own. " What
riches," one exclaims, "lie hidden in the vulgar
tongue of our poorest and most ignorant.  What
flowers of paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts undistinguished and undiscerned,
from having been daily trodden on."
And this subject upon which we are thus entering
ought not to be a dull or uninteresting one in the
handling, or one to which only by an effort you will
yield the attention which I shall claim. If it shall
prove so, this I fear must be through the fault of my
manner of treating it; for certainly in itself there is
no study which may be made at once more instructive and (elntertaining than the study of the use, origin, and distinction of words, which is exactly that




12          INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
which I now propose to myself and to you. I remember a very learned scholar, to whom we owe
one of our best Greek lexicons, a book which must
have cost him years, speaking in the preface to his
great work with a just disdain of some, who complained of the irksome drudgery of such toils as
those which had engaged him so long-and this,
forsooth, because they only had to do with words;
who claimed pity for themselves, as though they had
been so many galley-slaves chained to the oar, or
martyrs who had offered themselves to the good of
the rest of the literary world. He declares that, for
his part, the task of classing, sorting, grouping, comparing, tracing the derivation and usage of words,
had been to him no drudgery, but a delight and labor of love.
And if this may be true in regard of a foreign
tongue, how much truer ought it to be in regard of
our own, of our "' mother-tongue," as we fondly call
it. A great writer not very long departed from us
has here borne witness at once to the pleasantness
and profit of this study. " In a language," he says,
"like ours, where so many words are derived from
other languages, there are few modes of instruction
more useful or more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the etymology or primary meaning of the words they use. There are
cases in which more knowledge of more value may




LANGUAGE FOSSIL POETRY.             13
I)e conveyed by the history of a word than by the
ilistory of a campaign."
And, implying the same truth, a popular American author has somewhere characterized language
as "fossil poetry" -evidently meaning that just as
in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it may be, have been
extinct for thousands of years, are permanently
bound up with the stone, and rescued fiom that perishing which would have otherwise been theirs-so
in words are beautifnl thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long
since in their graves, of men whose very names
have perished, these, which would so easily have
perished too, preserved  and made safe for ever.
The phrase is a striking one; the only fault which
one might be tempted to find with it is, that it is too
narrow.  Language may be, and indeed  is, this
"fossil poetry;" but it may be affirmed of it with
exactly the same truth that it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as effectually
embody facts of history, or convictions of the moral
common sense, as of the imagination or passion of
men; even as, so far as that moral sense may be perverted, tlhey will bear witness and keep a record of
that perversion.  On all these points I shall enter at
fill in after lectures ^ but I may give by anticipation
a specimen or two of what I mean. to make from the




14           INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
first my purpose and plan more fully intelligible to
all.
Language, then, is fossil poetry; in other words,
we are not to look for the poetry which a people may
possess only in its poems, or its poetical customs,
traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is
itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical
thought and imagery laid up in it. Examine it,
and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy
of things natural and things spiritual; bringing
those to illustrate and to give an abiding form and
body to these. The image may have grown trite
and ordinary now; perhaps through the help of
this very word may have become so entirely the
heritage of all, as to seem little better than a commonplace; yet not the less he who first discerned the
relation, and devised the new word which should
express it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and figurative sense, this man
was in his degree a poet-.a maker, that is, of
things which were not before, which would not have
existed, but for him, or for some other gifted with
equal powers.
He who spake first of a " dilapidated" fortune,
what an image must have risen up before his mind's
eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching
itself fiom stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. Or he who to that Greek word
which signifies'tthat which will endure to be held




ILIADS WITHOUT A HOMER.          15
up to and judged by the sunlight," gave first its
ethical signification of " sincere," " truthful,' or as
we sometimes say, " transparent,".can we deny to
him the poet's feeling and eye? Many a man had
gazed, we may be sure, at the jagged and indented
mountain ridges of Spain, before one called them
" sierras" or " saws," the name by which now they
are known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada; but
that man coined his imagination into a word, whih
will endure as long as the everlasting hills which he
named.
"Iliads without a Homer," some one has called,
with a little exaggeration, the beautiful but anonymous ballad poetry of Spain. One may be permitted, perhaps, to push the exaggeration a little further in the same direction, and to apply the phrase
not merely to a ballac but to a word. Let me illustrate that which I have been here saying somewhat
more at length by the word " tribulation."  We all
know in a general way that this word, which occurs
not seldom in scripture and in the liturgy, means
affliction, sorrow, anguish; but it is quite worth our
while to know how it means this, and to question the
word a little closer. It is derived from the Latin
"tribulum" -which was the thrashing instrument
or roller, whereby the Roman husbandman separated
the corn from the husks; and "ti'ibulatio" in its
primary significance was the act of this separation.
But some Latin writer of the Christian church appro



16              INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
priated the word and image for the setting forth of
a higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity,
being the appointed means for the separating in men
of their chaff from their wheat, of whatever in them
was light and trivial and poor from the solid and the
true, therefore he called these sorrows and griefs
" tribulations," thrashings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no fitting
him for the heavenly garner. Now in proof of what
I have just now said, namely that a single word is
often a concentrated poem, a little grain of gold
capable of being beaten out into a broad extent of
gold-leaf, I will quote, in reference to this very word
"' tribulation," a graceful composition by an early
English poet, which you will at once perceive is all
wrapped  up in this word, being from  first to last
only the expanding of the ima8; and thought which
this word has implicitly given:" Till from the straw, the flail, the corn doth beat,
Until the chaff be purg(ed from the wheat,
Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear,
The richness of the flour will scarce appear.
So, till men's persons great afflictions touch,
If worth be found, their worth is not so much,
Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet
That value which in thrashing they may get.
For till the bruising flails of God's corrections
Have thrash6e out of us our vain affections;
Till those corruptions which do misbecome us
Are by thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us;




WORDS WITNESSES OF MORAL TRUTHS.          17
Until from us the straw of worldly treasures,
Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures,
Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay,
To thrash the husk of this our flesh away;
And leave the soul uncovered; nay yet more,
Till God shall make our very spirit poor,
We shall not up to highest wealth aspire;
But then we shall; and that is my desire."
This deeper religious use of the word " tribulation"
was unknown to classical, that is to heathen antiquity, and belongs exclusively to the Christian writers:
and the fact that the same deepening and elevating
of the use of words recurs in a multitude of other,
and many of them far more striking instances, is one
well deserving to be followed up. Nothing, I think,
would more strongly bring before us what a new
power Christianity was in the world than to compare
the meaning which so many words possessed before
its rise, and the deeper meaning which they obtained,
so soon as they were assumed by it as the vehicles of
its life, the new thought and feeling enlarging, purifying, and ennobling the very words which they employed. This is a subject which I shall have occasion to touch on more than once in these lectures,
but is itself well worthy of, as it would afford ample
material for, a volume.
But it was said just now that words often contain
a witness for great moral truths  God having impressed such a seal of truth upon language, that men
are continually uttering deeper things than they




18           INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
know, asserting mighty principles, it may be asserting them against themselves, in words that to them
may seem nothing more than the current coin of society. Thus to what grand moral purposes Bishop
Butler turns the word " pastime;" how seldom is the
testimony which he compels the world, out of its own
use of this word, to render against itself-obliging
it to own that its amusements and pleasures do not
really satisfy the mind and fill it as with the sense
of abiding and satisfying joy;* they are only " pastime;" they serve only, as this word confesses, to
pass away the time, to prevent it from weighing an
intolerable burden on men's hands; all which they
can do at the best is to prevent men from discovering and attending to their own internal poverty and
dissatisfaction and want.  Ite might have added
that there is the same acknowledgment in the word
"diversion," which means no more that that which
diverts or turns us aside from ourselves, and in this
way helps us to forget ourselves for a little. And
thus it would appear that, even according to the
world's own confession, all which it proposes is-not
to make us happy, but a little to prevent us from remembering that we are unhappy, to pass away our
time, to divert us from  ourselves. While on the
other hand we declare that the good which will really fill our souls and satisfy them to the uttermost,
is not in us, but without us and above us, in the
* Sermon xiv. Upon the Love of God.




MISUSE OF THE WORD RELIGION.        19
words which we use to set forth any transcending
delight. Take three or four of these words-" transport," " rapture," ravishment," " ecstasy" -"transport," that which carries us, as " rapture," or " ravishment," that which snatches us, out of and above
ourselves; and "ecstasy" is very nearly the same,
only drawn from the Greek.
And not less, where a perversion of the moral
sense has found place, words preserve oftentimes a
record of this perversion. We have a signal example of this, even as it is a notable evidence of the
manner in which moral contagion, spreading fiom
heart and manners, invades the popular language in
the use, or rather misuse of the word " religion," during all the ages of papal domination in Europe.
Probably many of you are aware that in those times
a "religious person" did not mean any one who felt
and allowed the bonds that bound him to God and
to his fellow-men, but one who had taken peculiar
vows upon him, a member of one of the monkish
orders; a " religious" house did not mean, nor does
it now mean in the church of Rome a Christian
household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house
in which these persons were gathered together according to the rule of some man, Benedict, or Dominic or some other. A " religion" meant not a service of God, but an order of monkery; and taking
the monastic vows was termed going into a "religion."  Now what an awful light does this one word




20             INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
so used throw on the entire state of mind and habits
of thought in those ages! That then was " religion,"
and nothing else was deserving of the name!  And
"religious," was a title which might not be given to
parents and children, husbands and wives, men and
women fulfilling faithfully and holily in the world
the several duties of their stations, but only to those
who had devised self-chosen service for themselves.*
In like manner that " lewd," which meant at one
time no more than "lay," or unlearned -the "lewd"
people, the lay people-should come to signify the
sinftil, the vicious, is not a little worthy of note. How
forcibly we are reminded here of that saying of the
Pharisees of old: "This people wllich knoweth not
the law is cursed;" how much of their spirit must
have been at work before the word could have acquired this secondary meaning.
But language is fossil history as well.  What a
record of great social revolutions, revolutions in nations and in the feelings of nations, the one word
" frank" contains; which is used, as we all know, to
* A reviewer in Fraser's Magazine, December, 1851, in the main
a favorable, and always a kind one, doubts whether I have not here
pushed my assertion too far. So far from this being the case, it was
not merely " the popular language," as I have expressed myself, which
this corruption had invaded, but a decree of the great Fourth Lateran Council, forbidding the further multiplication of monastic orders,
runs thus: Ne nimia religtonum diversitas gravem in Ecclesia Dei confusionem inducat, firmiter prohibemus, ne quis de cetero novam
religioner inveniat, sed quicunque voluerit ad religionem converti,
unam de approbatis assumat.




ORIGIN OF THE WORD FRANK.          21
express aught that is generous, straightforward, and
free. The Franks, I need not remind you, were a
powerful German tribe, or association of tribes, which
at the breaking up of the Roman empire possessed
themselves of Gaul, to which they gave their own
name. They were the ruling conquering people,
honorably distinguished fiom the Gauls and degenerate Romans among whom they established themselves by their independence, their love of fieedom,
their scorn of a lie: they had, in short, the virtues
which belong to a conquering and dominant race in
the midst of an inferior and conquered one. And
thus it came to pass that by degrees the namne
"frank," which may have originally indicated merely a national, came to involve a moral distinction as
well; and a "friunk" man was synonymous not
merely with a man of the conquering German race,
but was an epithet applied to a person possessed of
certain high moral qualities, which for the most part
appertained to, and were found only in men of that
stock; and thus in men's daily discourse, when they
speak of a person as being "frank," or when they
use the words " franchise,"   enfranchisement," to
express civil liberties and immunities, their language
here is the outgrowth, the record, and the result of
great historic changes, bears testimony to facts of
history, whereof it may well happen that the speakers have never heard. Let me suggest to you the
word " slave," as one which has undergone a pro



22          INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
cess entirely analogous, although in an opposite
direction.*
Having given by anticipation this handful of examples in illustration of what in these lectures I propose, I will, before proceeding further, make a few
observations on a subject, which, if we would go at
all to the root of the matter, we can scarcely leave
altogether untouched — I mean the origin of language; in which yet we will not entangle ourselves
deeper than we need. There are, or rather there
have been, two theories about this. One, and that
which rather has been than now is, for few maintain
it still, would put language on the same level with
the various arts and inventions with which man has
gradually adorned and enriched his life. It would
make him by degrees to have invented it, just as he
might have invented any of these, for himself; and
from  rude imperfect beginnings, the inarticulate
cries by which he expressed his natural wants, the
sounds by which he sought to imitate the impression
of natural objects upon him, little by little to have
arrived at that wondrous organ of thought and feeling, which his language is often to him now.
It might, I think, be sufficient to object to this explanation, that language would then be an accident
of human nature; and, this being the case, that we
certainly should somewhere encounter tribes sunken
* See Gibbon's Decline and Fall, c. 65.




THE SAVAGE NOT THE PRIMITIVE MAN.    23
so low as not to possess it; even as there is no human art or invention, though it be as simple and obvious as the preparing of food by fire, but there are
those who have fallen below its exercise. But with
language it is not so. There have never yet been
found human beings, not the most degraded horde
of South African bushmen, or Papuan cannibals,
who did not employ this means of intercourse with
one another. But the more decisive objection to this
view of the matter is, that it hangs together with,
and is indeed an essential part of that theory of society, which is contradicted alike by every page of
Genesis, and every notice of our actual experience
-the "orang-outang" theory, as it has been so
happily termed-that, I mean, according to which
the primitive condition of man was the savage one,
and the savage himself the seed out of which in due
time the civilized man was unfolded; whereas, in
fact, so far from being this living seed, he might
more justly be considered as a dead withered leaf,
torn violently away from the great trunk of humanity, and with no more power to produce anything
nobler than himself out of himself, than that dead,
withered leaf to unfold itself into the oak of the
forest. So far from being the child with the latent
capacities of manhood, he is himself rather the man
prematurely aged, and decrepit, and outworn.
But the true answer to the inquiry how language
arose, is this, that God gave man language, just as




24          INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
he gave him reason, and just because he gave him
reason (for what is man's word but his reason coming forth, so that it may behold itself?) that he gave
it to him, because he could not be man, that is a social being, without it. Yet this must not be taken
to affirm that man started at the first furnished with
a full-formed vocabulary of words, and as it were
with his first dictionary and first grammar readymade to his hands.  He did not thus begin the
world with names, but with the power of naming;
for man is not a mere speaking machine; God did
not teach him words, as one of us teaches a parrot,
from without; but gave him a capacity, and then
evoked the capacity which he gave. Here, as in
everything else that concerns the primitive constitution, the great original institutes of humanity, our
best and truest lights are to be gotten from the study
of the first three chapters of Genesis; and you will
observe that there it is not God who imposed the
first names on the creatures, but Adam-Adam,
however, at the direct suggestion of his Creator.
He brought them all, we are told, to Adam, "to see
what he would call them, and whatsoever Adam
called every living creature, that was the name
thereof."  (Gen. ii. 19.) Here we have the clearest
intimation of the origin, at once divine and human,
of speech; while yet neither is so brought forward
as to exclude or obscure the other.
And so far we may concede a limited amount of




LANGUAGE A DIVINE CAPACITY.         25
right to those who have held a progressive acquisition, on man's part, of the power of embodying
thought in words. I believe that we should conceive
the actual case most truly, if we conceived this
power of naming things and expressing their relations, as one laid up in the depths of man's being,
one of the divine capacities with which he was created: but one (and in this differing from those which
have produced in various people various arts of life),
which could not remain dormant in him, for man
could be only man through its exercise; which therefore did rapidly bud and blossom out from within
him at every solicitation from the world without, or
from his fellow-man; as each object to be named
appeared before his eyes, each relation of things to
one another arose before his mind. It was not the
possible only, but the necessary emanation of the
spirit with which he had been endowed. Man
makes his own language, but he makes it as the bee
makes its cells, as the bird its nest.
flow this latent power evolved itself first, how
this spontaneous generation of language came to
pass, is a mystery, even as every act of creation is
of necessity such; and as a mystery all the deepest
inquirers into the subject are content to leave it.
Yet we may perhaps a little help ourselves to the
realizing of what the process was, and what it was
not, if we liken it to the growth of a tree springing
2




26          INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
out of, and unfolding itself from a root, and according to a necessary law-that root being the divine
capacity of language with which man was created,
that law being the law of highest reason with which
he was endowed: if we liken it to this rather than
to the rearing of a house, which a man should slowly and painfully fashion for himself with dead tim.
bers combined after his own fancy and caprice; and
which little by little improved in shape, material,
and size, being first but a log-house, answering his
barest needs, and only after centuries of toil and
pain growing for his sons' sons into a stately palace
for pleasure and delight.
Were it otherwise, were the savage the primitive
man, we should then find savage tribes furnished, it
might be, scantily enough with the elements of speech
yet at the same time with its fruitful beginnings, its
vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their
language on close inspection prove  In every case
what they are themselves, the remnant and ruin of
a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the
impress of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage-more fearful perhaps even
than that which is stamped upon his form. When
wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly
sinning against light and conscience, a people has
thus gone the downward way, llas been scattered
off by some violent revolution from that portion of
the world which is the seat of advance and progress,




LOSS OF AN IMPORTANT WORD.          27
and driven to its remote isles and further corners,
then as one nobler thought, one spiritual idea after
another has perished from it, the words also that expressed these have perished too: as a people has
let go one habit of civilization after another, the words
also which those habits demanded have dropped,
first out of use, and then out of memory, and thus
after awhile have been wholly lost.
Moffat, in his Missionary labors and Scenes in
South Africa, gives us a very remarkable example
of the disappearing of one of the most significant
words from the language of a tribe sinking ever
deeper in savagery; and with the disappearing of
the word of course the disappearing as well of the
great spiritual fact and truth whereof that word was
at once the vehicle and the guardian. The Bechuanas, a Caffre tribe, employed formerly the word
"Morimo," to designate "Him  that is above," or
" Iim that is in heaven," and attached to the word
the notion of a supreme Divine Being. This word,
with the spiritual idea corresponding to it, Moffat
found to have vanished from the language of the
present generation, although here and there he could
meet with an old man, scarcely one or two in a
thousand, who remembered in his youth to have
heard speak of " Morimo:" and this word, once so
deeply significant, only survived now in the spells
and charms of the so-called rain-makers and sorcerers, who misused it to designate a fabulous ghost, of




28           INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
whom they told the absurdest and most contradic.
tory things.
And as there is no such witness to the degradation of the savage as the brutal poverty of his language, so is there nothing that so effectually tends
to keep him in the depths to which he has fallen.
You can not impart to any man more than the words
which he understands either now contain, or can be
made intelligibly to him to contain. Language is
as truly on one side the limit and restraint of thought,
as on the other side that which feeds and unfolds
it. Thus it is the ever-repeated complaint of the missionary that the very terms are wholly or nearly
wholly wanting in the dialect of the savage whereby
to impart to him heavenly truths, or indeed even the
nobler emotions of the human heart. Dobrizhoffer,
the Jesuit missionary, in his curious History of the
Abipones, tells us that neither they nor the Guarinnies, two of the principal native tribes of Brazil, with
whose languages he was intimately acquainted, possessed any word which in the least corresponded to
our " thanks."  But what wonder, if the feeling of
gratitude was entirely absent from their hearts, that
they should not have possessed the corresponding
word in their vocabularies?  Nay, how should they
have had it there?  And that this is the true explanation is plain from a fact which the same writer records, that although inveterate askers, they never
showed the slightest sense of obligation or of grati



THE LANGUAGE OF SAVAGES.           29
tude, when they obtained what they sought; never
saying more than, "This will be useful to me," or,
" This is what I wanted."
Nor is it only in what they have forfeited and lost,
but also in what they have retained or invented,
that these languages proclaim their degradation and
debasement, and how deeply they and those that
speak them have fallen. Thus I have read of a tribe
in New Holland, which has no word to signify God,
but has a word to designate a process by which an
unborn child is destroyed in the bosom of its mother.
And I have been informed, on the authority of one
excellently capable of knowing, an English scholar
long resident in Van Diemen's Land, that in the native language of that island there are four words to
express the taking of human life —one to express a
father's killing of a son, another a son's killing of a
father, with other varieties of murder; and that in
no one of these lies the slightest moral reprobation,
or sense of the deep-lying distinction between to
kill and to murder; while at the same time, of that
language so richly and so fearfully provided with expressions from this extremest utterance of hate, he
also reports that any word for love is wanting in it
altogether.
Yet with all this, ever and anon in the midst of
this wreck and ruin there is that in the language of
the savage, some subtle distinction, some curious allusion to a perished civilization, now utterly unintel



30           INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
ligible to the speaker, or some other note, which proclaims his language to be the remains of a dissipated
inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe which
was a royal one once. The fragments of a broken
sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre wherewith once he
held dominion (that is, in his progenitors) over large
kingdoms of thought, which now have escaped wholly
from his sway.
But while it is thus with him, while this is the
downward course of all those that have chosen the
downward path, while with every impoverishing and
debasing of personal or national life there goes hand
in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language, so on the contrary, where there is
advance and progress, where a divine idea is in any
measure realizing itself in a people, where they are
learning more accurately to define and distinguish,
more truly to know, where they are ruling, as men
ought to rule, over nature, and making her to give
up her secrets to them, where new thoughts are rising up over the horizon of a nation's mind, new feelings are stirring at a nation's heart, new facts coming
within the sphere of its knowledge, there language
is growing and advancing too. It can not lag behind;
for man feels that nothing is properly his own, that
he has not secured any new thought, or entered upon
any new spiritual inheritance, till he has fixed it in
language, till he can contemplate it, not as himself,
but as his word; he is conscious that he must express




WORDS GUARDIANS OF THOUGHTS.         31
truth, if he is to preserve it, and still more if he would
propagate it among others.  "Names," as it has
been excellently said, "are impressions of sense, and
as such take the strongest hold upon the mind, and
of all other impressions can be most easily recalled
and retained in view. They therefore serve to give
a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects
of thought and feeling. Impressions that when past
mighlt be dissipated for ever, are by their connection
with language always within reach. Thoughts, of
themselves, are perpetually slipping out of the field
of immediate mental vision; but the name abides
with us, and the utterance of it restores them  in a
moment."  And on the necessity of names for the
propagation of the truth it has been well observed:
" Hardly any original thought on mental or social
subjects ever make their way among mankind, or
assume their proper importance in the minds even
of their inventors, until aptly selected words or
phrases have as it were nailed them down and held
them fast."
Nor does what has here been said of the manner
in which language enriches itself contradict a prior
assertion that man starts with language as God's per
fect gift, which he only impairs and forfeits by sloth
and sin, according to the same law which holds good
in respect of each other of the gifts of Heaven. Foi
it was not meant, as indeed was then observed, that
men would possess words to set forth feelings which




32          INTRODUCTORY LECTURIE.
were not yet stirring in them, combinations which
they had not yet made, objects which they had not
yet seen, relations of which they were not yet conscious; but that up to his needs (those needs including not merely his animal wants, but all his higher
spiritual cravings), he would find utterance freely,
The great logical, or grammatical framework of language (for grammar is the logic of speech, even as
logic is the grammar of reason), he would possess, he
knew not how; and certainly not as the final result
of gradual acquisitions, but as that rather which alone
had made those acquisitions possible; as that according to which he unconsciously worked, filling in this
framework by degrees with these later acquisitions
of thought, feeling, and experience, as one by one
they arrayed themselves in the garment and vesture
of words.
Here then is the explanation of the fact that language should be thus instructive for us, that it should
yield us so much, when we come to analyze and
probe it; and the more, the more deeply and accurately we do so. It is full of instruction, because it
is the embodiment, the incarnation, if I may so speak,
of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a
nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which
through centuries they have attained to and won.
It stands like the pillars of Hercules, to mark how
far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind
have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and




W!RDI)S PROPIAG rATE TIlOUGTSII'S.  33
immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these; nay more-itself a great element of
that advance; for "language is the armory of the
human mind, and at once contains the trophies of
its past and the weapons of its future conquests."
The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular mind, have found therein their
unconscious voice; and the single kinglier spirits
that have looked deeper into the heart of things, have
oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some
one word, which they have launched upon the world,
and with which they have enriched it for ever-making in that new word a new region of thought to be
henceforward in some sort the common heritage of
all. Language is the amber in which a thousand
precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand
lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed
and arrested, might have been as bright, but would
have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as
the lightning. " Words convey the mental treasures
of one period to the generations that follow; and laden
with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across
gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk
into oblivion."  And for all these reasons far more
and mightier in every way is a language than any
one of the works which may have been composed in
it. For that work, great as it may be, is but the
0*




34           INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
embodying of the mind of a single man, this of a nation. The Iliad is great, yet not so great in strength
or power or beauty as the Greek language. Paradise Lost is a noble possession for a people to have
inherited, but the English tongue is a nobler heritage
yet.
Great then will be our gains, if, having these treasures of wisdom and knowledge lying round about us
so far more precious than mines of California gold, we
determine that we will make what portion of them
we can our own, that we will ask the words we use to
give an account of themselves, to say whence they
are, and whither they tend. Then shall we often rub
off the dust and rust from what seemed but a common token, which we had taken and given a thousand
times, esteeming it no better, but which now we shall
perceive to be a precious coin, bearing the "image
and superscription" of the great king; then shall we
often stand in surprise arid in something of shame,
while we behold the great spiritual realities which
underlie our common speech, the marvellous truths
which we have been witnessing for in our words, but,
it may be, witnessing against in our lives. And as
you will not find, for so I venture to promise, that
this study of words will be a dull one when you undertake it yourselves, as little need you fear that it
will prove dull and unattractive, when you seek to
make your own gains herein the gains also of those
who may be hereafter committed to your charge.




CHILDREN INT}'RESTED IN WORDS.         35
Only try your pupils, and mark the kindling of the
eye, the lighting up of the countenance, the revival
of the flagging attention, with which the humblest
lecture upon words, and on the words especially
which they are daily using, which are familiar to
them in their play or at their church, will be welcomed by them. There is a sense of reality about
children which makes them rejoice to discover that
there is also a reality about words, that they are not
merely arbitrary signs, but living powers; that, to
reverse the words of one of England's " false prophets," they may be the fool's counters, but are the
wise man's money; not like the sands of the sea, innumerable disconnected atoms, but growing out of
roots, clustering in families, connecting and intertwining themselves with all that men have been doing and thinking and feeling from the beginning of
the world till now.
And it is of course our English tongue, out of which
mainly we should seek to draw some of the hid treasures which it contains, fiom which we should endeavor to remove the veil which custom and familiarity have thrown over it. We can not employ ourselves better. There is nothing that will more help
to form an English heart in ourselves and in others
than will this. We could scarcely have a single lesson on the growth of our English tongue, we could
scarcely fllow up one of its significant words, without having unawares a lesson in English history as




36          TNTR'rmOnITOTOr.Y LECTURE.
well, without not merely falling on some curious fact
illustrative of our national life, but learning also how
the great heart which is beating at the centre of that
life was gradually shaped and moulded. We should
thus grow too in our feeling of connection with
the past, of gratitude and reverence to it; we
should estimate more truly, and therefore more highly, what it has done for us, all that it has bequeathed
us, all that it has made ready to our hands. It was
something for the children of Israel when they came
into Canaan, to enter upon wells which they digged
not, and vineyards which they had not planted, and
houses which they had not built; but how much
greater a boon, how much more glorious a prerogative, for any one generation to enter upon the inheritance of a language, which other generations by their
truth and toil have made already a receptacle of
choicest treasures, a storehouse of so much unconscious wisdom, a fit organ for expressing the subtlest
distinctions, the tenderest sentiments, the largest
thoughts, and the loftiest imaginations, which at any
time the heart of men can conceive. And that those
who have preceded us have gone far to accomplish
this for us, I shall rejoice if I am able in any degree
to make you feel in the lectures which will follow
the present.




LECTURE II.
ON THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
Is man of a divine birth and stock? coming from
God, and, when he fulfils the law and intention of
his creation, returning to him again?  We need no
more than his language to prove it. So much is
there in that which could never have existed on any
other supposition. How else could all those words
which testify of his relation to God, and of his consciousness of this relation, and which ground themselves thereon, have found their way into this, the
veritable transcript of his innermost life, the genuine
utterance of the faith and hope which is in him?
On no other theory than this could we explain that
great and preponderating weight thrown into the
scale of goodness and truth, which, despite of all in
the other scale, we must needs acknowledge in every
language to be there. How else shall we account
for that sympathy with the right, that testimony
against the wrong, which, despite of all its aberrations and perversions, is yet its prevailing groundfone?
But llas man fallen, and deeply fallen, from the




38          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
heights of his original creation? We need no more
than his language to prove it. Like everything else
about him, it bears at once the stamp of his greatness and of his degradation, of his glory and of his
shame. What dark and sombre threads he must
have woven into the tissue of his life, before we
could trace such dark ones running through the tissue of his language! What facts of wickedness and
wo must have existed in the first, ere there could
be such words to designate these as are found in the
last. There have been always those who have sought
to make light of the hurts which man has inflicted
on himself, of the sickness with which he is sick;
who would fain persuade themselves and others that
moralists and divines, if they have not quite invented,
have yet enormously exaggerated, these. But are
these statements found only in scripture and in sermons?  Are there not mournful corroborations of
their truth imprinted deeply upon every region of
man's natural and spiritual life, and on none more
deeply than on his language? It needs no more
than to open a dictionary, and to cast our eye
thoughtfully down a few columns, and we shall find
abundant confirmation of this sadder and sterner
estimate of man's moral and spiritual condition.
How else shall we explain this long catalogue of
words, having all to do with sin, or with sorrow, or
with both? How came they there? We may be
quite sure that they were not invented without being




TOKENS OF SIN IN LANGUAGE.           39
needed, that they have each a correlative in the
world of realities. I open the first letter of the alphabet; what means this " ah," this " alas," these
deep and long-drawn sighs of humanity, which at
once we encounter there? And then presently follow words such as these: " affliction," " agony,"
"anguish," " assassin," " atheist" " avarice," and
twenty more —words, you will observe, for the most
part not laid up in the recesses of the language, to
be drawn forth and used at rare opportunities, but
occupying many of them  its foremost ranks. And
indeed, as regards abundance, it is a melancholy
thing to observe how much richer is every vocabulary in words that set forth sins, than in those that
set forth graces. When St. Paul (Gal. v. 19-23)
would put these against those, "the works of the
flesh" against "the fruit of the Spirit," those are
seventeen, these only nine; and where do we find
in scripture such lists of graces, as we do at 2 Tim.
iii. 2, Rom. i. 29-31, of their opposites?
Nor can I help taking note, in the oversight and
muster from this point of view of the words which
constitute a language, of the manner in which it has
been put to all its resources that so it may express
the infinite varieties, now of human suffering, now
of human sin. Thus what a fearful thing is it that
any language should have a word expressive of the
pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others;
for the existence of the word bears testimony to the




40           THF  MORALITY IN WORDS.
existence of the thing. And yet in more than one
such a word is found.* Nor are there wanting, I suppose, in any language, words which are the mournful record of the strange wickednesses which the
genius of man, so fertile in evil has invented.
And our dictionaries, while they tell us much, yet
will not tell us all. How shamefully rich is the language of the vulgar everywhere in words which are
not allowed to find their way into books, yet which
live as a sinful oral tradition on the lips of men, to
set forth that which is unholy and impure. And of
these words, as no less of those which have to do
with the kindred sins of revelling and excess, how
many set the evil forth with an evident sympathy
and approbation, as taking part with the sin against
Him who has forbidden it under pain of his extremest displeasure.  How much wit, how much talent,
yea, how much imagination must have stood in the
service of sin, before it could have a nomenclature
so rich, so varied, and often so Heaven-defying as it
has.
How many words men have dragged downward
with themselves, and made partakers more or less
of their own fall. Having originally an honorable
significance, they have yet, with the deterioration
In the Greek, irXatopFavia, in the German, "Schadenfreude."
Cicero so strongly feels that such a word is wanting, that he gives to
"malevolentia" the same significance, "voluptas ex malo alterius,
though it lies not of noeosaitv in the word.




THE 1)EGENERATION OF VWRDS.         41
and degeneration of those that used them, deteriorated and degenerated too. What a multitude of words
originally harmless, have assumed a harmful as
their secondary meaning; how many worthy have
acquired an unworthy. Thus "knave" meant once
no more than lad (nor does it now in German mean
more),  "villain" than peasant; a "boor" was only a
farmer, a " varlet" was but a serving-man, a  churl"
but a strong fellow. " Time-server" was used two
hundred years ago quite as often for one in an honorable as in a dishonorable sense " serving the time."*
"Conceits" had once nothing conceited in them;
" officious" had reference to offices of kindness and
not of busy meddling; " moody" was that which
pertained to a man's mood, without any gloom or
sullenness implied.  "Demure" (which is, " des
mceurs," of good manners), conveyed no hint, as it
does now, of an over-doing of the outward demonstrations of modesty. In " crafty" and "cunning"
there was nothing of crooked wisdom implied, but
only knowledge and skill; "craft," indeed, still retains very often its more honorable use, a man's
" craft" being his skill, and then the trade in which
he is well skilled. And think you that the Magdalen could have ever given us " maudlin" in its
present contemptuous application, if the tears of
penitential weeping had been held in due honor in
the world? " Tinsel," from the French " etincelle,"
* See in proof Fuller's Holy State, b. iii. c. 19.




42          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
meant once anything that sparkles or glistens; thus
" cloth of tinsel" would be cloth inwrought with silver and gold; but the sad experience that "all is
not gold that glitters," that much which shows fair
and specious to the eye is yet worthless in reality,
has caused the word imperceptibly to assume the
meaning which it now has, and when we speak of
"tinsel," either literally or figuratively, we always
mean now  that which has no reality of sterling
worth underlying the glittering and specious shows
which it makes.  "Tawdry," which is a word of
curious derivation, though I will not pause to go
into it, has undergone exactly the same process; it
once conveyed no intimation of mean finery, or
shabby splendor, as now it does.
A like deterioration through use may be traced in
the word " to resent." It was not very long ago that
Barrow could speak of the good man as a faithful
" resenter" and requiter of benefits, of the duty of
testifying an affectionate " resentment" of our obligations to God. But, alas! the memory of benefits
fades and fails from us so much more quickly than
that of injuries; that which we afterward remember
and revolve in our minds is so much more predominantly the wrongs real or imaginary which men have
done us, than the favors they have bestowed on us,
that "to resent" in our modern English has come to
be confined entirely to that deep reflective displeasure which men entertain against those that have




ANIMOSITY, PREJUDICE.           48
done, or whom they believe to have done, them a
wrong. And this leads us to inquire how it comes
to pass that we do not speak of the " retaliation" of
benefits, as often as the "retaliation" of injuries?
The word does but signify the again rendering as
much as we have received; but this is so much
seldomer thought of in regard of benefits than of
wrongs, that the word, though not altogether unused
in this its worthier sense, has yet a strange and
somewhat unusual sound in our ears when so employed. Were we to speak of a man " retaliating"
kindnesses, I am not sure that every one would understand us.
Neither is it altogether satisfactory to take note
that " animosity," according to its derivation, means
no more than "spiritedness;" that in the first use
of the word in the later Latin to which it belongs,
it was employed in this sense; was applied, for instance, to the spirit and fiery courage of the horse;
but that now it is applied to only one kind of vigor
and activity, that namely which is displayed in enmity and hate, and expresses a spiritedness in these.
Does not this look too much as if these oftenest
stirred men to a lively and vigorous activity?
And then what a mournful witness for the hard
and unrighteous judgments we habitually form of
one another lies in the word " prejudice." The word
of itself means plainly no more than " a judgment
formed beforehand," without affirming anything as




44          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
to whether that judgment be favorable or unfavorable to the person about whom it is formed. Yet so
predominantly do we form harsh, unfavorable judgments of others before knowledge and experience,
that a "prejudice," or judgment before knowledge
and not grounded on evidence, is almost always
taken to signify an unfavorable anticipation about
one; and " prejudicial" has actually acquired a secondary meaning of anything which is mischievous or
injurious.
As these words are a testimony to the sin of
man, so there is a signal testimony to his infirmity,
to the limitation of human faculties and human
knowledge, in the word "to retract." To retract
means properly, as its derivation declares, no more
than to handle over again, to reconsider. And yet,
so certain are we to find in a subject which we reconsider or handle a second time, that which was at the
first rashly, inaccurately stated, that which needs
therefore to be amended, modified, withdrawn; that
" to retract" could not tarry long with its primary
meaning of reconsidering; and has come to signify,
as we commonly use it, " to withdraw." Thus a great
writer of the Latin church, at the close of his life
wishing to amend whatever he might now perceive
in his various published works to have been incautiously or incorrectly stated, gave to the book in
which he carried out this intention (for they had
then no such opportunities as second and third




MANY WORDS ENNOBLED.             45
editions afford now) this very name of "Retractations," being strictly " Rehandlings," but in fact, as
any one turning to the work will at once perceive,
withdrawings of various statements, which he now
considered to need thus to be withdrawn. What a
seal does this word's acquisition of such a secondary
use as this set to the proverb, humanum est errare.
At the same time urging, as I have thus done, this
degeneration of words, I should greatly err, if I failed
to bring before you the fact that a parallel process of
purifying and ennobling has also been going forward,
especially, through the influences of Divine faith
working in the world; which, as it has turned men
from evil to good, or lifted them from a lower earthly
goodness to a higher heavenly, so has it in like manner elevated, purified, and ennobled a multitude of
the words which they employ, until these which
once expressed only an earthly good, express now a
heavenly. The gospel of Christ, as it is the redemption of man, so is it in a multitude of instances the
redemption of his word, freeing it from the bondage
of corruption, that it should no longer be subject to
vanity, nor stand any more in the service of sin or
of the world, but in the service of God and of his
truth. In the Greek language there is a word for
"humility;" but this humility meant for the Greek
-that is, with very rarest exceptions- meanness
of spirit. He who brought in the Christian grace




46          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
of humility did in so doing rescue also the word
which expressed it for nobler uses, and to a far
higher dignity than hitherto it had attained. There
were "angels" before heaven had been opened, but
these only earthly messengers; "martyrs" also, or
witnesses, but these not unto blood, nor yet f)r God's
highest truth; "apostles," but sent of men; " evangels," but not of the kingdom of heaven; " ad vocates,"
but not "with the Father."  "Paradise" was a
word common in slightly different forms to almost
all the nations of the East; but they meant by it only
some royal park or garden of delights; till for the
Jew it was exalted to signify the wondrous abode of
our first parents; and higher honors awaited it still,
when, on the lips of the Lord, it signified the blissful
waiting-place of faithful departed souls (Luke xxiii.
43); yea, the heavenly blessedness itself (Rev. ii. 7).
Nor was the word "regeneration" unknown to the
Greeks: they could speak of the earth's regeneration
in the spring-time, of memory as the regeneration of
knowledge; the Jewish historian could describe the
return of his countrymen from the Babylonian captivity, and their re-establishment under Cyrus in
their own land, as the regeneration of the Jewish
state; but still the word, on the lips of either Jew or
Greek, was very far removed from  that honor re
served for it in the Christian dispensation -namely,
that it should be the bearer of one of the chiefest
and most blessed mysteries of the faith. And many




PAIN AND PLEASURE.                47
other words in like manner there are " fetched from
the very dregs of paganism,'* as one has said, which
words the Holy Spirit has not refused to employ for
the setting forth of the great truths of our redemption.
Reversing in this the impious deed of Belshazzar, who
profaned the sacred vessels of God's house to sinful
and idolatrous uses (Dan. v. 2), that blessed Spirit
has often consecrated the very idol vessels of Babylon to the service of the sanctuary.
Let us now proceed to contemplate some of the
attestations for God's truth, and then some of the playings into the hands of the devil's falsehood, which
may be found to lurk in words.  And first, the witnesses to God's truth, the falling in of our words with
his unchangeable word: for these, as the true uses of
the word, while the other are only its abuses, have
a prior claim to be considered. Some modern false
prophets, who would gladly explain away all the
phenomena of the world around us, as declare man
to be a sinful being and enduring the consequences
of sin, tell us that pain is only a subordinate kind of
pleasure, or at worst that it is a sort of needful hedge
and guardian of pleasure. But there is deeper feeling in the universal heart of man, bearing witness
to something very different from this shallow explanation of the existence of pain in the present econo
* Sanderson, Sermons, 1671, v. 2, p. 124. He instances the Latin' sacrament," the Greek "mystery."




48          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
my of the world-namely, that it is the correlative
of sin, that it is punish/ment; and to this the word
4' pain," which there can be no reasonable doubt is
derived  from  "pcena," bears continual witness.
Pain is punishment; so does the word itself, no less
than the conscience of every one that is suffering it,
declare. Just so, again, there are those who will
not hear of great pestilences being God's scourges
of men's sins; who fain would find out natural
causes for them, and account for them by the help
of these. I remember it was thus with too many
during both our fearful visitations from the cholera.
They may do so, or imagine that they do so; yet
every time they use the word "plague," they implicitly own the fact which they are endeavoring to
deny; for "plague" means properly and according
to its derivation, "blow," or "stroke;" and was a
title given to these terrible diseases, because the great
universal conscience of men, which is never at fault,
believed and confessed that these were " strokes" or
"blows" inflicted by God on a guilty and rebellious
world. With reference to such words so used we
may truly say: Vox populi, vox Dei, The voice of
the people is the voice of God-a proverb which
shallowly interpreted may be made to contain a most
mischievous falsehood; but interpreted in the sense
wherein no doubt it was spoken, holds a deepest
truth. We must only remember that this "people"
is not the populace either in high place or in low;




MISER, MISERABLE.              49
and that this " voice of the people" is not any momentary outcry, but the consenting testimony of the
good and wise, of those neither brutalized by ignorance, nor corrupted by a false cultivation, in all
places and in all times.
Every one who admits the truth which lies in this
saying must, I think, acknowledge it as a remarkable fact, that men should have agreed to apply the
word " miser," or miserable, to the man eminently
addicted to the vice of covetousness, to him who loves
his money with his whole heart and soul.  Here,
too, the moral instinct lying deep in all hearts has
borne testimony to the tormenting nature of this
vice, to the gnawing cares with which even here it
punishes him that entertains it, to the enmity which
there is between it and all joy; and the man who enslaves himself to his money is proclaimed in our very
language to be a " miser," or a miserable man.*
How deep an insight into the failings of the human
heart lies at the root of many words; and if only we
would attend to them, what valuable warnings many
contain against subtle temptations and sins! Thus, all
of us have probably, more or less, felt the temptation
of seeking to please others by an unmanly assenting
to their view of some matter, even when our own
independent convictions would lead us to a different.
* We here in fact say in a word what the Roman moralist, when
he wrote, " Nulla avaritia sine pcena est, quamvis satis sit ipsa pcena-,rnm," took a sentence to say.
3




150         THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
The existence of such a temptation, and the fact that
too many yield to it, are both declared in a Latin word
for a flatterer" assentator"-that is, " an assenter;" one who has not courage to say No, when a
Yes is expected from him: and quite independently
of the Latin, the German language, in its contemptuous
and precisely equivalent use of " Jaherr," or " a yea
Lord," warns us in like manner against all such unmanly compliances. I may observe by the way that
we also once possessed the word " assentation" in the
sense of unworthy, flattering lip-assent; the last example of it which Richardson gives is from Bishop Hall:
"It is a fearful presage of ruin when the prophets
conspire in assentation."  The word is quite worthy
to be revived. Again, how good it is to have that
spirit of depreciation of others, that willingness to
find spots and stains in the characters of the greatest
and the best, that so they may not oppress and rebuke us with a goodness and greatness so far surpassing ours -to have this tendency met and checked
by a word at once so expressive, and one which we
should so little like to take home to ourselves, as the
French "denigreur."  This word also is now I believe out of use; which is a pity, while yet the thing
is everywhere so frequent. Full too of instruction
and warning is our present employment of the word
" libertine." It signified, according to its earliest use
in French and in English, a speculative free-thinker
in matters of religion, and in the theory of morals,




LIBERTINE - PASSION.           51
or, it might be, of government. But as by a sure
process free-thtinking does and will end in freeacting, as he who has cast off the one yoke, will cast
off the other, so a "libertine" came in two or three
generations to signify a profligate, especially in rela
tion to women, a licentious and debauched person.
There is much, too, that we may learn from looking a little closely at the word " passion." We sometimes think of the "passionate" man as a man of
strong will, and of real though ungoverned energy.
But this word declares to us most plainly the contrary; for it, as a very solemn use of it declares,
means properly " suffering;" and a passionate man
is not a man doing something, but one suffering something to be done on him. When, then, a man or
child is "in a passion," this is no coming out in him
of a strong will, of a real energy, but rather the
proof that for the time at least he has no will, no energy; he is suffering, not doing-suffering his anger,
or what other evil temper it may be, to lord over
him without control. Let no one then think of passion as a sign of strength. As reasonably might one
assume that it was a proof of a man being a strong
man that he was often well beaten.  Such a fact
would be evidence that a strong man was putting
forth his strength on him, but of anything rather than
that he himself was strong. The same sense of passion and feebleness going together, of the first be
ing born of the second, lies, as I may remark by the




52          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
way, in the two-fold use of the Latin word, impotens
-which, meaning first weak, means then violent;
and then often weak and violent together.
In our use of the word " talents," as when we say,
"a man of talents" (not of " talent," for that, as we
shall see presently, is nonsense), there is a clear recognition of the responsibilities which go along with
the possession of intellectual gifts and endowments,
whatsoever they may be.  We draw, beyond a
doubt, the word from the parable in scripture in
which various talents, more and fewer, are committed
to the several servants by their lord, that they may
trade with them in his absence, and give account
of their employment at his return. Men may choose
to forget the ends for which their talents were given
them; they may turn them to selfish ends; they may
glorify themselves in them, instead of glorifying the
Giver; they may practically deny that they were
given at all; yet in this word, till they can rid their
vocabulary of it, abides a continual memento that
they were so given, or rather lent, and that each
man shall have to render an account of their use.
Let us a little consider the word "kind."  We
speak of a "kind" person, and we speak of man"kind," and perhaps, if we think about the matter
at all, we seem to ourselves to be using quite different
words, or the same word in senses quite unconnected,
and having no bond between them. But they are
connected, and that most closely; a " kind" person




KIND FROM KINNED.                53
is a " kinned" person, one of kin; one who acknowledges and acts upon his kinship with other men,
confesses that he owes to them, as of one blood with
himself, the debt of love. And so mankind is man
kinned.*  In the word is contained a declaration of
the relationship which exists between all the mem
bers of the human family; and seeing that this relationship in a race now scattered so widely and divided so far asunder can only be through a common head, we do in fact every time that we use the
word "mankind," declare our faith in the one common descent of the whole race of man. And beautiful before, how much more beautiful now do the
words " kind" and " kindness" appear, when we perceive the root out of which they grow; that they are
the acknowledgment in deeds of love of our kinship
with our brethren; and how profitable to keep in
mind that a lively recognition of the bonds of blood,
whether of those closer ones which unite us to that
whom  by best right we term  our family, or those
wider ones which knit us to the whole human family,
that this is the true source out of which all genuine
love and affection must spring; for so much is
affirmed in our daily, hourly use of the word.
And other words there are, having reference to
the family and the relations of family life, which are
* Thus it is not a mere play upon words, but something much
deeper, which Shakspere puts into Hamlet's mouth; when speak
ing of his father's brother who had married his mother, he characterizes him as "A little more than kin and less than kind."




54          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
not less full of teaching, which each may serve to
remind of some duty. For example, " husband" is
properly "house-band," the band and bond of the
house, who shall bind and hold it together. Thus,
Old Tusser in his Points of IHusbandry:' The name of the husband what is it to say?
Of wife and of household the band and the stay:"
so that the very name may put him in mind of his
authority, and of that which he ought to be to all the
members of the house. And the name " wife" has
its lessons too, although not so deep a one as the
equivalent word in some other tongues. It belongs
to the same family of words as " weave," "woof,"
"web," and the German, "weben."  It is a title
given to her who is engaged at the web and woof,
these having been the most ordinary branches of
female industry, of wifely employment, when the language was forming. So that in the word itself is
wrapped up a hint of earnest in-door stay-at-home
occupations, as being the fittest for her who bears
this name.
But it was observed just now that there are also
words which bear the slime on them of the serpent's
trail; and the uses of words, which imply moral perversity-I say not upon their parts who now employ
them in the senses which they have acquired, but on
theirs from whom little by little they received their
deflection, and were warped from their original rec



PRUDE -SIMPLE.               55
titude. Thus for instance is it with the word " prude,"
signifying as now it does a woman with an overscrupulous affectation of a modesty which she does
not really feel, and betraying the absence of the reality by this over-preciseness and niceness about the
shadow.  This use of the word must needs have
been the result of a great corruption of manners in
them among whom it grew up. Goodness must have
gone strangely out of fashion, before things could
have come to this. For " prude," which is a French
word, means virtuous or prudent; "prud'homme"
being a man of courage and probity.  But where
morals are greatly and almost universally relaxed,
virtue is often treated as hypocrisy; and thus, in a
dissolute age, and one disbelieving the existence of
any inward purity, the word " prude" came to designate one who affected a virtue, even as none were
esteemed to do anything more; and in this use of it,
which, having once acquired, it continues to retain,
abides an evidence of the corrupt world's dislike to
and disbelief in the realities of goodness, its willingness to treat them as mere hypocrisies and shows.
Again, why should the word "simple" be used
slightingly, and "simpleton" more slightingly still 
According to its derivation the "simple," is one
~ without fold," sine plic&; just what we may imagine Nathanael to have been, and what our Lord attributed as the highest honor to him, the "Israelite
without guile;" and indeed, what highel honor could




56          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
there be than to have nothing double about us, to be
without duplicities or folds? Even the world, that
despises " simplicity," does not profess to approve of
"duplicity," or double-foldedness. But inasmuch
as we feel that in a world like ours such a man will
make himself a prey, is likely to prove no match for
the fraud and falsehood which he will everywhere
encounter, and as there is that in most men which, if
they were obliged to choose between deceiving and
being deceived, would make them choose the former,
it has come to pass that " simple," which in a world
of righteousness would be a word of highest honor,
implies here in this world of ours, something of scorn
for the person to whom it is applied. And must it
not be confessed to be a striking fact that exactly in
the same way a person of deficient intellect is called
an "innocent," in nocens, one that does not hurt?
so that this word assumes that the first and chief
use men make of their intellectual powers will be
to do hurt, that where they are wise, it will be to
do evil. What a witness does human language bear
here against human sin!
Nor are these isolated examples of the contemptuous application of words expressive of goodness.
They meet us on every side. Thus " silly," written
"seely" in our earlier English, is beyond a doubt
the German "selig," which means "blessed."  We
see the word in its transition state in our early poets,
with whom  "silly" is so often an affectionate epi



SILLY, INNOCENT.             57
thet, applied to sheep as expressive of their harmlessness and innocency. With a still slighter departure from its original meaning, an early English poet
applies the word to the Lord of Glory himself, while
yet an infant of days, styling him "this harmless
silly babe." But here the same process went forward
as with the words "simple" and " innocent."  And
the same moral phenomenon repeats itself continually. For example: at the first promulgation of the
Christian faith, and while yet the name of its Divine
Founder was somewhat new and strange to the ears
of the heathen, they were wont, some perhaps out of
ignorance, but more of intention, slightly to mispronounce this name, as though it had not been " Christus," but " Chrestus," that word signifying in Greek
" benevolent," or "benign."  That they who did it
of intention meant no honor hereby to the Lord of
Life, but the contrary, is certain; and indeed the
word, like the " silly," "innocent," " simple," of
which we have already spoken, had already contracted a slight tinge of contempt, or else there would
have been no inducement to fasten it on the Savior.
What a strange shifting of the moral sense there
must have been, before it could have done so before men could have found in a name implying benignity and goodness a nickname of scorn.  The
French have their " bonhommie" with the same undertone of contempt, the Greeks also a well-known
word. It is to the honor of the Latin, and is very
2*




58          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
characteristic of the best side of Roman life, that
"simplex" and " simplicitas" never acquired this
housive signification.
Again, we all know how prone men are to ascribe
to chance or fortune those good gifts and blessings
which indeed come directly from  God-to build
altars to fortune rather than to IHim who is the author
of every good thing. And this faith of theirs, that
their blessings, even their highest, come to them by
a blind chance, they have incorporated in a word;
for "happy" and "happiness" are of course connected with and derived from  "hap," which is
chance. But how unworthy is this word to express
any true felicity, of which the very essence is that
it excludes hap or chance, that the world neither
gave it nor can take it away. It is indeed more objectionable than "lucky" and "fortunate," objectionable as also are these, inasmuch as by the " happy" man we mean much more than by the " fortunate."  Very nobly has a great English poet protested against the misuse of the latter word, when
of one who had lost indeed everything beside, but,
as he esteemed, had kept the truth, he exclaims:-, Call not the royal Swede unfortunate,
Who never did to fortune bend the knee."
But another way in which the immorality of words
mainly displays itself, one, too, in which perhaps
they work their greatest mischief, is that of giving




UGLY WORDS FOR UGLY THINGS.           59
honorable names to dishonorable things, making sin
plausible by dressing it out sometimes even in the
very colors of goodness, or if not so, yet in such as
go far to conceal its own native deformity. " The
tongue," as St. James has declared, " is a world of
iniquity" (iii. 6); or as some interpreters affirm the
words ought rather to be translated, and they would
be then still more to our purpose, " the ornament of
iniquity," that which sets it out in fair and attractive
colors: and those who understand the original will
at once perceive that such a meaning may possibly
lie in the words.  On the whole I do not believe
that these expositors are right, yet certainly the connection of the Greek word for "tongue" with our
"gloze," " glossy," with the German " gleissen," to
smoothe over or polish, with an obsolete Greek word
as well, also signifying " to polish," is not accidental, but real, and may well suggest some searching
thoughts, as to the uses whereunto we turn this
" best," but, as it may therefore prove also, this
worst " member that we have."
How much wholesomer on all accounts is it that
there should be an ugly word for an ugly thing, one
involving moral condemnation and disgust, even at
the expe-nse of a little coarseness, rather than one
which plays fast and loose with the eternal principles of miorality, which makes sin plausible, and
shifts the divinely-reared llandmarks of right and
wrong, thus bringing the user runder the wo of




60           THE MORALITY IN WORDS..them "that call evil good, and good evil, that put
darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put
sweet for bitter, and bitter for sweet" (Isa. v. 20)a text on which South has written four of his greatest sermons, with reference to this very matter, and
bearing this striking title, On the fatal imposture
and force of words.  How awful, yea, how fearful,
is this force and imposture of theirs, leading men
captive at will. There is an atmosphere about them
which they are evermore diffusing, an atmosphere
of life or death, which we insensibly inhale at each
moral breath we draw.*   "The winds of the soul,"
as one called them of old, they fill its sails, and are
continually impelling it upon its course, heavenward
or to hell. How immense is the difference as to the
light in which we shall learn to regard a sin, according as we have been wont to designate and to hear
it designated by a word which brings out its loathsomeness and deformity; —or by one which conceals these; as when in Italy, during the period
that poisoning was rifest, nobody was said to be poisoned; it was only that the death of some was " assisted" (aiutata); or again, by one which seeks to
turn the edge of the Divine threatenings against it
by a jest; as when in France a subtle poison, by
which impatient heirs delivered  themselves from
* Bacon's words have been often quoted, but they will bear being quoted once more: " Credunt enim hoinines rationem siuam verhis imperare. Sed fit etiam ut verba vim suam super intellectura
retorqueant et reflectant."




THE IMPOSTURE OF WORDS.                    61
those who stood between them  and the inheritance
which they coveted, was called " poudre de succession;" or, worse than all, which shall throw  a flimsy
vail of sentiment over it.  As an example of the last,
what a source of mischief in all our country parishes
is the one practice of calling a child born out of
wedlock, a "'love-child" instead  of a bastard.   It
would be hard to estimate how  much it has lowered
the tone and standard of morality among us; or for
how  many  young  women' it may  have helped  to
make the downward way more sloping still.  How
vigorously ought we to oppose ourselves to all such
immoralities of language; which opposition will yet
never be easy or pleasant; for many that will endure
to commit a sin, will resent having  that sin called
by its right name.*
Coarse as, according to our present usages of lan* On the general subject of the reaction of a people's language on
that people's moral life, I will adduce some words of Milton, who,
as he did so much to enlarge, to enrich, to purify our mother tongue,
so also in the Latin which lie wielded so well, has thU  declared his
mind: " Neque enim qui sermo, purusne an corruptus, qumve loquendi proprietas quotidiana populo sit, parvi interesse arhitrandum
est, que res Athenis non semel saluti fuit; immno vero, quod Platonis sententia est, immutato vestiendi more habituque graves in Repullica motus mutationesque portendi, equidem potius collahente in
vitium atque errorem loquendi nsu occasum ejus urbis remque humilem et obscuram subsequi crediderim: verba enim partim inscita
et putida, partim mendosa et perperam prolata, quid si ignavos et
oscitantes et ad servile quidvis jam olim paratos incolarum ani-los
hand levi indicio declarant? Cotntra nulluin unquam audivimus imperiumn, nullam civitatem nonl medliocriter saltem floruisse, quamdiu
linguan sua gratia, suusque cultns constitit."  Compare an interesting
spistle (the 114th) of Seneca.




62           THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
guage, may be esteemed the word by which our
plain-speaking Anglo Saxon fathers were wont to
designate the unhappy women who make a trade of
selling their bodies to the lusts of men, yet is there a
profound moral sense in that word, bringing prominently out, as it does, the true vileness of their occupation, who for hire are content to profane and lay
waste the deepest sanctities of their life. Consider
the truth which is witnessed for here, as compared
with the falsehood of ifany other titles by which
they have been known-names which may themselves be called "whited sepulchres," so fair are
they without, yet hiding so much foul within; as
for instance, that in the French language which ascribes joy to a life which more surely than any other
dries up all the sources of gladness in the heart,
brings anguish, astonishment, blackest melancholy,
on all who have addicted themselves to it. In the
same way how much more moral words are the
English " sharper," and " blackleg," than the French
"chevalier d'industrie:" and the same holds good
of the English equivalent, coarse as it is, for the Latin " conciliatrix."  In this last word we have a notable example of the putting of bitter for sweet, and
darkness for light, of the attempt to present a disgraceful occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its own true deformity
and ugliness.*
* So conscious have men been of this tendency of theirs to throw
the mantle of an honorable aword over a dishonorable thlin. or vic,




WORDS AGAINST ARGUMENTS.                    63
If I wanted any further proof of this which I have
been urging, namely, the moral atmosphere which
words diffuse, I would ask you to observe how the
first thing which men will do, when engaged in controversy with others, be it in the conflict of the
tongue  or the pen, or of weapons sharper yet, if
sharper there be, will be to assume some honorable
name to themselves, which, if possible, begs the
whole matter in dispute, and at the same time to
affix on their adversaries a name which shall place
them  in an invidious, or a ridiculous, or a contemptible, or an odious light.  There  is a deep instinct in
men, deeper perhaps than they give any account of
to themselves, which tells them  how  far this will go;
that multitudes, utterly unable to weigh the arguments of the case, will yet be receptive of the influences which these words continually, though almost
imperceptibly, diffuse.  By arguments  they might
hope to gain over the reason of a few, but by these
they enlist what at first are so much more effectual,
versa, of the temptation to degrade an honorable thing, when they
do not love it, by a dishonorable appellation, that the Greek language has a word significative of this very attempt, and its great
moral teachers frequently occupy themselves in detecting this most
frequent, yet perhaps practically most mischievous, among all the
impostures of words - VT7KoipiecOa', itself a word with an interesting
history.  And when Thucydides (iii. 82) would paint the fearful
moral deterioration of Greece in the progress of its great Civil War,
he adduces this alteration of the received valne of words, this fitting
of false names to everything - names of honor to the base, and of
baseness to the honorable - as one of its most striking signs, even
as it again set forward the evil, of which it had been first the result




64           THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
the passions and prejudices of many, on their side.
Thus when at the beginning of our Civil Wars the
parliamentary party styled themselves " The Godly,"
and the royalists "The Malignants," it is very certain that wherever they could procure entrance for
these words, the question upon whose side the right
lay was already decided. I do not adduce this instance as at all implying that the royalists did not
make exactly the same employment of question-begging words, and of words steeped quite as deeply in
the passion which animated them, but only as a sufficient illustration of my meaning.
Seeing, then, that language contains so faithful a
record of the good and of the evil which in time past
have been working in the minds and hearts of men,
we should not err if we regard it as a moral barometer, which indicates and permanently marks the rise
or fall of a nation's life. To study a people's language will be to study them, and to study them at
best advantage, where they present themselves to us
under fewest disguises, most nearly as they are.
Too many have had a hand in it, and in causing it
to arrive at its present shape, it is too entirely the
collective work of the whole nation, the result of the
united contributions of all, it obeys too immutable
laws, to allow any successful tampering with it, any
making of it to witness other than the actual facts of
the case.
The frivolity of an age or nation, its mockery of




WORDS REVEAL NATIONAL CHARACTER.    65
itself, its inability to comprehend the true dignity
and meaning of life, the feebleness of its moral indignation, all this will find an utterance in the use
of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively
trivial or even ridiculous, in the squandering of such
as ought to have been reserved for the highest mysteries of the spiritual life on slight and secular objects, in the employment almost in jest and play of
words implying the deepest moral guilt-as for instance the French'perfide;' while, on the contrary,
the high sentiment, the scorn of everything mean or
base of another people or time, will as certainly in
one way or another stamp themselves on the words
which they employ; and thus, too, with whatever
good or evil they may own.
Often a people's use of some single word will afford us a deeper insight into their real condition,
their habits of thought and feeling, than whole volumes written expressly with the intention of imparting this insight. Thus our word "idiot" is abundantly characteristic, not indeed of English, but of
Greek life, from which we have derived it and our
use of it. The i~,r,  or " idiot" was in its earliest
usage the private man, as contradistinguished from
him who was clothed with some office and had a
share in the management of public affairs. In this
its primary use it is occasionally employed in English; as in Jeremy Taylor, who says, "'Humility is
a duty in great ones as well as in idiots." It came




66           THE MOIAJITY IN WORDS.
then to signify a rude, ignorant, unskilled, intellectually-unexercised person, a boor; this derivation or
secondary sense bearing witness, as has been most
truly said, to "the Greek notion of the indispensableness of public life, even to the right development
of the intellect,"  a feeling which was entirely inwoven in the Greek habit of thought, lying at the
foundation of all schemes of mental culture.  Nor is
it easy to see how it could have uttered itself with
greater clearness than it does in this secondary use
of the word "idiot."   Our tertiary, according to
which the "idiot" is one deficient in intellect, and
not merely one with its powers unexercised, is but
this secondary pushed a little further. Again, the
innermost distinction between the Greek mind and
the Hebrew reveal themselves in the several salutations of each, the " rejoice" of the first, the " peace"
of the second. The clear, cheerful, world-enjoying
temper of the Greek embodies itself in the first; he
could desire nothing better or higher for himself, and
thus could not wish it for his friend, than to have
joy in his life. But the Hebrew had a deeper longing within him, and one which finds utterance in
his " peace."  It is not hard to perceive why this
people should have been chosen as the first bearers
of that truth which indeed enables truly to rejoice,
but only through first bringing peace; nor why
from them the word of life should first go forth. It
* Archdeae(on Itar'o Mlfission of the Comforter, p. 552.




MODIFICATIONS OF MEAN1RNG.         67
may be urged, indeed, that these were only forms,
and so in great part they may have at length be-omne; as in our " good-by" or " adieu" we can hardly be said now to commit our friend to the Divine
protection; yet still they were not such at the first,
nor would they have held their ground, if ever they
had become such altogether.
So, too, the modifications of meaning which a
word has undergone, as it had been transplanted
from one soil to another, the way in which one nation receiving a word from another, has yet brought
into it some new force which was foreign to it in
the tongue whence it was borrowed, has deepened,
or extenuated, or otherwise altered its meaningall this may prove profoundly instructive, and may
reveal to us, as perhaps nothing else would, the
most fundamental diversities existing between them.
Observe, for instance, how different is the word
" self-sufficient" as used by us, and by the heathen
nations of antiquity. The Greek work exactly corresponding to it is a word of honor, and applied to
men in their praise. And indeed it was the glory
of the heathen philosophy to teach a man to find
his resources in his own bosom, to be thus sufficient
for himself; and seeing that a true centre without
him and above him, a centre in God, had not been
revealed to him, it was no shame for him to seek it
there; better this, such as it was, than no centre at
all. But the gospel has taught us another lesson, to




68          THE MORALITY IN WORDS.
find our sufficiency in God: and thus "self-sufficient," which with the Greek was a word in honorable use, is not so with us. Self-sufficiency is not a
quality which any man desires now to be attributed
to him. We have a feeling about the word, which
causes it to carry its own condemnation with it; and
its different uses, for honor once, for reproach now,
do in fact ground themselves on the central differences of heathenism and Christianity.
Once more, we might safely conclude that a nation would not be likely tamely to submit to tyranny and wrong, which had made " quarrel" out of
" querela."  The Latin word means properly "complaint," and we have in " querulous" this its proper
meaning coming distinctly out. Not so however in
" quarrel;" for Englishmen, having been wont not
merely to complain, but to set vigorously about
righting and  redressing  themselves, their griefs
being also grievances, out of this word, which might
have given them only " querulous" and " querulousness," they have gotten " quarrel" as well.
On the other hand we can not wonder that Italy
should fill our Great Exhibition with beautiful specimens of her skill in the arts, with statues and sculptures of rare loveliness, but should only rivet her
chains the more closely by the weak and ineffectual
efforts which she makes to break them, when she
can degrade the word " virtuoso," or " the virtuous,"
to signify one accomplished in I ainting, music, and




ITALIAN WORDS DEGRADED.           69
sculpture, such things as are the ornamental fringe
of a nation's life, but can never be made, without
loss of all manliness of character, its main texture
and woof-not to say that excellence in these fine
arts has been in too many cases divorced from all
true virtue and worth. And what shall we say concerning the uses to which she turns her " bravo"?
The opposite exaggeration of the ancient dwellers in
Italy, who often made " virtus" to signify warlike
courage alone, as if for them  all virtues were included in this one, was at all events more tolerable than
this; for there is a sense in which a man's " valor"
is his value. How little, again, the modern Italians
live in the spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverence the greatest among them, we may argue from
the fact that they have been content to take the
name of one among their noblest, and degrade it so
far that every glib and loquacious hireling who
shows strangers about their picture galleries, palaces,
and ruins, is termed by them a " Cicerone," or a
Cicero! So too the French use of the word " honnetet6," as external civility, marks a tendency to accept the shows and pleasant courtesies of social life
in the room of deeper moral qualities.
How much too may be learned by noting the
words which nations have been obliged to borrow
from other nations, as not having them of homegrowth - this, in general, if not in every case, testifying that the thing itself was not native, was only




To          THE MORALITY IN WORDSan exotic, transplanted, like the word which indicated
it, from a foreign soil. Thus it is singularly characteristic of the social and political life of England, as
distinguished from that of the other European nations, that to it alone the word "clubs" belongs;
that the French and German languages have been
alike unable to grow a word of their own as its
equivalent, and have both been obliged to borrow
this from us, And no wonder; for these voluntary
associations of men for the furthering of such social
or political ends as are near to the hearts of the associates could have only had their rise under such
favorable circumstances as ours.  In no country
where there was not extreme personal freedom
could they have sprung up; and as little in any
where men did not know how to use this fieedom
with moderation and self-restraint, could they long
have been endured. It was comparatively easy to
adopt the word; but the ill success of the " club"
itself everywhere save here where it is native, has
shown that it was not so easy to transplant the thing.
While we have lent this and other words, mostly
political, to the French and to the German, it would
not be less instructive, were this a suitable opportunity, to trace our corresponding obligations to
them.
But it is time to bring this lecture to an end.
These illustrations, to which it would not be hard to
add many more, are amply enough to justify what




WORDS TAKE THEIR SIDE.          71
I have asserted of the existence of a moral element
in words; they are enough to make us feel about
them, that they do not hold themselves neutral in
the great conflict between good and evil, light and
darkness, which is dividing the world; that they
are not contented to be the passive vehicles, now of
the truth, and now of falsehood. We see on the
contrary that they continually take their side, are
some of them  children of light, others children of
this world, or even of darkness; they beat with the
pulses of our life; they stir with our passions; they
receive fiom us the impressions of our good and of
our evil, which again they are active further to
propagate among us. Must we not own, then, that
there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of which
we may hitherto have taken too little account,
around us and about us? and may there not be a
deeper meaning than hitherto we have attached to
it, lying in that solemn declaration, " By thy words
thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt
be condemned"?




LECTURE III.
THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
IT might at first sight appear as if language, apart
that is from literature and books, and where these
did not exist, was the frailest, the most untrustworthy,
of all the vehicles of knowledge, and that most likely
to betray its charge: yet is it in fact the great, oftentimes the only, connecting link between the present
and the remotest past, an ark riding above waterfloods that have swept away every other landmark
and memorial of ages and generations. Far beyond
all written records in a language, the language itself stretches back and offers itself for our investigation -" the pedigree of nations," as Johnson calls it
itself a far more ancient monument and document
than any writing which it contains. These records,
moreover, may have been falsified by carelessness,
by vanity, by fraud, by a multitude of causes; but it',s never false, never deceives us, if we know how to
question it aright.
And this questioning of it will often lead to conclusions of extreme importance.  Thus there have
been those who have denied on one ground or anoth



ORIGINAL UNITY OF LANGUAGE.         73
er the accuracy of the Scripture statement that the
whole earth was peopled from a single pair; who
have sought to prove that there must have been many
beginnings, many centres. In answer to these, the
physical unity of the race of mankind has been triumphantly shown by Dr. Prichard and others; but all
recent investigations plainly announce that a yet
stronger evidence, and a moral argument more convincing still, for the unity of mankind will be found in the
proofs which are daily accumulating of the tendency
of all languages, however widely they may differ now,
to refer themselves to a common stock and single fountain-head. Of course we need not these proofs, who
believe the fact, because it is written; yet can we only
rejoice at each new homage which Science pays to
revealed Truth, being sure that at the last she will
stand in her service altogether.
Such investigations as these, however, lie plainly
out of your sphere. Not so, however, those humbler,
yet not less interesting inquiries, which by the aid
of any tolerable dictionary you may carry on into the
past history of your own land, as born witness to by
the present language of its people, on which language
the marks and vestiges of great revolutions are visibly
and profoundly impressed, never again to be obliterated from it. You know how the geologist is able
from the different strata and deposites, primary, secondary, or tertiary, succeeding one another, which
he meets, to conclude the successive physical changes
4




74           THE HISTORY TN WORDS.
through which a region has passed; is in a condition
to preside at those changes, to measure the forces
which were at work to produce them, and almost to
indicate their date. Now with such a composite language as the English before us, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely analogous to his.
Here too are strata and deposites, not of gravel and
chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin,
Saxon, Danish, Norman, and then again Latin and
French words, with slighter intrusions fiom  other
sources: and any one with skill to analyze the language might re-create for himself the history of the
people speaking that language, might come to appreciate the divers elements out of which that people was
composed, in what proportion these were mingled,
and in what succession they followed one upon the
other.
Take for example the relation in which the Saxon
and Norman occupants of this land stood to one
another. I doubt not that an account of this, in the
main as accurate as it would be certainly instructive,
might be drawn from an intelligent study of the contributions which they have severally made to the
English language, as bequeathed to us jointly by them
both. Supposing all other records to have perished,
we might still work out and almost reconstitute the
history by these aids; even as now, when so many
documents, so many institutions survive, this must
still be accounted the most important, and that of




SAXON AND NORMAN WORDS.            75
which the study will introduce us, as no other can,
into the innermost heart and life of great periods of
our history.
Nor indeed is it hard to see why the language
must contain such instruction as this, when we a
little realize to ourselves the stages by which it has
come down to us in its present shape. There was a
time when the languages which the Saxon and the
Norman severally spoke, existed each by the side of,
but unmingled with the other; one, that of the small
dominant class, the other that of the great body of
the people. By degrees, however, with the fusion
of the two races, the two languages also fused into a
third.  At once there would exist duplicates for
many things. But as in popular speech two words
will not long exist side by side to designate the same
thing, it became a question how the relative claims
of the Saxon and Norman word should adjust themselves, which should remain, which should be dropped;
or, if not dropped, should be transferred to some
other object, or express some other relation. It is
not of course meant that this was ever formally proposed, or as something to be settled by agreement;
but practically, one was to be taken, one left. Which
was it that should maintain its ground? Evidently
where a word was often on the lips of one race, its
equivalent seldom on those of the other, where it intimately cohered with the manner of life of one, was
only remotely in contact with that of the other, where




76          THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
it laid strong hold on one, but slight on the other, the
issue could not be doubtful. In several cases the
matter was simpler still: it was not that one word
expelled the other, or that rival claims had to be adjusted; but there never had existed more than one
word, the thing having been quite strange to the
other section of the nation.
Here is the explanation of the assertion just now
made-namely, that we might almost reconstruct
our history, so far as it turned upon the Norman conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation
of the nature and character of those which the two
races have severally contributed to it. Thus we
should confidently conclude that the Norman was
the ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the
words of dignity, state, honor, and pre-eminence, with
one remarkable exception (to be adduced presently),
descend to us from them -sovereign, sceptre, throne,
realm, royalty, homage, prince, duke, count, (" earl"
indeed is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his
" countess" from the Norman), chancellor, treasurer,
palace, castle, hall, dome, and a multitude more.
At the same time the one remarkable exception of
"king" would make us, even did we know nothing
of the actual facts, suspect that the chieftain of this
ruling race came in not upon a new title, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the
rightful line of its succession; that the true continu



SAXON AND NORMAN WORDS.             77
ity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in
word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time
to assert itself anew.
And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the
language, almost all articles of luxury, all that has to
do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment, is Norman throughout; with the broad basis
of the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great features of nature, sun, moon, and
stars, earth, water, and fire, all the prime social relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter,
these are Saxon.  The palace and the castle may
have come to us from the Norman, but to the Saxon
we owe far dearer names, the house, the roof, the
home, the hearth. His " board" too, and often probably it was no more, has a more hospitable sound
than the "table" of his lord. His sturdy arms turns
the soil; lie is the boor, the hind, the churl; or if his
Norman master has a name for him, it is one which
on his lips becomes more and more a title of opprobrium and contempt, the villain. The instruments
used in cultivating the earth, the flail, the plough,
the sickle, the spade, are expressed in his language;
so too the main products, of the earth, as wheat, rye,
oats, here, i. e. barley; and no less the names of domestic animals.  Concerning these last it is not a
little characteristic to observe (and it may be remembered that Wamba, the Saxon jester in Ivanhoe,
plays the philologer here), that the names of almost




78           THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
all animals so long as they are alive, are thus Saxon,
but when dressed and prepared for food become
Norman-a fact indeed which we might have expected beforehand; for the Saxon hind had the charge
and labor of tending and feeding them, but only that
they might appear on the table of lis Norman lord.
Thus ox, steer, cow, are Saxon, but beef Norman;
calf is Saxon, but veal Norman; sheep is Saxon, but
mutton Norman; so it is severally with swine and
pork, deer and venison, fowl and pullet. Bacon, the
only flesh which perhaps ever came within his reach
is the single exception.
Putting all this together, with much more of the
same kind, which might be produced, but has only
been indicated here, we should certainly gather, that
while there are manifest tokens as preserved in our
language, of the Saxon having been for a season an
inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of Anglo-Saxon life, however overlaid for a
while, had still made good their claim to be the
solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after
language; and to the justice of this conclusion all
other historic records, and the present social condition
of England, consent in bearing testimony.
What I have here supposed might be done in the
way of reproducing the past history of England, had
all records of her earlier times, and of the great social changes of those times, been entirely swept away,
this has been done for the earlier history of Italy, of




LATIN AND GREEK WORDS.              79
which the written memorials hcve thus perished, by
a great modern historian of Rome.  lie draws most
important conclusions respecting the races which occupied the Italian soil, and the relations in which
they stood to one another, from  an analysis of the
words which in the Latin language are derived severally from  a Greek and fiomn  other sources.  "It
can not," le says, " be mere chance that the words
for house, field, plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk,
kine, swine, and others relating to tillage and gentler ways of life agree in Latin and in Greek, while
all objects appertaining to war or the chase are designated by words utterly un-Grecian."  Hence, he
draws the conclusion that this un-Grecian population which has bequeathed these latter words stood
toward the Grecian very much in the same relation
which we have seen the Norman, as declared by the
consenting witness of history and language, to have
occupied in respect of the Saxon.
Thus far our lesson has been derived from a noting
of the relative proportions in which the words of one
stock and of another are mingled in a language,
with the domains of human activity to which these
severally appertain. But this is not all; there are
vast harvests of historic lore garnered often in single
words; there are continually great facts of history
which they at once declare and preserve. Thus, for
instance, is it with the word " church."  There can,




80             THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
I think, be no reasonable doubt that " church" is
originally  from   the Greek, and  signifies, " that
which pertains to the Lord," or " the house which
is the Lord's."   But here a difficulty meets us.
How explain the presence of a Greek word in the
vocabulary of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers? for that
we derive the word mediately fiom  them, and not
immediately from the Greek, is certain. What contact, direct or indirect, was there between the languages to account for this? The explanation is curious. While the Anglo-Saxons and other tribes of
the Teutonic stock were alnost universally converted by their contact with the Latin church in the
western provinces of the Roman empire, or by its
missionaries, yet it came to pass that before this,
some of the Goths on the lower Danube had been
brought to the knowledge of Christ by Greek missionaries from  Constantinople; and this word KVptaK
or " church" did, with certain others, pass over from
the Greek to the Gothic tongue; and these Goths,
the first converted to the Christian faith, the first,
therefore, that had a Christian vocabulary, lent the
word in their turn to the other German tribes, among
others to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers; thus it has
come round by the Goths from Constantinople to us.*
* The passage most illustrative of the parentage of the word is
from Walafrid Strabo (about 840) who writes thus: " Ab ipsis autem
Gruecis Kyrch a Kyrios —et alia multa accepimus. Sicut domus
Dei Basilica, i. e., Regia a Rege, sic etiam Kyrica, i. e., Dominica a
Domino nuncupatur. Si autem quseritur, qua occasione ad nos ve&




PAGAN AND PAGANISM.                81
Or, again, examine the words " pagan" and " paganism," and you will find that there is history in
them.  Many of us no doubt are aware that the
word "pagani," derived from  "pagus," a village,
signifies properly the dwellers in hamlets and villages, as distinguished from the inhabitants of towns
and cities; and the word was so used, and without
any religious significance, in the earlier periods of
the Latin language. "Pagani" did indeed then not
unfrequently designate all civilians, as contradistinguished from  the military caste; and this fact may
not have been without its influence, when the idea
of the faithful as soldiers of Christ was strongly realized in the minds of men.  But how mainly was
it that it came first to be employed as equivalent to
"heathen," and applied to those yet alien fiom the
faith of Christ   It was in this way: The Christian
church fixed itself first in the seats and centres of
intelligence, in the towns and cities of the Roman
empire, and in them its first triumphs were won;
while long after these had accepted the truth, heathen superstitions and  idolatries languished and
lingered on in the obscure hamlets and villages of
the country; so that "pagans," or villagers, came
to be applied to all the remaining votaries of the old
and  decaying superstitions, inasmuch as far the
tigia hec grfecitatis advenerint, dicendum praecipue a Gothis, qui et
Getas, cum eo tempore, quo ad fidem Christi perducti sunt, in Grecorum provinciis commorantes, nostrum, i. e., theotiscum sermonem
habuerint."
4*




82             THE HISTORY IN  WORDS.
greater number of them  were of this class.  The
first document in which the word appears in this its
secondary sense is an edict of the emperor Valentinian, of date A. D. 368.  The word " heathen" acquired  its meaning  from  exactly  the same  fact,
namely, that at the introduction of Christianity into
Germany, the wild dwellers on the " heaths" longest
resisted the truth.  Here, then, are two instructive
notices for us-first, the historic fact that the church
of Christ did thus plant itseli' first in the haunts of
learning and intelligence; and then the more important moral fact, that it shunned not discussion, that
it feared not to grapple with the wit and wisdom of
this world, or to expose its claims to the searching
examination of educated men; but, on the contrary,
had its claims first recognised by them, and in the
great cities of the world won first a complete triumph
over all opposing powers.*
I quoted the words of one in my first lecture, who,
magnifying the advantage of following up the history of a word, observed that oftentimes more would
be learned from this than from  the history of a campaign.t  On the strength of this assertion let us take
* There is an interesting and learned note upon the word "pagan"
in Gibbon's Decline and Fall, c. 21, at the end; and in Grimm's
Deutsche Mlythol., p. 1198; and the history of the changes in the
word's meaning is traced in another interest in Mill's Logic, v. 2, p.
271.
f Let me mention here, as I shall not follow them out in this volume, which is rather suggestive than anything else, the following




HISTORY OF SACRAMENT.               83
the word " sacrament," and see whether its history,
while it carries us far, yet will not carry us by ways
full of instruction; and this, while we seek to trace
out merely and strictly the world's history, not needlessly mixing ourselves with discussions in regard of
the thing, or of its place and importance in the Christian scheme.  We shall find ourselves first among
the forms of Roman law, where the " sacramentum"
first appears, as the deposite or pledge which in certain suits plaintiff and defendant were alike bound
to make, and whereby they engaged themselves to
one another, the loser of the suit forfeiting his pledge
to sacred temple-uses, from  which fact the name
" sacramentum," or thing consecrated, was derived.
The next employment of the word would plant us
amid the military affairs of Rome, " sacramentum"
being applied to the military oath with which the
Roman soldiers mutually engaged themselves at
their first enlisting never to desert their standards,
or turn their back upon the enemy, or abandon their
imperator-this use of the word teaching us the
sacredness which the Romans attached to their military engagements, and going far to explain to us their
victories. The word was then transferred from this
military oath to any solemn oath whatsoever.
This, which has hitherto been traced, we may call
the histoly of the word, anterior to the period when
words, "soplist," "barbarous," "clerk," "romance," of which it
seems to me eminently true that they have such a history as this,




84           THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
it was assumed into Christian usage at all, and these
three stages it had already passed through, before
the church claimed it for her own, before indeed she
had herself come into existence. Her early writers,
out of a sense of the sacredness and solemnity of the
oath among all human transactions, first used the
word to signify any sacred transaction whatsoever
that had some special solemnity or sanctity attached
to it, and especially any mystery where more was
meant than met the eye or the ear. Thus in the
early church writers the In-:arnation is a "sacrament," the lifting up of the brazen serpent is a " sacrament," the giving of the manna, and many things
more. This period of the word's history it is very
expedient that we be aware of, and acquainted with
it; for thus all force is taken away from the passages quoted by Romish controversialists in proof
of their seven sacraments. It is quite true that the
early church writers did entitle marriage, and supreme unction, and the others which they have added, "sacraments;" but then they called " sacraments" or mysteries many things more, which even
the theologians of Rome themselves do not pretend
to include in the " sacraments" properly so called;
so that the evidence here is unfortunately too good;
proving too much, it proves nothing. But there is
another stage in the word's history, and that stage
the one which concerns us the most nearly of all,
its limitation to the two " sacraments," properly so




THE CRUSADES.                 85
called, of the Christian church. The remembrance
of the use of "sacrament," a use which had not
passed away, to signify the plighted troth of the Roman soldier to his imperator, was that, I think, which
specially wrought to the adaptation of the word to
baptism; wherein we also, with a manifest allusion
to this oath of theirs, pledge ourselves "to fight
manfully under Christ's banner, and to continue his
faithful soldiers and servants to our life's end;"
while the mysterious character of the holy Eucharist was, I believe, its especial point of fitness for
having this name of " sacrament" applied to it.
I have already sought to find history embedded
in the word " frank;" but I must bring forward the
Franks again, and ask you to consider whether the
well-known fact that in the East not Frenchmen
alone, but all Europeans are so called, does not require to be accounted for   It can be so, and this
wide usage of the word is indeed a deep foot-print
of the past. This appellation dates from the Crusades, and Michaud, the chief French historian of
these, finds herein, and I think with justice, an evidence that the French took a decided lead, as their
gallantry well fitted them to do, in these great romantic enterprises of the middle ages; impressed
themselves so strongly on the mind and imagination
of the East as the crusading nation of Europe, that
their name was extended to all the warriors of the
West. And remembering how large a proportion




86           THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
cf the noblest Crusaders, as well as of others most
influential in bringing them about, as Peter the Hermit, Urban the Second, St. Bernard, were French,
it must be allowed that the actual facts bear him
out in his assertion.
To the Crusades also, probably, and to the intense
hatred which they roused throughout Christendom
against the Mahometan infidels, we owe " miscreant,"
in its present sense of one to whom we would attribute the vilest principles aid practice. It meant at
the first simply a "misbeliever," and would have
been used as freely and with as little sense of injustice, of the royal-hearted Saladin as of the most infamous wretch that fought in his armies. By degrees, however, those who employed it put more
and more of their feeling and passion into it, and
ever lost sight more of its etymology, until they
would apply it to any whom  they regarded with
feelings of abhorrence resembling those which they
entertained for an infidel; just as " Samaritan" was
often employed by the Jews purely as a term of reproach, and with no thought whether the person on
whom it was fastened was really sprung from that
mongrel people or not; indeed where they were
quite sure that he was not. The word " assassin,"
also, the explanation of which however we must be
content to leave, belongs probably to a romantic
chapter in the history of the Crusades.*
* (ibbon'w Ded/w wnd Fulll,,. 64.




ORIGIN OF SAUNTER.               87
Once more, the words " saunter" and " saunterer"
are singular records of the same events. " Saunterer," derived from  "la Sainte Terre," is one who
visits the Holy Land.  At first a deep and earnest
enthusiasm drew men thither to visit-in the beautiful words which Shakespere puts into the mouth
of our Fourth Henry, and which explain so well the
attractions that at one time made Palestine the magnet of all Christendom-to visit, I say" those holy fields,
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet,
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed
For our advantage on the bitter cross."
By degrees, however, as the enthusiasm spent itself,
the making of this pilgrimage degenerated into a
mere worldly fashion, and every idler that liked
strolling about better than performing the duties of
his calling, assumed the pilgrim's staff, and proclaimed himself bound for the Holy Land; to which
very often he never in earnest set out.  And thus
this word forfeited the more honorable meaning it
may once have possessed, and the " saunterer" came
to signify one idly and unprofitably wasting his time,
loitering here and there, with no fixed purpose or
aim.
A  curious piece of history is wrapped up in the
word " poltroon," supposing it to be indeed derived,
as many excellent etymologists have considered,




88             THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
from  the Latin "pollice truncus;" one, that is deprived, or who has deprived himself, of his thumb.
We know that in the old times a self-mutilation of
this description was not unfrequent on the part of
some cowardly shirking fellow, who wished to escape
his share in the defence of his country; he would
cut off his right thumb, and at once become incapable of drawing the bow, and thus useless for the
wars. It was not to be wondered at that Englishmen, the men of Crecy and Agincourt, who with
those very bows which he had disabled himselffirom
drawing, had quelled the mailed chivalry of Europe,
should have looked with extremest disdain on one
who had so basely exempted himself fiom  service,
nor that the "pollice truncus," the poltroon, first
applied to a coward of this sort, should afterward
become a name of scorn affixed to every base and
cowardly evader of the duties and dangers of life.*
Our use of the word "caitiff," which is identical
with "captive," only coming through the Norman
French, has, in like manner, its rise out of the sense
that he who lets himself be made prisoner in war is
a worthless, good-for-nothing person —a feeling so
* See The Diversions of Purley, part ii., chap. 2. - In Bonaparte's
wars exactly the same thing happened, and young men cut off not
now the thumb, but the forefinger, that which should pull the trigger, so to escape being drawn for the conscription; and travellers
in Egypt tell us that under the horrible tyranny of  ehlenmet Ali, a
great part of the population in some of the villages had deprived
thenselves of the sight of the right eye, that in like manner they
might be useless for war.




DERIVATION OF CARDINAL.                89
strong in some states of antiquity, that under no circumstances would they consent to ransom  those of
their citizens who had fallen alive into the hands of
the enemy. The captives were accounted " caitiffs,"
whom they could better do without. The same feeling has given us " craven," a synonym  for coward:
this is one who has craved or craven his life at the
enemies' hands, instead of resisting to the death.
Various derivations of " cardinal" have been proposed; or, to speak more accurately, it has been
sought in various ways to account for the appropriating of this name to the parochial clergy of the city
of Rome with the subordinate bishops of the diocese.
I believe the application of the name is an outgrowth,
and itself a standing testimony, of the measureless
assumptions of the Romish see. One of the favorite
comparisons by which that see sought to set out its
relation of superiority to all the other churches of
Christendom was this: it was the " hinge" or " cardo" on which all the rest of the church, as the door,
at once depended and turned.  It followed presently upon this that the clergy of Rome were " cardinales," as nearest and most closely connected with
him who was thus the " hinge" or " cardo" of all.*
* Thus a letter, professing to be one of Pope Anacletus the First
in the first century, but really forged in the ninth: "Apostolica
Sedes cardo et caput omnium Ecclesiarum a Domino est constituta;
et sicut cardine ostium regitur, sic hujus S. Sedis auctoritate omnes
Ecclesie reguntur." And we have "cardinal" put in relation with
this "cardo" in a genuine letter of Pope Leo the Ninth: "Clerici
summse Sedis Cardinales dicuntur, cardini utique illi quo catera me
ventur, vicinius adhserentes."




90           THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
There is a little word not in uncommon use among
us, an inquiry into the pedigree of which will lay
open to us an important page in the intellectual history of the world. We may all know what a " dunce"
is, but we may not be as well acquainted with the
quarter whence the word has been derived. Certain theologians in the middle ages were termed
schoolmen; being so called because they were formed
in tie cloister and cathedral schools which Charlemagne had founded-men not to be lightly spoken
of, as now they often are by those who never read a
line of their works, and have not a tithe of their wit;
who moreover little guess how many of the most familiar words which they employ, or misemploy,
have descended to them from these. " Real," " virtual,"  "entity," "nonentity," "equivocation," all
these, with many more unknown to classical Latin,
but which now have become almost necessities, were
first coined by the schoolmen, and passing over
from them into the language of those more or less
interested in their speculations, have gradually filtered through the successive strata of society, till
now they have reached, some of them, to quite the
lowest. At the revival of learning, however, their
works fell out of favor: they were not written in
classical Latin: the form in which their speculations
were thrown was often unattractive; it was mainly
in their authority that the Romish church found
support for many of its periled dogmas; on all




ORIGIN OF DUNCE.               91
which accounts, it was considered a mark of intellectual progress and advance to have broken with
them and altogether thrown off their yoke. Some,
however, still clung to these Schoolmen, and to one
in particular, Duns Scotus, the great teacher of the
Franciscan order; and many times an adherent of
the old learning would seek to strengthen his position by an appeal to its great doctor, familiarly called
Duns; while the others would contemptuously rejoin,
" Oh, you are a.Dunsman," or more briefly, "You
are a Duns" —or, "This is a piece of dunsery;"
and inasmuch as the new learning was ever enlisting more and more of the genius and scholarship of
the age on its side, the title became more and more
a term of scorn:'" Remember ye not," says Tyndal,
"how within this thirty years and far less, the old
barking curs, Dunce's disciples, and like draff called
Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every
pulpit against Greek, Latin, and Hebrew?" And
thus from that long extinct conflict between the old
and the new learning, that strife between the mnedieval and the modern theology, we inherit the words,
" dunce," and " duncery."  Let us pause here for a
moment to confess that the lot of poor Duns was
certainly a hard one, who, whatever may have been
his merits as a teacher of Christian truth, was certaiiily one of the keenest and most subtle-witted
of men. He, the "subtle doctor" by pre-eminence,
for so his admirers called him, could hardly have




92           THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
anticipated, and as little as any man deserved, that
his name should be turned into a by-word expressive
of stupidity and obstinate dullness. This, however,
is only one example of the curious fortune of words.
We have another singular example of the same, and
of a parallel injustice, in the way in which the word
" mammetry," which is a contraction of " Mahometry," is employed by our early English writers.
Mahometanism being the most prominent form of
false religion with which Englishmen were acquainted, this word was used up to and beyond the Reformation, to designate first any false religion, and
then the worship of idols; idolatry being proper to,
and a leading feature of most false religions. They
did not pause to remember that Mahometanism is
the great exception, its most characteristic feature
and glory being its protest against all idol-worship
whatsoever; which being so, the injustice'was signal
in calling an idol a " mamlmet" or a Mahomet, and
idolatry, " mammetry." To pursue the fortunes of
the word a little further, another step caused not
religious images only, but dolls to be called " mammets;" and when in Romeo and Juliet Capulet
contemptuously styles his daughter " a whining
mammet," the process is strange, yet every step of
it may be easily traced, whereby the name of the
Arabian false prophet is fastened on the fair maiden
of Verona.
Nor is the true derivation of " tariff" unworthy to




DERIVATION OF TARIFF.           93
be traced. We all know what it means, namely, a
fixed scale of duties, levied upon imports. If you
turn to a map of Spain, you will take note at its
southern point, and running out into the straits of
Gibraltar, of a promontory, which from its position
is admirably adapted for commanding the entrance
of the Mediterranean sea, and watching the exit and
entrance of all ships. A fortress stands upon this
promontory, called now, as it was also called in the
times of the Moorish domination in Spain, " Tarifa;"
the name indeed is of Moorish origin.  It was
the custom of the Moors to watch from this point all
merchant-ships going into, or coming out of, the Midland sea; and issuing from this stronghold, to levy
duties according to a fixed scale on all merchandise
passing in and out of the straits, and this was called
from the place where it was levied, " tarifa" or " tariff;" and in this way we have acquired the word.
"Bigot" is another word widely spread over Europe, of which I am inclined to think that we should
look for the derivation where it is not generally sought,
and that here too we must turn to Spain for the explanation. It has much perplexed inquirers, and two
explanations of it are current; one of which traces it
up to the early Normans, while they yet retained
their northern tongue, and to their often abjuration
by the name of God, with sometimes reference to a
famous scene in French history in which Rollo, duke
of Normandy, played a conspicuous part; the other




94            THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
puts it in connection with " beguines," called often
in Latin "beguttse," a name by which certain communities of pietist women were known in the middle
ages. Yet I can not but think it probable that rather
than to either of these sources we owe the word to
that mighty impression which the Spaniards began
to make upon all Europe in the fifteenth century, and
made for a long time after.  ~Now the word "bigote," means in Spanish "mustachio;" and as contrasted with the smooth or nearly smooth upper
lip of most other people, at that time the Spaniards
were the " men of the mustachio."  That it was
their characteristic feature comes out in Shakspere's
Love's Labor's Lost, where Armado, the " fantastical
Spaniard," describes the king " his familiar, as sometimes being pleased to lean on his poor shoulder, and
dally with his mustachio."   That they themselves
connected firmness and resolution with the mustachio,
that it was esteemed the outward symbol of these, is
plain from such phrases as "hombre de bigote," a
man of resolution, "tener bigotes," to stand firm.
But that in which they eminently displayed their
firmness and resolution in those days was their adherence to whatever the Roman see required and
taught. What then more natural, or more entirely
according to the law of the generation of names, than
that this striking and distinguishing outward feature
of the Spaniard should have been laid hold of to exAct 5 sc. 1.




BIGOT WHENCE DERIVED.             95
press that character and condition which eminently
were his, and then transferred to all others who shared
the same? The mustachio is in like manner in France
a symbol of military courage; and thus "un vieux
moustache" is an old soldier of courage and military
bearing. And strengthening this view, the earliest
use of the word which Richardson gives, is a passage
from Bishop Hall, where " bigot" is used to signify
a pervert to Romanism: "he was turned both bigot
and physician." In further proof that the Spaniard
was in those times the standing representative of the
bigot and the persecutor, we need but turn to the
older editions of Fox's Book of ilartyrs, where the
pagan persecutors of the early Christians are usually
arrayed in the armor of Spanish soldiers, and sometimes graced with tremendous " bigotes."
Having dedicated this lecture to the history which
is in words. I can have no fitter opportunity of urging upon you the importance of seeking in every case
to acquaint yourselves with the circumstances under
which any body of men, that have played an important part in history, especially in the history of your
own land, obtained the name by which they were
afterward willing to be known, or which was used
for their designation by others. This you may do as
a matter of historical inquiry, and keeping entirely
aloof in spirit from the scorn, the bitterness, the falsehood the calumny, out of which very often this name




9A fTHE HISTORY IN WORDS.
was first imposed. Whatever of this evil may have
been at work in them that coined, or gave currency
to, the name, the name itself can never be neglected
without serious loss by those who would truly understand the moral significance of the thing; there is
always something, often very much, to be learned
from it. Learn then in regard of each one of these
names which you may meet in your studies, whether
it was one which men gave to themselves; or one
imposed on them by others, and which they never
recognised; or one which being first imposed by
others, was yet in course of time admitted and accepted by themselves. We have examples in all these
kinds. Thus the "' gnostics" called themselves such;
the name was of their own devising, and one in which
they boasted: in like manner the " cavaliers" of our
civil war.*   "Quaker," "puritan," "roundhead,"
were all, on the contrary, names devised by others,
and never accepted by them to whom they were attached; while "whig" and " tory" were nicknames
originally indeed of bitterest scorn and party hate,
given by two political bodies in England to one another,t which, however, in course of years lost what
was offensive in them, until they came to be accepted
and employed by the very parties themselves. The
same we may say of " methodist;" it was certainly
not first taken by the followers of Wesley, but im* See Roger North's Examen., p. 321, for a very lively, though not
a very impartial account, of the rise of these names.
t See Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, b. 4.




NAMES OF PARTIES IMPORTANT.         97
posed on them by others, while yet they have been
subsequently willing to accept and to be known by it.
Now of these titles, and of many more that might
be adduced, some undoubtedly had their rise in mere
external accident, and stand in no essential connection with those that bear them; and these, although
not without their instruction, yet plainly are not so
instructive as other names, in which the innermost
heart of a system speaks out and reveals itself, so
that, having mastered the name, we have placed ourselves at the central point, and that from which we
shall best master everything besides. Thus for instance is it with " gnosticism" and " gnostic;" in
the prominence given to gnosis, or knowledge, as opposed to faith, lies the key to the whole system. And
I may say generally that almost all the sects and
parties, religious and political, which have risen up
in times past in England, are known by names that
will repay study; an entering into which will bring
us far in the understanding of their strength and
their weakness, their truth and their error, the idea
and intention according to which they wrought. " Puritans," " fifth-monarchy men," " seekers," " independents," "friends," "latitudinarians," these titles with
many more have each its significance; and would
you understand what they meant, you must first understand what they were called. From this must
be your point of starting, even as to this you must
bring back whatever later information you may gain;
5




98           THIE HISTORY IN WORDS.
and, though I will not say that you must always subordinate it to the name, yet must you ever put it in
relation and connection with that.
You will often be able to glean knowledge from
the names of things, if not as important as that I
have just been speaking of, yet curious and interesting. What a record of invention is presented in the
names which so many articles bear, of the place from
which they first came, or the person by whom they
were first invented. The " bayonet" tells us that it
was first made at Bayonne —" cambrics" that they
came from Cambray- " damask" from Damascus"arras" from the city of the same name —" cordwain" or "cordova" from  Cordova-" currants"
from Corinth-the "guinea," that it was originally
coined of gold brought from the African coast so
called — " camlet" that it was woven, at least in part,
of camel's hair. Such has been the mannfacturing
progress of England that we now send our calicoeF
and muslins to India and the east; yet the words give
standing witness that we once imported them thence;
for "calico" is fiom  Calicut, and " muslin" from
Moussul, a city in Asiatic Turkey.
It is true indeed that occasionally names embody
and give permanence to an error; as when in the
name " America" the honor of discovering the New
World, which belonged  to Columbus, has been
transferred to another eminent discoverer, but to
one who had no title to this praise, and who did not,




MISTAKES EMBODIED IN NAMES.         99
as has been lately abundantly shown, by any means
desire to claim it for himself. So, too, the " turkev"
in our farm-yards seems to claim Turkey for its
home; and the assumption that it was thence no
doubt caused it to be so called; while indeed it
was unknown in Europe until introduced from the
New World, where alone it is indigenous.  This
error the French in another shape repeat, calling it
"dinde," which was originally "poulet d'Inde," or,
Indian fowl. In like manner " gypsies" appears to
imply that Egypt was the country to which these
wanderers originally belonged, and from which they
had migrated westward; and certainly it was so believed in many parts of Europe at their first appearance in the beginning of the fifteenth century, and
hence this title. It is now however clearly made
out, their language leaving no doubt of the fact, that
they are an outcast tribe, which has wandered hither
from a more distant land, from India itself.  " Bohemians," which is the French appellation of gypsies,
involves an error similar to ours. They were taken
at first by the common people in France to be the
expelled Hussites of Bohemia, and hence this name.
In the German "zigeuner" there is no expression
of the land from which they were assumed to have
come, but if this word be "zieh-gauner," roaming
thieves, it will then indicate the evil repute in which
from the very beginning they were held.
And where words have not, as in these cases, em



[00         THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
bodied an error, it will yet sometimes happen that
the sound or spelling of a word will to us possibly
suggest a wrong explanation, against which in these
studies it will need to be on our guard. I dare say
that there has been a stage in most boys' geographical knowledge, when they have taken for granted
that Jutland was so called, not because it was the:and of the Jutes, but on account of itsjutting out
*nto the sea in so remarkable a manner. And there
aave not been wanting those who have ventured to'race in the name " Jove" a heathen reminiscence
of the awful name of Jehovah. I will not enter into
this here; sufficient to say that, however specious
this at first sight may seem, yet on closer examination of the two words, every connection between
them disappears.
Sometimes the assumed derivation has reacted
upon and modified the spelling. Thus the name of
the Caledonian tribe whom we call the " Picts,"
would probably have come down to us in a somewhat different form, but for the assumption which
early rose up, that they were so called from their
custom of staining or painting their bodies, that in
fact " Picts" meant " the painted."  This, as is now
acknowledged, is an exceedingly improbable supposition. It would be quite conceivable that the Romans should have given this name to the first barbarous tribe they encountered, who were in the habit
of painting themselves thus; such a custom, forcing




FAULTY ETYMOLOGY.                   101
itself on the eye, and inpressing itself on the imagination, is exactly that which gives birth to a name:
but after they had been long familiar with the tribes
in southern Britain, to whom this painting or tattooing was equally familiar, it is quite inconceivable
that they should have applied it to one of the northern tribes in the island, with whi h  they first
came in contact at a far later day.  The name is
much more probably the original Celtic one belonging to the tribe, slightly altered in the mouths of the
Romans. -It may have been the same with " hurricane;" for many have imagined that this word, being used especially to signify the West Indian tornado, must be derived from  the tearing up and hurrying away of the canes in the sugar plantations,
just in the same way as the Latin " calamitas" has
been drawn, but erroneously, from    calamus," the
stalk of the corn. In both cases the etymology is
faulty; " hurricane" is only a transplanting into our
tongue of the Spanish " hurracan" or the French
" ouragan."
* One or two words more I will mention here, in which a falsely
imagined etymology has certainly gone so far as often, if not always,
to influence the spelling. How could the h, for example, have ever
found its way into "posthumous," but for the erroneous assumption
that it had something to do with post humum, instead of being the
superlative of "posterus"? " Surname," too, is spelled by many with
an i, as if it were "sire"-name, the family name in contradistinction
to the personal or Christian, when indeed it is the name over and
above (" sur" for "super"), as I shall have occasion to note in a later
lecture.  "Shamefaed," too, was once "shamefast," "shamefacedness was "snamefastness," like "steadfast" and "steadfastness:" but




102          TIlE IIISTORY IN WORIDS.
It is a signal evidence of the conservative powers
of language, that we may oftentimes trace in speech
the records of customs and states of society which
have now passed so entirely away as to survive nowhere else but in these words alone. For example,
a "stipulation," or agreement, is so called, as many
are strong to affirm, fromi " stipula," a straw, because
it once was usual, when one person passed  over
landed property to another, that a straw  fiom  the
land, as a pledge or representative of the property
transferred, should be handed from the seller to the
buyer, which  afterward was commonly preserved
with, or inserted in the title-deeds.   And we all
know how important a fact of English history is laid
up in "curfew" or "couvre-feu."  Nor need I do
more than remind you that in our common phrase
of " signing our name," we preserve a record of a
time when the first rudiments of education, such as
the power of writing, were the portion of so few, that
it,vas not as now the exception, but the custom for
most persons to make their mark or "sign," great
barons and kings themselves not being ashamed to
set this sign or cross to the weightiest documents.
the ordinary manifestations of shame being by the face, have brought
it to its present orthography; it was'shamefastness" at 1 Tim. ii. 9,
in the first edition (1611) of the authorized version, and certainly
ought not to have been altered. In Latin the same has occurred
with "orichalcum," spelled often "aurichalcum," as though it were
J composite metal of mingled gold and brass. It is indeed the noun
tain brass, dpeiXaXKos.




EXPLODED THEORIES IN WORDS.         103
The more accurate language by which to express
what now we do, would be to speak of " subscribing
the name."  Then, too, whenever we speak of arithmetic as the science of " calculation," we in fact
allude to that rudimental period of the science of
numbers, when pebbles (calculi) were used, as now
among savages they often are, to facilitate the practice of counting. In " library" we preserve a record
of the fact that books were once written on the bark
(liber) of trees, as in " paper," of a somewhat later
period, when the Egyptian papyrus, " the paper
reeds by the brooks," furnished the chief material
employed in writing.
Theories, too, which long since were utterly renounced, have yet left their traces behind them.
Thus the words " good humor," " bad humor," " humorous," and the like, rest altogether on a now-exploded, but a very old and widely-extended theory
of medicine; according to which there were four
principal moistures or "humors" in  the natural
body, on the due proportion and combination of
which the disposition alike of body and of mind depended.*  And " temper," as used by us now, has
its origin in the same theory; the due admixture, or
right "tempering," of these gave what was called
the happy " temper," which, thus existing inwardly,
manifested itself also outwardly. In the same manner " distemper," which we still employ in the sense
* See the Prologue to Ben Jonson's Every 2Man out of his Humor.




104          THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
of sickness, was that evil frame either of a man's
body or of his mind (for it was used alike of both),
which had its rise in an unsuitable mingling of these
humors. In these instances, as in many more, the
great streams of thought and feeling have changed
their course, and now flow in quite other channels
from those which once they filled, but have left
these words as lasting memorials of the channels
in which once they ran.
Other singular examples we have of the way in
which the record of old errors, themselves exploded
long ago, may yet survive in language -the words
that grew into use when those errors found credit,
maintaining still their currency among us. The
mythology, for example, which our ancestors brought
with them from the forests of Germany is as much
extinct for us as are the Lares, Larve, and Lemures
of heathen Rome; yet the deposite it has permanently left in the language is not inconsiderable. "Lubber," " dwarf," " oaf," " droll," " lag," " nightmare,"
suggest themselves at once, as belonging to the old
Teutonic demonology.  Thus, too, no one now believes in astrology, that the planet under which a
man may happen to be born will affect his temperament, will make him for life of a disposition grave
or gay, lively or severe. Yet we seem to affirm as
much in language, for we speak of a person as "jovil, " or " saturnine," or  mercurial""  jovial, "asbeing born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which




WORDS NOT CONTROLLED BY ORIGIN.    105
was the joyfullest star, and of the happiest augury
of all: a gloomy, severe person is said to be " staurnine," as born under the planet Saturn, who was
considered to make those that owned his influence,
and were born when he was in the ascendant, grave
and stern as himself; another we call  mercurial,"
that is light-hearted, as those born under the planet
Mercury were accounted to be.  The same faith in
the influence of the stars survives, so far at least as
words go, in "disaster," " disastrous," "ill-starred,"
"ascendant," "ascendency," and, indeed, in the
word "influence" itself.  What curious legends belong to the explanation of the "sardonic laugh;"
to the "topaz," so called, as some said, because
men were only able to conjecture (Toir,,) the place
whence it was brought, and to innumerable other
of the words employed by us still.
But here a question presents itself, one which
might at first sight seem  merely speculative, yet
which is not altogether so; for it has before now beoome a veritable case of conscience with some whether they ought to use words which originally rested
on, and so seem to affirm, some superstition or untruth. This question has practically settled itself;
they will keep their ground; but they also ought.
It is not of necessity that a word should always be
considered  to  root itself in its etymology, and
to draw  its life-blood thence.  It may so detach
itself froim  this as to lhave a right to he regarded in



106          THE HIST'ORY IN WORDS.
dependently of it: and thus our weekly newspapers
commit no aosurdity in calling themselves "journals;" we involve ourselves in no real contradiction,
speaking of a " quarantine"-of five, ten, or any number of days more or fewer than forty. Thus, too, I
remember once asking a class of children in a school,
whether an announcement which during one very
hard winter appeared in the papers, of a " white
blackbird" having been shot, was correctly worded,
or self-contradictory and absu:d. The less thoughtful members of the  class instantly  pronounced
against it; while after some little consideration,
some two or three perceived and replied that it was
perfectly correct, that while no doubt the bird had
originally obtained this name from its blackness,
yet was it now the name of a species, and a name
which so cleaved to it, as not to be forfeited even
when the blackness had ceased altogether to exist.
We do not question the right of the " New Forest"
still to be so called, though it has now stood for nigh
eight hundred years.
It must then be esteemed a piece of ethical prudery, and an ignorance of the laws which govern
words and their uses, in the early quakers, when
they refi,-  Lo employ the names commonly given
to tt 2 days of the week, and substituted for these
"first day," "second day," and so on; which they
did, as is well known, on the ground that it became
not Christian men to give so much sanction to idola



QUAKER PRUD)iRY ABOUT WORDS.       107
try as was involved in the ordinary style-as though
every time they spoke of Wednesday they would be
doing some honor to Woden, of Thursday to Thor,
of Friday to Freya, and thus with the rest. But
these names of the days of the week had long left
their etymologies behind, and quite disengaged themselves from them. Moreover, had these precisians
in speech been consistent, they could not have stopped
where they did; every new acquaintance with the
derivation or primary use of words would have entangled them in new embarrassment, would have required them still further to purge their vocabulary.
"To charm," " to bewitch," " to fascinate," " to enchant," would have been no longer lawful words for
those who had outlived the belief in magic, and in
the power of the evil eye; nor " lunacy," nor " lunatic," for such as did not believe that the moon had
anything to do with mental unsoundness. Nay, they
must have found fault with the language of IHoly
Scripture itself; for in the New Testament there is a
word in very honorable use expressing a function that
might be exercised by the faithful, that, namely, of
an interpreter, which word is yet directly derived
fiom Hermes, a heathen deity, and a deity, who did
not, lik'l Woden, Thor, and Freya, pertain to a long
extinct mythology, but to one existing at that very
moment in its strength. And how was it, we may
ask, that BPaul did not protest against a Christian




108          r TE HISTORY IN WO()IS.
woman retaining the name of Phoebe (Ror. xvi. 1),
a goddess of the same mythology?
That which has been spoken in this lecture will, I
trust, abundantly justify the comparison with which
I would conclude it. Suppose, then, that the pieces
of money which, in the ordinary intercourse of life,
are passing through our hands, had each one something of its own which made it more or less worthy
of note; if on one was stamped some striking maxim, on another some important fact, on a third a
memorable date; if others were works of finest art,
graven with rare and beautiful devices, or bearing
the head of some ancient sage or heroic king; while
others again were the sole surviving monuments of
mighty nations that once filled the world with their
fame; what a careless indifference to our own improvement would it argue in us, if we were content
that these should come and go, should stay by us or
pass from  us, without our vouchsafing to them so
much as one serious regard. Such a currency there
is, a currency intellectual and spiritual of no meaner
worth, and one with which we have to transact so
much of the higher business of our lives. Let us see
that we come not here under the condemnation of
any such incurious dullness as that which I have
imagined.




LECTURE  IV.
THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
ONE of the most interesting branches of the study
which is occupying us now is the taking note of the
periods when great and and significant words, or, it
nmay be, even such as can hardly claim those epithets,
have risen up and come into use, with the circumstances attending their rise. The different portions
of my theme so run into one another, that this is a
subject which I have, though unwillingly, already
anticipated in part; yet is it one so curious, and
which, I believe, may be made so instructive, that I
purpose to dedicate a lecture exclusively to it. Indeed, I am persuaded that a little volume might be
conlstructed, which few  of its size would rival in
interest;, that slhould do nlo more than indicate, or,
where advisable, give a quotation from, the first
writer or the first document in which new words, or
old words employed in a new sense-such, I mean,
as have afterward played a more or less important
part in the world's history   have appeared.  For
the feeling wherewith one watches the rise above the
horizon of thlese words, some of them  to shine for




110           THE RISE OF NEW  WORDS.
ever as luminaries in the moral and  intellectual
heaven above us, can oftentimes be only likened to
that which the poet so grandly describes, of"some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken."
I would instance of words religious and ecclesiastical such as these-" Christian,"*  "trinity;"t
"catholic,"  as an epithet applied  to the church;+
" canonical,"  as a distinctive characteristic of the
received  Scriptures; ~  "New  Testament,"  as expressing the complex of the sacred books of the new
covenant; l  "'gospels,"  as applied to the four inspired records of the life of our Lord;[ or again,
historical and  geographical, as the  first mention
of India;** the first emerging of the names " Germany" and the "Germans;" tt the earliest mention
of Rome in any writer; +*  or when the entire Hesperian peninsula acquired the title of "Italy," which
had been gradually creeping up for centuries from
its southern extremity;~~  when Asia on this side
* First in Acts xi. 26.
t First in Tertullian, Adv. Prax., c. 3.
t First by Ignatius, Ad. Smyr., c. 8.
~ Origen, Opp. v. 3, p. 36. (Ed. de ]a Rue.)
Tertullian, Adv. Marc., iv. 1; Adv. Prax., 15, 20.
~ Justin Martyr, Apol. i. 66.
** AEschylus, Suppl., 282.
tt They probably first occur in the writings of Csesar.
14 Probably in Hellanicus, a contemporary of Herodotus.
~~ In the time of Augustus Caesar. Merivale (Hist. of the Rom.,
v. 3. p. 157) notices what he believes the first use of it whieh has
come down to us in this its widest sense.




HISTORY  OF TYRANT.                    111
Taurus was first called  "Asia Minor;"*  the earliest
notice which  we have  of the  "Normans,"  under
this title;"t who first gave to the newly-discovered
continent in the west the name of "America,"  and
when;; the period when this island exchanged its
earlier name of " Britain"  for its new  one of "Anglia,' or, "England;"  or, again, when it resumed' Great Britain,"  as its official designation; so, too,
to go back in the world's history, and to take one or
two  examples  of a  different character-at what
moment the words " tyrant" and " tyranny," marking
so distinct an epoch as they do in the political history
of Greece, first appeared;~  when  and  from  whom
* The name first occurs in Orosius, i. 2; that is, in the fifth
century of our aera.
f In the Geographer of Ravenna.
$ Alexander von Humboldt, who has studied the question closely,
ascribes its general reception to its having been introduced into
a popular and influential work on geography, published in 1507.
~ First in the writings of Archilochus, about 4. C. 700. I will just
observe, that "tyrant," with the Greeks, had a much deeper sense
than it has in our modern use. The difference between a king and a
tyrant was much more deeply apprehended by them than by us. A
tyrant was not a bad king, one who abused the advantages of a rightful position to purposes of lust, or cruelty, or other oppression; but it
was of the essence of the tyrant that he attained supreme dominion
tlrough a violation of the laws and liberties of the state, and such
a one, with whatever moderation he might afterward exercise his
rule, would not the less retain the name.  Thus, the mild and
bounteous Pisistratus was, and was called, "tyrant" of Athens;
while a Christian the Second, of Denmark, would not have been
esteemed such in their eyes. It was to the honor of the Greeks that
they (lid not allow the course of the word to be arrested or turned
aside by any occasional or partial exceptions in the manner of the
after-exercise of this ill-gotten dominion, but in the hateful secondary




112             THE RISE OF NEW  WORDS.
the fabric of the external universe first received the
title  of  "cosmos,"  or,  "beautiful order;"*  with
many more of the same description.
Of these which I have just adduced let us take,
by way of sample, two, and try whether there is not
much to be gathered from them, and from attending
to the epoch and circumstances of their rise. Our
first example is a remarkable one, for it shows us the
Holy Spirit himself, counting a name, and  the rise
of a name of so much  importance as to  make  it
matter of special record in the Book of Life.  "The
disciples were called  Christians first in Antioch."
(Acts xi. 26.) Tills might seem at first sight a notice
curious and interesting, as all must possess interest
for us which relates to the early days of the church,
but nothing  more.   And  yet in  truth  how  much
of history is enfolded  in this name;  what light it
throws on the early history of Christianity to know
when and where it was first imposed on the faithful
-"imposed,"  I say, for it is clearly a name which
sense which the word even with them acquired, and which is felt
still more strongly by us, the moral conviction, justified by all
experience, spake out, that what was gotten by fraud and violence
would only by the same methods be retained; that the "tyrant," in
the earlier Greek sense of the word, dogged as he would be by suspicion, fear, and an evil conscience, must also bv a sure law becolmec
a "tyrant" in the later, which is that in which alone we employ the
word. The present ruler of France, in the manner in which he got
his power, and in the manner in which he wields it, casts the
broadest light on the whole history of the word.
* The word is ascribed, as is well known, to Pythagoras, born
about B. C. 570.




ORTIGIN OF THlE NAME CHRISTIAN.       113
they did not give to themselves, but received from
their adversaries, however afterward they may have
learned to accept it as a title of honor, and to glory
in it. For it is not said that they " called themselves,"
but " were called" Christians first at Antioch; nor
do we find the name anywhere in scripture except
on the lips of those alien from, or opposed to, the
gospel. (Acts xxvi. 28; 1 Pet. iv. 16.) And as it
was a name imposed by adversaries, so among those
adversaries it was plainly the heathen, and not the
Jews, that gave it; since the Jews would never
have called the followers of Jesus of Nazareth,
"Christians," or " those of Christ," seeing that the
very point of their opposition to him was, that he
was not the Christ, but a false pretender to this
name.
Starting then fiom  this point, that " Christians"
was a name given to the early disciples by the
heathen, let us see what we may learn from  it
Now we know that Antioch was the headquarters
of the earliest missions to the heathen, even as
Jerusalem was to those of the seed of Abraham.  It
was there and among the faithful there that the
sense of the world-wide destination of the gospel
arose; there it was first plainly seen as intended for
all kindreds of the earth.  Hitherto the faithful in
Christ had been called by their enemies, and indeed often were still called, " Galileans," or l' Nazarenes"   both names which indicated the Jewish




114         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
cradle in which the gospel had been nursed, and
tlat the world saw in it no more than a Jewish sect.
But the-name " Christians," or " those of Christ,"
imposed upon them  now, while it indicated that
Christ and the confession of his name was felt even
by the world to be the sum and centre of their religion, showed also that the heathen had now come to
comprehend, I do not say what the church would be,
but what it claimed to be- no mere variety of Judaism, but a society with a world-wide mission; it
is clear that, when this name was given, the church,
even in the world's eyes, had chipped its Jewish
shell. Nor will the attentive reader fail to observe
that the imposing of this name on believers is by
closest juxtaposition connected in the sacred narrative, and still more closely in the Greek than in the
English, with St. Paul's first arrival at Antioch, and
preaching there; he being the especial and appointed instrument for bringing the church into the recognition of this its destination for all men. As so
often happens with the rise of a new name, the rise
of this one marked a new epoch in the church's life,
its entrance upon a new stage of its development.
It is a merely subordinate matter, but yet I might
just observe how strikingly what we know  from
other quarters confirms the accuracy of this account,
which lays the invention of this name to the credit
of thle Antiochenes. Antioch, with its idle and witty inhabitants, was famous in all antiquity for the




BRITAIN, ANGLIA.               115
invention of nicknames. It was a manufacture in
which they particularly excelled: and thus it was
exactly the place, where beforehand we might have
expected that such a name, being a nickname or
little better in the mouths of those that devised it,
should have sprung up.
Our other example shall be "Anglia," or "England."  When and under what circumstances did
this island exchange for this its earlier name of
Britain, which it had borne for more than a thousand years? There seems no sufficient reason for
calling in question, though some have so done, the
statement of the old chronicler that it received this
new name of Anglia from Egbert, king of Wessex,
who with the sanction of his parliament or witanegemot, holden A. D. 800 in this very city of Winchester, determined that the name " Britain" should give
place to "England."  It may be that the change
was not effected by any such formal act as this, yet
the accuracy of the old historian, so far at least as
his date is concerned, receives strong confirmation
from the circumstance that " Anglia," which is nowhere to be traced in any documents anterior to this
period, does immediately after begin to appear.
What lessons for the student of English history are
here, in the knowledge of this one fact, if he will but
seek to look at it all round, and consider it in a
thoughtful spirit. I have said that the rise of a new
name marks often a new epoch in history; certainly




116         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
it was so in the instance before us. In the first
place, as it is the just law of names, that a people
should give a name to the land which they possess,
not receive one from it, as the Franks make Gaul to
be France, do not suffer themselves to become Gauls,
so, as regards our own land, it is plain from the
coming up of this name that there must have been
now a sense in men's minds that its transformation
from a land of Britons to a land of Angles was at
length completely accomplished, and might therefore justly claim to find its recognition in a word.
That the Normans never made a " Norman-land"
out of England, as they had out of Neustria, and as
the Angles had made an " Angle-land" out of Britain-that they never so supplanted the population
or dissolved the social framework of the Angles, as
these had done of the Britons-is evident from the
fact that there went along with their conquest of the
land no such substitution of a new name for the old,
no such obliteration of the old by the new, as on that
prior occupation of the soil.had found place.-And
then, further, how significant a fact, that the invading German tribes, which had hitherto been content to call themselves according to the different
provinces or districts which they occupied, should
have now felt that they needed, and out of that need
should have given birth to a name common to and
including the whole land. Was there not here a
sign that the sense of unity, of all making up one




HOW NEW WORDS ARISE.           117
corporate body, one nation, was emerging out of the
confusion of the preceding period of the heptarchy?
We know from other sources that Egbert was the
first who united the different kingdoms of the heptarchy under his single sceptre; the first in whom
the nation was knit together into one. How instructive to find a name which should be the symbol of
unity, coming to the birth at this very moment. In
respect, too, of the relations between themselves of
the two most important tribes which had settled in
this island, the Angles and the Saxons (the Jutes
were too few to contend for the honor), it is assuredly a weighty fact that it was the Angles alone, fiom
whom, though numerically inferior, the new appellation was derived. Doubtless, a moral or political
predominance of this trlibe, probably a political
founded on a moral asserted itself in this fact. We
are the less inclined to attribute it to accident from
the circumstance that in the phrase " Anglo-Saxons"
(Angli-Saxones), a term which is no modern invention of convenience as is sometimes erroneously asserted, but is of earlier use even than Anglia, the
Angles have again the precedence, and the Saxons
only follow.
It will be seen, I think, by these two examples
that new words will repay any attention which we
may bestow upon them, and upon the conditions under which they emerge. Let us proceed to consider
the causes which give them birth, the periods when




118         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
a language is most fruitful in them, the regions of
society from which they usually proceed, with some
other interesting phenomena about them.
The cause then which more than any other creates
the necessity for these additions to the vocabulary
of a language, and calls forth the words which shall
supply this necessity, when it is felt, is beyond a
question this-namely, that in the appointments of
highest Wisdom  there are certain cardinal epochs
in the world's history, in which, far more than at
other times, new moral and spiritual forces begin to
work, and to stir society to its central depths. When
it is thus with a people, they make claims upon their
language, which were never made upon it hitherto.
It is required to utter truths, to express ideas, which
were strange to it in the time of its first moulding
and shaping, and for which therefore the terms sufficient will naturally not be found in it at oncethese new thoughts and feelings being larger and
deeper than any with which hitherto the speakers
of that tongue had been familiar. But when the
bed of a river is suddenly required to deliver a far
greater volume of waters than till now has been its
wont, it is nothing strange if it should surmount its
banks, break forth on the right hand and on the left,
or even force new channels with something of violence for itself. The most illustrious example of this
whereof I have been speaking, would be, of course,
the coming in of Christianity, or, to include the an



LANGUAGES EXPAND.              119
terior dispensation, we may say, of revealed religion
into the ancient heathen world, with the consequent
necessity under which the great novel truths which
were then proclaimed to mankind lay, of clothing
themselves in the language of men, in the languages
of Greece and Rome —languages which in their
previous form might have sufficed, and did suffice,
for heathenism, sensuous and finite as it was, but
not for the spiritual and infinite of the new dispensation. How often had the new thoughts to weave
a new garment for themselves, inasmuch as that
which they found ready made was too narrow to
wrap themselves withal; the new wine to find new
vessels for itself, that both might be preserved, the
old vessels being neither sufficiently strong nor expansive to hold it.
Thus, not to speak of mere technical matters which
would claim their utterance, how could the Greek
language have had a word for'' idolatry," so long as
the sense of the awful contrast between the worship
of the living God and of dead things had not risen
up in their minds that spoke it? But when those
began to use Greek, and that as tie sole utterance of
what was in them, men to whom this distinction and
contrast was the most earnest and the deepest conviction of their lives, the words " idolatry,"   idolater," of necessity appeared. The heathen claimed
not for their deities to be " searchers of hearts," disclaimed not for them  the being " accepters of per



120         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
sons;" such attributes of power and righteousness
entered not into their minds as pertaining to the objects of their worship. The Greek language, therefore, so long as they only employed it, had not the
words corresponding. It indeed could not have, as
the Jewish Hellenistic Greek could not be without
them.
As these difficulties would be felt the most strongly when the thought and feeling which had been at
home in the Hebrew, the original language of inspiration, were to be translated into Greek, the same
also would reappear, though naturally not to the
same extent, when that which had gradually woven
for itself in the Greek an adequate attire, again demanded to find garments in the Latin wherein it
might be suitably arrayed. A single example will
illustrate this better than long disquisitions. There
was in the Greek a word for "savior," which, although it had often been degraded to unworthy uses,
having been applied not merely to heathen deities,
but bestowed as a title of honor on men, and these
such as sometimes were rather " destroyers" than
" saviors" of their fellows, was yet in itself sufficient
to set forth that central office and dignity of Christ
-the word being like some profaned temple, which
did not need to be rebuilt, but only to be consecrated
anew. With the Latin it was otherwise; the lan.
guage seemed to be without a word of such frequent
recurrence, and essential use to Christianity: indeed




SAVIOR, SALVATOR.               121
Cicero, than whom none could know better the capabilities of his own tongue, distinctly declared that it
possessed no single word corresponding to the Greek
"savior." *  "Salvator" would have been the natural word; but the classical Latin, though it had
" salus" and " salvus," had neither this, nor the verb
" salvare;" I say the classical, for some believe that
" salvare" had always existed in the common speech.
"Servator" was instinctively felt to be insufficient,
even as in English " preserver" would fall very short
of uttering all for us which " savior" does now; the
seeking of the strayed, the recovering of the lost, the
healing of the sick, all this would be very feebly and
faintly insinuated in " preserver."  God "preserveth
man and beast," but he is the " Savior" of his own,
in a far more inward and far tenderer sense. For
some time the Latin Christian writers were in considerable perplexity how  they should render the
Greek word, employing "salutare," " sospitator,"
and other terms more  unsatisfactory still.  The
strong good sense of Augustine, however, finally
disposed of the difficulty.  He made no scruple
about employing "salvator;" observing well, and
with a true insight into the law of the growth of
words, that it was not good Latin before the Savior
came; but when he came, he made it to be such;
*Hoc [caorip] quantum est? ita magnum ut Latine uno verbo
exprimi non possit
6




122          TIHE RISE OF NEW  WORDS.
for as shadows follow substances, so words result
from things.*
These are, as I said, the most illustrious examples
of the coming in of a new world of thoughts and
feelings into the bosom of humanity, whereby has
been necessitated a corresponding creation in the
world of words, their outward representatives. And
the same has repeated itself continually since; each
new reception of the Word of life by another people
must needs bring over again the same effects with
more or less striking features. It is true we are not
so favorably placed for tracing these effects as in
the cases of the two classical languages of antiquity:
yet our missionaries, to whom the study of language
is in many respects so greatly indebted, have incidentally told us much on this subject, and, were
their attention particularly directed to it, might
doubtless tell us much more.
But it is not only when new truth directly from
God has thus to fit itself to the lips of men, that such
enlargements of speech follow, but in each further
unfolding of those seminal truths implanted in man's
heart at the first, in each new enlargement of his
* Serm. 299, 6: " Christus Jesus, id est Christus Salvator: hoc est
enim Latine Jesus. Nec querant grammatici quam sit Latinum, sed
Christiani, quam verum. Salus enim Latinum nomen est: salvare
et salvator non fuerunt hzec Latina, antequam veniret Salvator:
quando ad Latinos venit, et hoe Latina fecit. Cf. De Trin. xiii. 10:
Quod verbum [salvator] Latina lingua antea non habebat, sed habe"e poterat; sicut potuit quando voluit."




NEW WORDS INDISPENSABLE.         123
sphere of knowledge, outward or inward, lie the
same necessities involved.  The beginnings and
progressive advances of moral philosophy in Greece,
the transplanting of the same to Rome, the rise of
the scholastic, and then of the mystic theology in
the middle ages, the discoveries of modern science
and natural philosophy, all these have been accompanied with corresponding extensions in the limits
of language. Of the words to which each of these
has in turn given birth, many, it is true, have never
passed beyond their own peculiar sphere, having remained technical, scientific, or purely theological to
the last; but many also have passed over fiom the
laboratory, the school, and the pulpit, into daily life,
and have, with the ideas which they incorporate, become the common heritage of all. For, however
hard and repulsive a front any study or science may
seem to present to the great body of those who are
as laymen to it, there is yet inevitably such a detrition as this going forward in the case of each, and it
would not be a little interesting for one who was
furnished with the knowledge sufficient, to trace it
in all.
Where the movement is a great popular one, stirring the heart and mind of a people to its very
depths, such as the first reception of the Christian
faith, there these new words will be for the most part
born out of their bosoms, a free spontaneous birth,
seldom or never capable of being referred to one man




124         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
more than another, because they belong to all. Where
on the contrary, the movement is not so, is more
strictly theological, or finds place in those regions of
science and philosophy, where as first pioneers and
discoverers only a few can bear their parts, there the
additions and extensions will lack something of the
freedom, the unconscious boldness, which marked the
others. Their character will be more artificial, less
spontaneous, although here also the creative genius
of the single man, as there of the nation, will oftentimes set its mark; and many a single word will
come forth, which shall be the result of profound
meditation, or of intuitive genius, or of both in happiest combination-many a word, which shall as a
torch illuminate vast regions comparatively obscure
before, and, it may be, cast its rays far into the darkness beyond; or which, summing up into itself all
the acquisitions in a particular direction, of the past,
shall be as a mighty vantage ground from which to
advance to new conquests in the realms of mind, or
of nature, as yet unsubdued to the intellect of man.
As occupying something of a middle place between
whose more deliberate word-makers, and the people
whose words rather grow than are made, we must
not omit him who is a maker by the very right of
his name-I mean, the poet. That creative energy
with which he is endowed will in all probability manifest itself in this region as in others. Extending the
domain of thought and feeling, he will scarcely fail to




WORDS DELIBERATEL'Y COINED.       125
extend that also of language, which does not willingly
lag behind. And the loftier his moods, the more of
this maker he will be. The passion of such times,
the all-fusing imagination, will at once suggest and
justify audacities in speech, upon which in calmer
moods he would not venture, or, if he ventured, would
fail to carry others with him: for only the fluent
metal runs easily into novel shapes and moulds. It
is not merely that the old and the familiar will often
become new in his hands; that will give the stamp
of allowance, as to him it will be free to do, to words,
should he count them worthy, which hitherto have
lived only on the lips of the multitude, or been confined to some single dialect and province; but he will
enrich his native tongue with words unknown and
non-existent before-non-existent, that is, save in
their elements; for in the historic period of a language it is not permitted to any man to bring new
roots into it, but only to work on already given materials; to evolve what is latent therein, to combine
what is apart, to recall what has fallen out of sight.
But to return to the more deliberate coining of
words. This will often find place for the supplying
of discovered deficiencies in a language. The manner in which men most often become aware of such
deficiencies, is through the comparison of their own
language with another and a richer, a comparison
which is forced upon them, so that they can not put
it by, when it becomes necessary for them to express




12(6        THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
in their own tongue that which has already found utterance in another, and so has, at any rate, shown
that it is utterable in human speech. Without such
a comparison, the existence of the want would probably have seldom dawned even on the most thoughtful. For language is to so great an extent the condition and limit of thought, men are so little accustomed, indeed so little able, to meditate on things,
except through the intervention and by the machinery
of words, that nothing short of this would bring them
to a sense of the actual existence of any such wants.
And it is, I may observe, one of the advantages of
acquaintance with another language besides our own,
and of the institution which will follow, if we have
learned that other to any purpose, of these comparisons, that we thus come to be aware that names are
not, and least of all the names which any single language possesses, co-extensive with things (and by
" things" I mean subjects as well as objects of thought
whatever one can think about), that a multitude of
things exist which, though capable of being resumed
in a word, are yet without one, unnamed and unregistered; so that, vast as is the world of names, the
world of realities is even vaster still. Such discoveries the Romans made, when they attempted to
transplant the moral philosophy of Greece to an Italian
soil; they found that many of its words had no equivalents in their own tongue, which equivalents therefore they proceeded with more or less success to de



WORDS INVENTED BY CICERO.          127
vise for themselves, appealing, with this view, to the
latent capacities of their own tongue. For example,
the Greek schools had a word, and one playing no
unimportant part in some of their systems, to express
the absence of all passion and pain. As it was absolutely necessary to possess a corresponding word,
Cicero invented "idolentia," as the "if I may so
speak" with which he paves the way to his first introduction of it, manifestly declares.*
Sometimes, indeed, such a skilful mintmaster of
words, such a subtle watcher and weigher of their
forces t as he was, will note, even without this comparison with other languages, an omission in his own,
which thereupon he will endeavor to supply. Thus
was it with him in regard of " invidentia."  While
there existed in the Latin two adjectives which,
though sometimes confusedly used, had yet each its
peculiar meaning, "invidus," one who is envious,
"invidiosus," one who excites envy in others, there
was only one substantive, " invidia," correlative to
them both; with the disadvantage therefore of being
employed now in an active, now in a passive sense,
now for the envy which men feel, and now for that
which they excite. The word he saw was made to
do double duty, and that under a seeming unity there
lurked a real dualism, from which manifold confu* Fit. 2, 4.
f Ille verborum vigilantissimus appensor ac mensor, as Augustine
happily terms him.




128          THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
sions might follow.  He therefore devised " invidentia," to express the active envy, or the envying, no
doubt desiring that "invidia" should be restrained
to the passive, the being envied. To all appearance
the word came to supply a real want, yet he did not
succeed in giving it currency -indeed does not seem
himself to have much cared to employ it again.*
We see by this example that it is not every word
which even a great master of language proposes, that
finds acceptance.t  He must be contented, if some
live, that others should fall to the ground.  }Nor is
this the only one which Cicero unsuccessfully proposed.  His " indolentia," which I mentioned just
now, hardly passed beyond himself: his " vitiositas"t not at all.  " Beatitas," too, and " beatitudo,"
both of his coining, but which he owns to have something strange and uncouth about them, can hardly
be said to have found more than the faintest echo in
the classical literature of Rome: " beatitudo," indeed, obtained a home, as it deserved to do, in the
Christian church, but the other made no way whatsoever. I do not suppose that Coleridge's " esemplastic" will find any considerable favor; while the words
of Jeremy Taylor, of such Latinists as Sir Thomas
* Tase. 3, 9; 4, 8. Cf. Doderlein's Synon. v. 3, p. 68.
t Quintilian's advice to those who come after is excellent here (1,
6, 42: "Etiamsi potest nihil peccare, qLi utitur iis verbis quae summi auctores tradiderunt, multfm tamen refert non solim quid dixerint, sed etiam qulid pcrsuascrint."
t Tusc. 4. 15.              ~ Nat. Deor. 1. 34.




NOT ALL WORDS SUCCEED.           129
Browne, and of others, that were born only to die,
are multitudinous as the leaves of autumn.  Still
even the word which fails is often, though not always, an honorable testimony to the scholarship, the
range of thought, the imagination of its proposer;
and Ben Jonson is overhard on "neologists," if I
may bring this term  back to its earlier meaning,
when he says: " A man coins not a new word without some peril, and less fruit; for if it happen to be
received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the
scorn is assured."
But I alluded just now to comprehensive words,
which should singly be effectual to say that which
hitherto it had taken many words to say, in which
a higher term  has been reached than before had
been found. It is difficult to estimate too highly the
value of such words for the facilitating of mental
processes, and indeed for the making practicable of
many, which would have been nearly or quite impracticable without them; and those who have invented, or who have succeeded in putting into circulation such, may be esteemed as benefactors of a
high order to knowledge. In the ordinary traffic of
life, unless our dealings were on the smallest scale,
we should willingly have about us our money in the
shape rather of silver than of copper; and if our
transactions were at all extensive, rather in gold
than in silver; while if we were setting forth upon
a long and arduous journey, we should be best




130         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
pleased to turn even our gold coin itself into bills of
exchange or circular notes; in fact, into the highest
denomination of money which it was capable of assuming. How many words with which we are now
perfectly familiar are for us what bills of exchange
or circular notes are for the merchant and the traveller. As in one of these last, innumerable pence,
a multitude of shillings, not a few pounds, are gathered up and represented, so have we in some single
words the quintessence and fil.al result of an infinite
number of anterior mental processes, ascending one
above the other, and all of which have been at
length summed up for us in them. We may compare such words to some great river, which does not
bring its flood of waters to the sea, till many rills
have been swallowed up in brooks, and brooks in
streams, and streams in tributary rivers, each of
these having lost its individual being in that which
at last does at once represent and is continent of
them all.
Let us only consider all which must have gone before, ere the word "circle," with its corresponding
idea, could have come into existence; and then consider if, each time that in some long and difficult
mathematical problem we had to refer to the figure
so named, we were obliged to introduce the entire
definition of it, because no single word stood for it
-and not this only, but the definition of each term
employed in  the definition-how  impossible  or




QUINTESSENTIAL WORDS.           131
nearly impossible it would be to carry the whole
process in the mind, or to take oversight of its steps.
Imagine a few more words struck out of the vocabulary of the mathematician, and if all mental activity
in his direction was not quite put a stop to, yet
would it be as effectually restricted as commerce
and exchange would be, if all transactions had to be
carried on with iron or copper as the only medium
of mercantile intercourse.
It is not to be supposed that words of such primary, almost vital necessity for the science whereto
they pertain as that I have just referred to, still wait
to be coined; but yet, wherever knowledge is progressive, words are keeping pace with it, which with
more or less felicity resume in themselves very much
of the labors of the past, at once assist and abridge
the labors of the future; being as tools which, themselves the result of thie finest mechanical skill, do at
the same time render other and further triumphs of
art possible, which would have been quite unattainable without them.
But it is not merely the widening of men's intellectual horizon, which, as it brings new  thoughts
within the range of their vision, constrains tile origination of corresponding words; but when regions
of this outward world hitherto closed are laid open
to them, the various novel objects of interest which
these contain will demand to find their names, and
not merely to be catalogued in the nomenclature of




132        rTHE RRISE OF NEW WORDS.
science, but in so far as they present themselves to
the popular eye, will require a popular name.  As
however nothing is rarer il this world than the invention of aught which is entirely new, men will
most often content themselves with applying to this
new a name drawn from that old wherewith they
are already familiar, which resembles it the most.
Yet this may be done with modifications and combinations, which shall vindicate for it an original
character.  Thus when the Romans became acquainted with the stately giraffe, long concealed
from them in the inner wilds of Africa, and we learn
from Pliny that they first made this acquaintance in
the shows exhibited by Julius Cesar, it was happily
imagined to designate a creature combining, though
with infinitely more grace, yet something of the
height and even the proportions of the camel with
the spotted skin of the leopard, by a name which
should incorpoiate both these its most prominent
features,* calling it the "camelopard;" nor can we,
I think, hesitate to accept his account as the true
one, who describes the word as no artificial creation
of the scientific naturalist, but as bursting extempore
from the lips of the populace at the first moment
when the novel creature was presented to their gaze.
" Cerf-volant," a name which the French so happily
gave to the horned scarabeus, the same which we
somewhat less poetically call the "stagbeetle," is
Varro: "Qnod erat figura ut canelus, maculis ut panthera."




THLE WORD ALLIATOR.            133
another example of what may be effected with the
old materials, by merely bringing them  into new
combinations.
Let us take another example, and one which will
present us with another proof of that which we have
been called already to notice, namely, the popular
birth of a multitude of words, and those the most
genuine which rise up in a language; an example
also of the manner in which at some periods of its
growth everything turns to good, so that mistakes
and errors, misshaping, and it would seem marring
a word at its formation, yet do not hinder it fiom
forming a worthy portion of the after-tongue. When
the alligator, this ugly crocodile of the new world,
was first seen by the Spanish discoverers, they called
it, with a trlue insight into its species, " el lagarto,"
or " the lizard," as being the largest of that species to
which it belonged. In Sir Walter Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana, the word still retains this its
Spanish form.  Sailing up the Orinoco, " We saw
in it," he says, "divers sorts of strange fishes of marvellous bigness, but for lagartos it exceeded; for
there were thousands of these ugly serpents, and the
people call it, for the abundance of them, the river
of layartos, in their [the Spanish] language."  We
can perfectly explain the shape which afterward the
word assumed, by supposing that English sailors
who brought home the word, and had continually
heard, but may probably have never seen it written,




134            THE RISE OF NEW  WORDS.
blended, as has not unfrequently happened, the Spanish article " el" with the name, and thus from  this
absorption  of the  article it acquired the shape in
which  we possess it now.  In  Ben Jonson, who
writes " aligarta," we see the word in the process of
its transformation.*
One of the most legitimate methods by which a
language may increase in wealth, especially in the
times, when its generative energy is in great part
spent, as after a certain period is the case with all,
is through the reviving of old words, not, that is,
without discrimination, but of such as are worthy to
be revived; which yet through carelessness, or illplaced fastidiousness, or a growing unacquaintance
on the part of a later generation with the elder worthies of the language, or some other cause, have been
suffered to drop. These words, obsolete or obsolescent, it will sometimes happen that some writer instructed in the early literature of his native language
is not willing to let die, and himself using or suggesting to the use of others, is successful in again
* I can not remember any other examples of this curious absorption of the article in English, though probably there are such; but
two in French present themselves to me. " Lierre," which is "ivy,"
was written in early French, as by Ronsard, "l'hierre," which is no
doubt correct, being fiom the Latin "hedera;" but "loutre," the
otter, which Ampere supposes to have been originally "l'outre," is
manifestly the Latin, "lutra."  "La Pouille," a name given to the
southern extremity of Italy, and in which we reengnise "Apulia," is
another variety of error, but moving in the same sphere.




REVIVAL    O  LD WORDS.                135
putting  into circulation.*   And to the poet more
than any other it will be thus free to recall and recover the forgotten treasures of his native language.
Yet if success is to attend his attempt, or that of any
other, the words to which it is thus sought to impart
a second life must scarcely belong to the hoar antiquities of the language, with the dust of many centuries upon them, being not merely out of use, but
out of all memory  as well.   A   word  which has
not been employed since Chaucer is in a very different position from one that has only dropped out of
active service since Spenser or Shakspere, and which,
being found in their writings, or in those of their
great compeers, has preserved for the circle of educated readers a certain vitality. Thus, if I might
dissent from a great living master of English, I
should  doubt the employment of such  "Chaucerisms," to use Ben Jonson's phrase on this very subject, as " to burgeon," as I should quite despair even
of his effecting that, which of course he must look
forward to in using it, namely, the giving to it cur* A modern French writer of some eminence, Charles Nodier, has
composed a treatise on the subject of words in his own language
which have become obsolete, and ought to be revived. We have a
curious proof of the unobserved manner in which this sometimes is
accomplished in tie fact that "vaillant," which certainly now is not
felt to have anything archaic about it, was seriously found fault with,
as out of date, when employed in the epitaph of Turenne. Horace,
too, a great observer of the fortunes of words, who has said more
and wiser things about them in a few lines of his De Arte Poeticd
than ever have been said elsewhere, gives this as his conviction:
" Multa renascentur, qua jam cecidere."




136          THIE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
rency again. But the case is altogether different
with words which have been only recently lost, or in
some sense not lost at all-such words, for example,
as " leer," " lese," " debonair," " deft," " malapert,"
" phantast," which I instance, as every one of them
to my mind worthy to have continued. The case is
different, because of these some have never gone
out of use among our humbler classes, so often the
conservators of precious words and genuine idioms:
thus you all probably know very well that "leer" is
with our rustic population in the south a commoner
word than " empty;" " to lese," very much more in
use than "to glean;" indeed this last is scarcely
known.  Others again, as "deft," " debonair," " malapert," reach down, at least in literary use,.to the
middle of the eighteenth century, witli, in the case
of the last, the further inconvenience entailed by its
loss, that we have been obliged to make "pert"
which remains do double duty, that of "malapert"
and its own. For as some word is plainly wanting,
not so strong as " insolent," we have been led to
employ "pert" exclusively in an unfavorable sense,
while yet it was free of old to use it also in a good,
even as among our southern poor it still retains the
meaning of " sprightly" or "lively;" a child recovering from illness, a cagebird after moulting, are said
to look quite "pert" again -an employment of the
word justified lby Shakspere's
" Awake the pert and nimble spirit of youth."




ORIGIN OF THE WORD ROUE.          137
Other and less honorable causes than many of
those which I have sought hitherto to trace, give
birth to new words; and it will happen that the
character and moral condition of an epoch are only
too plainly revealed by the new words which have
risen up in that period, upon which sometimes they
reflect back a very fearful light. Thus a great Latin
historian tells us of the Roman emperor, Tiberius,
one of those " inventors of evil things" to whom St.
Paul alludes (Rom. i. 30), that he caused words unknown before to emerge in the Latin tongue, for the
setting out of wickedness, happily also previously
unknown, which he had invented.
The atrocious attempt of Louis the Fourteenth to
convert to Romanism the protestants in his dominions by quartering dragoons upon them, with all license to misuse to the uttermost those who would
not apostatize from their faith, this " booted mission"
(mission bottee), as it was facetiously called, has bequeathed " dragonade" to the French language. I
believe "refugee" had about the same time its rise,
being first applied to those who escaped the tender
mercies of these missionaries.
And " roue," a word to a considerable extent naturalized among us, throws light upon a curious
though a shameful page of history. It is a term applied, as we may be aware, to a man of profligate
character and conduct; but properly and primarily
means one "wheeled," or broken on the wheel.




138         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
Now  the first person who gave it its secondary
meaning, was the profligate duke of Orleans, regent of France in the interval between the reigns
of Louis the Fourteenth and Fifteenth.  It was his
miserable pride to collect around him companions as
worthless and wicked as himself, and he called them
his " roues," inasmuch as there was not one of them
that did not deserve, as he was wont to boast, to be
broken on the wheel, that being then in France the
punishment for the worst malefactors.* When we
have learned the pedigree of the word, the man and
the age which gave it birth rise up before us, glorying in their shame, and no longer caring to pay even
that outward hypocritical homage, which vice yields
often to virtue.
The great French Revolution has made also its
contributions to the French language; and these
contributions characteristic  enough.   We  know
much of that event, when we know  that among
other words it gave birth to these, "incivisme,"
"sansculotte," "noyade," " guillotine."  And still
later, the French conquests in North Africa, and the
pitiless methods by which every attempt at resistance on the part of the free tribes of the interior has
been put down and punished, all this has left its
mark upon the language; for it has added to it the
* The "rou6s" themselves declared that the word expressed rather
their readiness to give any proof of their affection, even to the being broke upon the wheel, to their protector and friend.




WORDS RECORDS OF SHAME.          139
word " razzia," to express the sweeping and sudden
destruction of a tribe, its herds, its crops, and all
that belongs to it-a word bearing on its front that
it is not originally of French formation, having rather
an Italian physiognomy, but being, I believe, the
popular corruption of an Arabic word —one of
which the language therefore may be as little proud,
as the people of the thing which is indicated by it.
But it would ill become us to look only abroad for
examples of that whereof perhaps at least an equal
abundance may be found much nearer home, and it
must at once be acknowledged that there are words
also among ourselves, which preserve a record of
passages in our history in which we have little reason to glory. "Plunder" was a word first heard of
in England in the period immediately preceding our
civil wars, between 1630 and 1640.  Richardson,
whose Dictionary has in most cases the passage in
English literature which best serves to mark the exact epoch of a word's appearing, as well as the circumstances which attended its rise, has passed over
two instructive passages in Fuller in regard of this.
He observes with truth that the word began to be in
common use at the commencement of the Great Rebellion. The word is German, for this Fuller means,
when he calls it " Dutch," and he ascribes the first
bringing of it in to the soldiers who returned fiom
the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus. " Sure I am,"
he says, " we first heard thereof in the Swedish wars;




140          THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
and if the name and thing be sent back whence
it came, few  English eyes would weep thereat.'*
The " thing" was not exactly what it is now; it was
not the spoiling by an open violence, but the ransacking and robbing which under legal pretence as
of searching for papers found place, of the effects
of the so-called " malignants;" so that " plunderings
and sequestrations" are named continually together.
"Delinquent" belongs to the same epoch.
" Mob," too, and "sham," had their birth in one
of the most shameful periods of English history, that
between the Restoration and Revolution.  The first
of these words originated in a certain club in London in the latter end of the reign of Charles the
Second.  "I may note," says a writer of the time,
" that the rabble first changed their title, and were
called  the'mob' in the assemblies of this [the
Green Ribbon] club. It was their beast of burden,
and called first'mobile vulgus,' but fell naturally
into the contraction of one syllable, and ever since
is become proper English."t  Yet we find considerably later a writer in Tie Spectator speaking of
"mob" as still only struggling into existence.  " I
dare not answer," he says, " that mob, rap, pos, incog., and the like will not in time be looked at as
part of our tongue."  In regard of " mob," abbrevi* Church Iistory, b. 11, ~ 4, 33; cf. b. 9, ~ 4, quite at the beginning.
t North's Examen, p. 574. If we may trust the origin of " sham"
which he gives, p. 231, it is not less disgraceful than the word itself




SLANG WORDS RECEIVED.           141
ated as we see from " mobile," the multitude swayed
hither and thither by each gust of passion or caprice,
this, which that writer plainly hardly expected,
while he confessed it possible, has actually taken
place. " It is one of the many words formerly slang,
which are now used by our best writers, and received, like pardoned outlaws, into the body of respectable citizens."
And though the murdering of poor helpless lodg
ers, afterward to sell their bodies to the surgeons for
dissection, can not be regarded as a crime in which
the nation had a share, or anything but the monstrous
wickedness of one or two, yet the word "to burk,"
drawn from the name of a wretch who long pursued
this hideous traffic, a word which has won its place
in the language, will be a lasting memorial in all
after-times, unless indeed its origin should be forgotten, to how strange a crime this age of a boasted civilization could give birth.
Such are some of the sources of the increase in the
wealth of a language, or, it may be, in that which
has no just title to be termed by this name. There
have been, fiom time to time, those who have so little
understood what a language and the laws of a language are-that it has a life, just as really as a man
or as a tree-that, as a man, it must grow to its full
stature, being also submitted to his conditions of decay-as a forest-tree, will defy any feeble bands
which should attempt to control its expansion, so long




142         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
as the principle of growth is in it-as a tree too will
continually, while it casts off some leaves, be putting
forth others-that they have sought by a decree of
theirs to arrest its growth, to pronounce it to have
attained to the limits of its growth and development,
so that no one should henceforward presume to make
additions to it. The attempt has utterly failed, even
when made under the most favorable conditions for
success.  For instance, the French academy, containing the great body of the distinguished literary
men of France, once sought to exercise such a domination over their own language, and, if any could
have succeeded, might have hoped to do so. But
the language recked of their decrees, as little as the
advancing ocean did of those of Canute. They were
obliged to give way, and in each successive edition
of their dictionary to throw open its doors to words
which had established themselves in the language,
and would hold their ground, comparatively indifferent whether they received their seal of allowance
or no.
Certainly those who make attempts of this kind
strangely forget that all the words in a language,
with the exception of its primitive roots, were at one
time or another novelties.  We have so taken for
granted that those with which we have been always
familiar, whose right to form a part of it no one
dreams of challenging or disputing, being perfectly
naturalized now, have always formed part of it, that




OPPOSITION TO NEW WORDS.           143
we should, I believe, be somewhat startled to discover of how very late introduction not a few of them
actually are, what an amount of remonstrance, and
even resistance, some of them encountered at the
first. To take two or three Latin examples. Cicero,
in employing " favor," a word in a little while after
used by everybody, does it with an apology, seems
to feel that he is introducing a questionable novelty;
" urbanus," too, in our sense of " urbane," had only
just come up; "obsequium" he believes Terence to
have been the first to employ.*   " Soliloquium"
seems to us so natural, indeed so necessary, a word,
this " soliloquy," or talking of a man with himself,
something which would so inevitably seek out its
suitable expression, that it is hard to persuade oneself
that no one spoke of a soliloquy before Augustine,
that the word should have been invented, as he distinctly informs us, by himself.t
And to take some English examples: Sir Thomas
Elyot (1534) speaks of the now familiar words " frugality," " temperance,"  sobriety," " magnanimity,"
as being not in his day in general use; " magnanimity," however, is in Chaucer. The translators of the
authorized version of the Bible, in a preface not now
often reprinted, but prefixed to the original edition,
find fault, and others had done the same before them,
with the Greek and Latin words-" inkhorn terms,"
* On the new words in classical Latin see Quintilian viii. 3, 30-37
f Solil. 2, 7.




144         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
Fulke calls them-with which the Rhemish translators so plentifully sprinkled their version; with the
intention, as these last affirmed, of preserving for it
an ecclesiastical character; but as others, and we
can scarcely say uncharitably, charged them, that
so, if they must give the Scriptures in the vulgar
tongue, they might yet keep them, as far as might be,
" dark and unprofitable to the ignorant readers." In
many cases the accusation was quite borne out by
the facts, and the Greek and Latin terms they employed could never have made themselves at home
in English; but this certainly is not so in all. Thus
"rational," "tunic," "scandal," "neophyte," were
severally either words which had not been invented
by the Rhemish translators, having existed long before; or the sequel has gone far to justify them in
what they did, the words having been freely absorbed
into the language, as useful additions to it.  "To
evangelize" was another word which they were
blamed for introducing. It was quite worthy to have
been introduced, supposing it had not previously been
in being; but it already found place in Wiclif's version, as at Luke i. 19, xvi. 16, which the Rhemish
merely follows, so that Fulke is every way unjust in
urging against the authors of this: "When you say' evangelized,' you do not translate, but feign a new
word, which is not understood of mere English ears."
Considering how old a thing is selfishness in the
world, we should hardly have expected to find "sel



PRETENSIOUS, A NEW WORD.            145
fish" to be a word of such late devising as it proves.
From  a passage in Hacket's life of Archbishop
TFilliams, we certainly conclude that it had only
newly come up in his time, and been freshly issued
from the puritan mint.* " Mob" is of still later date,
belonging, as we saw just now, to the latter half of
the seventeenth century.  " Coffee" and " tea" were
not naturalized words in Locke's time, at least not
in 1684.  He writes "Coffe," "the."t  "Tour" is
printed "tour" so late as 1712.  "Pretentious," the
adjective of " pretence," which is a word at the present moment forcing its way into existence, is now
displeasing enough to delicate ears, yet no doubt it
will keep its ground, for it supplies a real need, and
has the analogy of the French " pretentieux" to help
it; in a very little while multitudes will use it, quite
unconscious that it is not older, nor perhaps so old
as they are themselves.
When a word has proved an unquestionable gain
to the language, it is very interesting to preside, so
to speak, at its birth, to watch it as it first comes
forth, timid, and it may be as yet doubtful of the reception it will meet with; and the interest is very
much enhanced, if it thus come forth on some memorable occasion, or from some memorable man. Both
* Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, part 2, p. 144: "When
they [the presbyterians] saw that he was not selfish (it is a word of
their own new mint)," &c.
t Locke's Diary, in his Life by Lord King, p. 42.
7




146         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
these interests meet in the word "essay."  If any
one were asked what is the most remarkable volume
of essays which the world has seen, few, having sufficient oversight of the field of literature to be capable of replying, would fail to answer, Lord Bacon's.
But they were also the first which bore that name;
for we certainly gather from the following passage in
the (intended) dedication of the volume to Prince
Henry, that the word " essay" was altogether a very
recent one in the English language, and in the use
to which he put it, perfectly novel: he says: "To
write just treatises requireth leisure in the writer, and
leisure in the reader;... which is the cause which
hath made me choose to write certain brief notes set
down rather significantly than curiously, which I
have called Essays. The word is late, but the thing
is ancient." From these words, and others which I
have omitted in the quotation, we further gather that
little as " essays" at the present day can be consid
ered a word of modesty, deprecating too large expectations on the part of the reader, it had, as " sketches"
perhaps would have now, such an ethical significance
in this its earliest use. In this last respect it resembled the "philosopher" of Pythagoras. Before his
time the founders of systems of philosophy had styled
themselves, or been willing to be styled by others,
"wise men."  This appellation, " lover of wisdom,"
so modest and so beautiful, was of his devising.
Let us remark, at the same time, that while thus




RATIONALIST - CHRISTOLOGY.         147
some words surprise us that they are so new, others
again that they are so old. Few, I should imagine,
are aware that the word " rationalist," and this in a
theological, and not merely a philosophical sense, is
of such early date as it is; or that we have not imported quite in these later times both the name and
the thing from  Germany. This, however, is very
far from being in either respect the case. There
was a sect of " rationalists" in the time of the Commonwealth, who called themselves such exactly on
the same grounds as those who in later times have
challenged the name. Thus, one writing the news
fiom London,* among other things, mentions:"There is a new sect sprung up among them [the
presbyterians and independents], and these are the
rationalists, and what their reason dictates them
in church or state stands for good, until they be convinced with better;" with more to the same effect.
The word " Christology" a recent reviewer has characterized as a monstrous importation from Germany.
I should be quite ready to agree with him that English theology does not need, and can do excellently
well without it; yet is it not this absolute novelty:
for in thepreface to the works of that great divine
of the seventeenth century, Thomas Jackson, written
by a friend and scholar, the following passage occurs: "The reader will find in this author an emi* With date, Oct. 14, 1646; in The Clarendon State Papers, v. 2
p. 40, of the Appendix.




148        THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
nent excellence in that part of divinity which I make
bold to call Christology, in displaying the great
mystery of godliness, God the Son manifested in human flesh."*
In their power of taking up foreign or otherwise
new words into healthy circulation and making them
truly their own, languages are very different as compared with one another, and the same language is
very different from itself at different periods of its
life. There are languages of which the appetite and
digestive power, the assimilative energy, is at some
periods almost unlimited. Nothing is too hard for
them; they will shape and mould to their own uses
and habits almost whatsoever is offered to them.
This is in the youth of a language; as age advances
upon it, this assimilative power diminishes. Words
are still adopted; for this process of adoption can
never cease, but a chemical amalgamation of the
new with the old does not any longer find place, or
only in some instances, and partially in them. They
lie often on the surface of the language; their sharp
corners are not worn and rounded off; they remain
foreign still in their aspect and outline, and, having
missed the great opportunity of becoming otherwise,
will remain so to the end. Those who adopt, as with
an inward misgiving about their own gift and power
of stamping them afresh, seem to make a conscience
of keeping them in exactly the same form in which
* Preface to Dr. Jackson's Works, v. 1, p. xxvii.




BISHOP, EPISCOPAL.           149
they have received them; instead of conforming
them to the laws of that new community into which
they now have been received. Nothing will illustrate this better, or indeed so well as a comparison
of different words of the same family, which have
at different periods been introduced into our language. We shall find that those of an earlier introduction have become English through and through,
while the later introduced belonging to the same
group, have been very far from undergoing the same
transforming process.  Thus "bishop," a word as
old as the introduction of Christianity into England,
though not hiding its descent from " episcopus," is
thoroughly English; while " episcopal," which has
supplanted " bishoply," is only a Latin word in an
English dress. "Alms," too, is genuine English,
and English which has descended to us from far;
the very shape in which we have the word, one syllable for " eleemosyna" of six, sufficiently testifying
this; "' letters," as Horne Tooke observes, "like soldiers, being apt to desert and drop off in a long
march."  I need not say that the long and awkward
" eleemosynary" is of a very much more recent date.
Or sometimes this comparison is still more striking,
when it is not merely words of the same family, but
the very same word which has been twice adopted,
at an earlier period and a later-the earlier form
will be truly English, as "palsy;" the later will
be only a Greek or Latin word spelt with English




150        THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
letters, as "paralysis."   "Dropsy," " megrim,"
"tansy," and many more words that one might
name, have nothing of strangers or foreigners about
them, have made themselves quite at home in English; so entirely is their physiognomy native that it
would be difficult even to suspect that they were of
Greek descent as they are. Nor has " kickshaws"
anything about it now which would compel us at
once to recognise in it the French " quelques choses"
"French kickcshose," as with allusion to the quarter
from which it came, and while the memory of that
was yet fresh in men's minds, it was often called by
our early writers.
An eminent German grammarian has called attention to a very curious process which he traces
many German words to have undergone in the act
of their adoption from foreign tongues, whereby not
only their outward form and shape are fitted and
moulded to their new home, but a new soul, a new
principle of life put within them. What he means
will best be understood by a single illustration. The
Germans, knowing nothing of carbuncles, had natnrally no word of their own for them, and when they
first became acquainted with them, as naturally borrowed the Latin term " carbunculus," which originally had meant "a little live coal," to designate
these precious stones of a fiery red. But " carbunculus," though a real word, full of poetry and life,
for a Latin, would have been only an arbitrary sign




LTSCINIA, ROSSIGNOL.          151
for others, ignorant of that language. What then
did they do? or what, rather did the working genius
of the language do?  It adopted, but in adopting
modified slightly the word, changing it into "kar
funkel," thus retaining the outlines of the original,
yet at the same time, inasmuch as " funkeln" signifies " to sparkle," reproducing now in an entirely
novel manner the image of the bright sparkling of
the stone, for every knower of his native tongue.
I have no doubt that our own language would
supply instances of a like kind, though I have not
any such at the present to adduce to you; which
not having, I must be content with one which the
French seems to supply me. " Rossignol," a nightingale, is undoubtedly derived from the Latin " lusciniola," the diminutive of "luscinia," with the alteration which so frequently finds place in the
romance languages, of the commencing I into r.
Whatever may be the etymology of "luscinia,"
whether it be "in lucis cano," the singer in the
groves, or " lugens cano," the melancholy singer, or,
as is most probable, " luscus cano," the singer in the
twilight, with which our " nightingale" would most
closely correspond, it is plain that for Frenchmen
the word would no longer be suggestive of any of
these meanings, hardly even for French scholars,
after the serious transformations which it had undergone; while yet, at the same time, in the exquisitely musical " rossignol," and still more, perhaps, in




152         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
the Italian " usignuolo," there is an evident intention and endeavor to express something of the music
of the bird's song in the liquid melody of the imitative name which it bears; and thus to put a new
soul into the word, in lieu of that one which it has
lost.
One of the most striking facts about new words,
and a very signal testimony of their birth from the
bosom of the people, that is, where they are not
plainly from the schools, is the difficulty which is so
often found in tracing their derivation. When the
causme vocum are sought, which they justly are, and
out of much more than mere curiosity, for the causce
rerum are very often contained in them, they continually elude research; and this, not merely where
attention has only been called to the words, and interest about their etymology excited, long after they
had been in popular use, and when thus they had
left their origin, whatever it may have been, very
far behind them -for that the words of a remote antiquity should often puzzle and perplex us, should
give scope to idle guesses, or altogether defy conjecture, this is nothing strange-but even when it
has been sought to investigate their origin almost as
soon as they have come into existence. Their rise is
mysterious; like so many other acts of becoming, it
is veiled in deepest obscurity. They appear, they
are in everybody's mouth; but yet when it is inquired whence they are, nobody can tell. They ave




WORDS FORGET THEIR ORIGIN.             153
but of yesterday, and yet with a marvellous rapidity
have forgotten the circumstances of their origin.
Thus Baxter tells us in his most instructive Narrative of his Life and Times, that there already existed two theories about the term " roundheads,"* a
word not nearly so old as himself, showing how
much uncertainty already rested upon it. " Cannibal," as a designation of man-eating savages, came
first into use with the great discoveries in the western world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
I know not whether it occurs earlier than in Hackluyt's Voyages.  All attempts to explain  it have
been fruitless.  So, too, the origin of' huguenots,"
as applied to the French protestants, was already a
matter of doubt and discussion in the lifetime of
those who first bore it.t  One might suppose that a
name like " Canada," given, and within fresh historic times, to a vast territory, would be accounted
for, but it is not; or that the Anglo-Americans
would be able to explain how they got their word
"caucus," which plays so prominent a part in their
elections, but they can not.
* "The original of which name is not certainly known. Some
say it was because the puritans then commonly wore short hair, and
the king's party long hair; some say, it was because the queen, at
Strafford's trial, asked who that roundheaded man was, meaning Mr.
Pym, because he spake so strongly."-P. 34.
t I can hardly doubt that it is a corruption of " eidgnoten," low
German for "eidgenossen," confederates; but this was not the explanation of some who must have been grown men at the time of its
first emerging.
7*




154        THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
These are but a handful of examples of the way in
which words forget the circumstances of their birth.
Now if we could believe in any merely arbitrary
words, such, that is, as stood in connection with
nothing but the mere lawless caprice of some inventor, the impossibility of tracing their derivations
would be nothing strange. Indeed it would be lost
labor to seek for the parentage of all words, when
many perhaps had not any. But there is no such
thing; there is no word which is not, as the Spanish
gentleman loves to call himself, an "hidalgo," the
son of somebody; all are the embodiment, more or
less successful, of a sensation, a thought, or a fact;
or if of more fortuitous birth, still they attach themselves somewhere to the already subsisting world of
words and things, and have their point of contact
with it and departure from it, not always discoverable, as we see, but yet always existing; so that,
when a word entirely refuses to give up the secret
of its origin, it can be regarded in no other light but
as a riddle which no one has succeeded in solving,
a lock of which no one has found the key - but still
a riddle which has a solution, a lock for which there
is a key, though now, it may be, irrecoverably lost.
And this fact of the difficulty, often the impossibility of tracing the genealogy even of words of a very
recent formation, is, as I said, an evidence of the
birth at least of these out of the heart and from the
lips of the people. Had they had their rise first in




WORDS BECOME POPULAR.          155
books, then it would be easily traced; had it been
from the schools of the learned, these would not
have failed to have left a recognisable stamp and
mark upon them.
But we must conclude. I may have seemed in
this present lecture a little to have outrun your needs,
and to have sometimes moved in a sphere too remote
from that in which your future work will lie. Perhaps it may have been so; yet is it in truth very difficult to say of any words that they do not touch us,
that they do not reach us in their influence, or in
some way bear upon our studies, upon that which
we shall hereafter have to teach or shall desire to
learn; that there are any conquests which language
makes, that concern only a few, and may be regarded indifferently by all others. For it is here as with
many inventions in the arts and luxuries of life,
which being in the beginning the exclusive privilege
and possession of the wealthy, the cultivated, the refined, do yet gradually descend into lower strata of
society, until at length what were once the luxuries
and elegancies of a few, have become the decencies,
well nigh the necessities of all. Exactly in the same
manner there are words, once only on the lips of
philosophers or divines, of the deeper thinkers of
their time, or of those interested in their speculations,
which yet step by step have come down, not debasing thenmselves in this act of becoming popular, but
training and elevating more and more to understand




156         THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
and embrace their meaning, till at length they have
become truly a part of the nation's common stock,
household words used naturally and easily by all.
And I know not how I can better conclude this
lecture than by quoting some words which express
with a rare eloquence all which I have been laboring to utter: for this truth, which many indeed have
noticed, none that I am aware of have set forth with
at all the same fullness of illustration, or laying upon
it at all the same stress, as the author of The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, whose words now
quoted are but one out of many passages on the same
theme:' Language is often called an instrument of
thought, but it is also the nutriment of thought; or,
rather, it is the atmosphere in which thought lives; a
medium essential to the activity of our speculative
powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its
operation; and an element modifying, by its qualities
and changes, the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds. In this way the influence of
preceding discoveries upon subsequent ones, of the
past upon the present, is most penetrating and universal, although most subtle and difficult to trace.
The most familiar words and phrases are connected
by imperceptible ties with the reasonings and discoveries of former men and distant times. Their
knowledge is an inseparable part of ours; the present
generation inherits and uses the scientific wealth of
all the past. And this is the fortune, not only of the




PAST ACQUISITIONS OURS.        157
great and rich in the intellectual world, of those who
have the key to the ancient storehouses, and who have
accumulated treasures of their own, but the humblest
inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into words,
benefits by the labors of the greatest. When he
counts his little wealth he finds he has in his hands
coins which bear the image and superscription of
ancient and modern intellectual dynasties, and that
in virtue of this possession acquisitions are in his
power, solid knowledge within his reach, which none
could ever have attained to, if it were not that the
gold of truth once dug out of the mine circulates
more and more widely among mankind."




LECTURE V.
THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
IT is to the subject of synonyms and their distinction, with the advantages which may be derived
from the study of these that I propose to devote the
present lecture. But what, it may be asked, do we
mean, when, comparing certain words with one another, we affirm of them that they are synonyms?
It is meant that they are words which, with great
and essential resemblances of meaning, have at the
same time small, subordinate, and partial differences
-these differences being such as either originally,
and on the ground of their etymology, inhered in
them; or differences which they have by usage acquired in the eyes of all; or such as, though nearly
latent now, they are capable of receiving at the hands
of wise and discreet masters of the tongue. Synonyms are words of like significance in the main, but
with a certain unlikeness as well.
So soon as the term is defined thus, it will be at
once perceived by any acquainted with the derivation, that strictly speaking, it is a misnomer, and is
given to these words with a certain inaccuracy and im



DEFINITION OF SYNONYMS.          159
propriety; since in strictness the terms " synonyms,"
or " synonymous," applied to words, would affirm of
them that they covered not merely almost the same
extent of meaning, but altogether and exactly the
same, that they were in their signification perfectly
identical and coincident. The terms, however, are
not ordinarily so used, and plainly are not so, when
it is undertaken to trace out the distinction between
synonyms; for, without denying that there are such
absolutely coincident words, such perfect synonyms,
yet these could not be the object of any such discrimination; since, where there was no real distinction, it
would be lost labor and the exercise of a perverse ingenuity to attempt to draw one. Synonyms, then
as the word is generally understood, and as I shall
use it here, are words with slighter differences already existing between them, or with the capabilities
of such: neither on the one side absolutely identical;
but neither we may add, on the other only very remotely related to one another; for the differences
between these last will be self-evident, will so lie on
the surface and proclaim themselves to all, that it
would be impossible to make them clearer than they
already are, and it would be like holding a candle
to the sun to attempt it. They must be words which
are more or less liable to confusion, but which yet
ought not to be confounded; words, as one has said,
a quse conjungi, non confundi, debent;" words in
which there originally inhered a difference, or be



160        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
tween which, though once absolutely identical, such
has gradually grown up, and so established itself in
the use of the best writers, and in the instinct of the
best speakers of the tongue, that it claims to be recognised and openly admitted by all.
But here an interesting question presents itself to
us, which is this: How do languages come to possess
synonyms of this latter class, which are differenced
not by etymology or other deep-lying and necessary
distinction, but only by usage? Now if they had
been made by agreement, of course no such words
could exist; for when one word had been found which
was the adequate representative of a feeling or an
object, no further one would have been sought. But
languages are the result of processes very different
from, and far less formal and regular than this.
Various tribes, each with its own dialect, kindred
indeed, but in many respects distinct, coalesce into
one people, and cast their contributions of language
into a common stock; sometimes two have the same
word, but in forms sufficiently different to cause that
both remain, but as different words; thus in Latin,
" serpo" and "repo" are merely two slightly different appropriations of the same Greek word, and of
"puteo" and "foeteo" the same may be said; thus
too in German, "odem" and "athem," were originally but different formations of the same word. Or
again, a conquering people have fixed themselves in
the midst of a conquered; they impose their domin



WORDS IMPORTED FROM ABROAD.         161
)on, but do not succeed in imposing their language;
nay, being few in number, they find themselves at
last compelled to adopt the language of the conquered; or after a while that which may be called a
transaction, a compromise between the two languages,
finds place. Thus was it in England; our modern
English being in the main such a compromise between the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman-French.
These are causes of the existence of synonyms
which reach far back into the history of a nation and
a language; but other causes at a later period are
also at work. When a written literature springs up,
authors familiar with various foreign tongues, import
from one and another words which are not absolutely required, which are oftentimes rather luxuries than
necessities. Sometimes having a very good word of
their own, they must yet needs go and look for a finer
one, as they esteem it, from abroad; as, for instance,
the Latin having its own good and expressive " succinum" (from " succus"), for "amber," some must
import from the Greek the ambiguous " electrum."
But of these which are thus proposed as candidates
for admission, some fail to receive the rights of citizenship, and after longer or shorter probation are rejected; it may be, never advance beyond their first proposer. Enough, however, receive the stamp of popular allowance to create embarrassment for a while,
and until their relations with the already existing
words are adjusted. As a single illustration of the




162        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
various quarters from which the English has thus
been augmented, and in the end enriched, I would
instance the words "trick," "device," "finesse,"
" artifice," and " stratagem," and enumerate the various sources from which we have gotten these words.
Here " trick" is Saxon, " devisa" is Italian, " finesse"
is French, "artificium" is Latin, and "stratagema"
Greek.
By-and-by, however, as a language becomes itself more an object of attention, at the same time that
society, advancing from a simpler to a more complex
state, has more things to designate and thoughts to
utter, it is felt to be a waste of resources to have two
or more words for the signifying of one and the same
object. Men feel, and rightly, that with a boundless
world lying around them  and demanding to be
named, and which they only make their own in the
measure that they do name it, with infinite shades
and varieties of thought and feeling subsisting in their
own minds, and claiming to find utterance in words,
it is a mere and wanton extravagance to expend two
or more signs on that which could adequately be set
forth by one-an extravagance in one part of their
expenditure, which would be almost sure to issue in,
and to be punished by, a too great scantness and
straitness in another. Some thought or feeling would
be certain to want its adequate sign because another
has wo. Hereupon that which has been well called
t   process of "desynonymizing" begins —that is




WORDS DESYNONYBIIZED.           163
of gradually coming to discriminate in use between
words which have hitherto been accounted perfectly
equivalent, and, as such, indifferently employed. It
is a positive enriching of a language when this process is felt to be accomplished, when two or more
words which were once promiscuously used, are felt
to have had each its own peculiar domain assigned
to it, which it shall not itself overstep, upon which
the others shall not encroach. This may seem  at
first sight but as the better regulation of old territory;
for all practical purposes it is the acquisition of new.
It is not to be supposed that this desynonymizing
process is effected according to any pre-arranged
purpose or plan. The working genius of the language accomplishes its own objects, causes these synonymous words insensibly to fall off from one another, and to acquire separate and peculiar meanings.
The most that any single writer can do, save indeed
in matters of science, is, as has been observed, to
assist an already existing inclination, to bring to the
consciousness of all that which may already have
been implicitly felt by many, and thus to hasten the
process of this disengagement, or, as it has been excellently expressed, "to regulate and ordinate the
evident nisus and tendency of the popular usage
into a severe definition;" and establish on a firm
basis the distinction, so that it shall not be lost sight
of, or brought into question again. This, for instance,
Wordsworth did in respect of the words " imagina



164            THE DISTINCTION  OF WORDS.
tion" and " fancy." Before he wrote, it was, I suppose, obscurely felt by most that in " imagination"
there was more of the earnest, in " fancy" of the play
of the spirit, that the first was a loftier faculty and
gift than the second; yet for all this the words were
continually, and  not without loss, confounded.  He
first, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, rendered
it henceforth impossible that any one, who had read
and mastered what he had written on the two words,
should remain unconscious any longer of the important difference existing between them.*
* I had read a great many years ago, in The Opium Eater's Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been neglected, a passage
which I had still clearly in my mind while writing the above. I
have now recovered this passage, which, though it only says over
again what is said above, yet does this so much more forcibly and
fully, that I shall not hesitate to quote it, and the more readily that
these letters, in many respects so valuable, have never been reprinted, but lie buried in the old numbers of a magazine, like so many
other of the "disjecta membra" of this illustrious master of English
prose. "All languages," he says, "tend to clear themselves of synonyms, as intellectual culture advances; the superfluous words being
taken up and appropriated by new shades and combinations of
thought evolved in the progress of society. And long before this
appropriation is fixed and petrified, as it were, into the acknowledged vocabulary of the language, an insensible clinamen (to borrow
a Lucretian word) prepares the way for it. Thus, for instance, before Mr. Wordsworth had unveiled the great philosophic distinction
between the powers of fancy and imagination, the two words had
begun to diverge from each other, the first being used to express a
faculty somewhat capricious and exempted from law, the other to
express a faculty more self-determined. When, therefore, it was at
length perceived, that under an apparent unity of meaning there
lurked a real dualism, and for philosophic purposes it was necessary
that this distinction should have its appropriate expression, this necessity was met half way by the clinamen which had already affected




REVENGE, VENGEANCE.                  165
Let me remark by the way how many other words
in English are still waiting for such a discrimination.
What an ethical gain, for instance, would it be, how
much clearness would it bring into men's thoughts
and feelings, if the distinction which exists in Latin
between " vindicta" and " ultio," that the first is a
moral act, the just punishment of the sinner by his
God, of the criminal by the judge, the other an act
in which the self-gratification of one who counts
himself injured or offended is sought, could in like
manner be established between "vengeance" and
" revenge," so that only " vengeancc" (with the verb
" avenge") should be ascribed to God, and to men
acting as the executors of his righteous doom; while
all in which their evil and sinful passions are the
impulsive motive should be exclusively termed " revenge."   As it now  is, the moral disapprobation
which cleaves, and cleaves justly, to " revenge," is
oftentimes transferred almost unconsciously to " vengeance;" while yet without vengeance it is impossible to conceive in an evil world any assertion of
the popular usage of the words." Compare with this what Coleridge
had before said upon the subject, Biog. Lit., v. 1, p. 90. It is to
Coleridge we owe the word "desynonymize," and his own contributions direct and indirect in this province are perhaps both more in
number, and more important, than those of any modern English writer, as for instance the disentanglement of "fanaticism" and "enthusiasm," which we mainly owe to him (Lit. Rem., v. 2, p. 365), and
of other words not a few; as " keenness" and " subtlety" (Table Talk,
p. 140), "poetry" and "poesy" (Lit. Rem., v. 1, p. 219); and that on
which he himself laid so great a stress, "reason" and "understanding."




166        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
righteousness, any moral government whatsoever.
These distinctions which still wait to be made we
may fitly regard " as so much reversionary wealth
in our mother-tongue."
The two causes which I mentioned above, the fact
that English is in the main a compromise between
the languages spoken by the Anglo-Saxon and the
Norman, and the further circumstance that it has received, welcomed, and found place for many later
additions, these causes have together effected that
we possess in English a great many duplicates, not
to speak of triplicates, or even such a quintuplicate
as that which I adduced just now, where the Saxon,
French, Italian, Latin, and Greek, had each given
us a word. Let me mention a few duplicate substantives, Anglo-Saxon and Latin; thus we have
"shepherd" and " pastor;" " feeling" and "sentiment;"' handbook" and " manual;" "shire" and
"county;"' "ship" and "nave;" "anger" and "ire;"
"grief" and "dolor;" "feather" and "plume;"
" love" and " charity;" forerunner" and "precursor; " freedom" and " liberty;" " murder" and
"homicide;"  "moons"  and  "lunes"-a  word
which has not been met with in the singular. Sometimes, in science and theology especially, we have
gone both to the Latin and to the Greek, and drawn
the same word from them both; thus "deist" and
"theist;" " numeration" and " arithmetic;" " Revelation" and " Apocalypse;" "temporal" and "chron



LATIN AND ANGLO-SAXON WORDS.       167
ical;" "compassion" and "sympathy;" "supposition" and " hypothesis." But to return to the Anglo-I
Saxon and Latin, the main factors of our tongue, be-'
side duplicate substantives, we have duplicate verbs,
such as " to heal" and " to cure;" " to whiten" and
"to blanch;" " to soften" and "to mollify;" "to
cloak" and " to palliate;" with many more.
Duplicate  adjectives  also  are numerous, as
"shady" and " umbrageous;" "unreadable" and
"illegible;" "almighty" and " omnipotent."  Occasionally where only one substantive, an Anglo-Saxon,
exists, yet the adjectives are duplicate, and the English, which has not adopted the Latin substantive,
has yet admitted the adjective; thus "burden" has
not merely " burdensome" but also " onerous," while
yet " onus" has found no place with us; "priest"
has " priestly"  and  " sacerdotal;" " king" has
"kingly,"  "regal," which is purely Latin, and
"royal," which is Latin distilled through the Norman.  " Bodily" and "corporal," "boyish" and
"puerile," "bloody" and "sanguine,"  "fearful"
and "timid," "manly" and "virile," "womanly"
and " feminine," " starry" and " stellar," " yearly"
and "annual," may all be placed in the same list.
Nor are these more than a handful of words out of
the number which might be adduced, and I think
you would find both pleasure and profit in seeking
to add to these lists, and as far as you are able, to
make them gradually complete.




168        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
I will observe by the way, that I have only adduced instances in which both the words have continued to maintain their ground in our spoken and
written language to the present day. Other cases
are not few in which these duplicates once existed,
but in which the one word has in the end proved
fatal to, and has extinguished the other. Thus " resurrection" and " againrising" no doubt existed contemporaneously; Wiclif uses them indifferently; we
may say the same of "judge" and "doomsman,"
"adultery" and  " spouse-breach," and of many
words more. In each of these cases, however, instead of dividing the intellectual domain between
them, which perhaps would not always have been
easy, the one word has definitively put the other
out of use; the Latin word, as you will observe, has
triumphed over the Anglo-Saxon. I am not of those
who consider these triumphs of the Latin element of
our speech to be in every case a matter of regret;
though I would not willingly have seen " pavone,"
which Spenser would have introduced, for our much
older " peacock;" or "terremote," which Gower employs, for " earthquake," or other such Latinisms as
these.
But to return; if we look closely at those other
words which have succeeded in maintaining side by
side their ground, we shall not fail to observe that
in almost every instance they have vindicated for
themselves separate spheres of meaning, that al



SEPARATE SPHERES OF MEANING.        169
though not in etymology, they have still in use become more or less distinct. Thus we use "shepherd" almost always in its primary meaning, keeper
of sheep; while "pastor" is exclusively used in the
tropical sense, one that feeds the flock of God; at the
same time the language having only the one adjective, "pastoral," that is of necessity common to both.
" Love" and " charity" are used in our authorized
version of the New Testament promiscuously, and
out of the sense of their equivalence are made to
represent one and the same Greek word; but in
modern use " charity" has come almost exclusively
to signify one particular manifestation of love, the
supply of the bodily needs of others, " love" continuing to express the affection of the soul. " Ship" remains in its literal meaning, while "nave" has become a symbolic term used in sacred architecture
alone. So with " illegible" and " unreadable," the
first is applied to the hand-writing, the second to the
subject-mratter written; thus, a man writes an "'illegible" hand; he has published an "unreadable"
book. So, too, it well becomes boys to be " boyish,"
but not men to be "puerile."  Or take " to blanch"
and " to whiten;" we have grown to use the first in
the sense of to withdraw coloring matter: thus we
"blanch" almonds or linen; the cheek is " blanched"
with fear, that is, by the withdrawing of the blood;
but we " whiten" a wall, not by the withdrawing of
some other color, but by the superinducing of white;
8




170         THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
thus "whited sepulchres."  " To palliate" is not now
used, though it once was, in the sense of wholly
cloaking or covering over, as it might be, our sins,
but in that of extenuating; " to palliate" our faults
is not to hide them  altogether, but to seek to diminish their guilt in part.
It might be urged that there was a certain preparedness in these words to separate off in their
meaning from one another, inasmuch as they originally belonged to different stocks; nor would I say
that it was not so, nor deny that this may have assisted; but we find tie same process at work where
difference of stock can have supplied no such assistance.  "Astronomy" and  " astrology" are  both
drawn from the Greek, nor is there any reason beforehand why the second should not be in as honorable use as the first; for it signifies the reason, as
astronomy the law, of the stars. But seeing there is
a true and a false science of the stars, both needing
words to utter them, it has come to pass that in our
later use, " astrology" designates always that pretended science of imposture, which affecting to submit the moral freedom of men to the influences of
the heavenly bodies, prognosticates future events
from  the position of these, as contrasted with " astronomy," that true science which investigates the
laws of the heavenly bodies in their relations to one
another and to the planet upon which we dwell.
As these are both from the Greek, so " despair,"




DIFFIDENCE, DESPAIR.           171
and "diffidence" are both, though the second more
directly than the first, fiom the Latin.  At a period
not very long past the difference between them was
hardly appreciable; it certainly could not be affirmed of one that it was very much stronger than the
other. If in one the absence of all hope, in the
other that of all faith, was implied. In proof I
would only refer you to a book with which I am
sure every English schoolmaster will wish to be familiar, I mean The Pilgrimn's Progress, where Mistress "Diffidence" is Giant "Despair's" wife, and
not a whit behind him in her deadly enmity to the
pilgrims; even as Jeremy Taylor speaks of the impenitent sinner's " diffidence" in the hour of death,
meaning, as the context plainly shows, his despair.
But to what end two words for one and the same
thing?  And thus "diffidence" did not retain that
force of meaning which it had at the first, but little
by little assumed a more mitigated sense (Hobbes
speaks of "men's diffidence," that is distrust, "of
one another"), till it has come in our present English to signify a becoming distrust of ourselves, an
humble estimate of our own powers, with only a
slight intimation in the word, that perhaps this distrust is carried too far.
Again, " interference" and " interposition" are both
from the Latin; and here too it lies not by any anterior necessity in the several derivations of the words,
that they should have the different shades of mean



172          THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
ing which yet they have obtained  among us: the
Latin verbs which form their latter halves being about
as strong one as the other. And yet in our practical
use, " interference" is something offensive; it is the
pushing in of himself between two parties on the part
of a third, who was not asked, and is not thanked
for his pains, and who, as the feeling of the word
implies, had no business there; while " interposition"
is employed  to express the friendly  peacemaking
mediation of one whom the act well became, and who,
even if he was not specially invited thereunto, is still
thanked for what he has done.  How real an increase
is it in the wealth and capabilities of a language thus
to have discriminated such words as these; and to
be able to express acts outwardly the same by different words, as we would praise or blame them.*
But these which I have named are not the only
desynonymizing processes which are going forward
in a language; for we may observe in almost all lan* It must at the same time be acknowledged, that if in the course
of time distinctions are thus created, and if this is the tendency of
language, yet they are also sometimes, though far less often, obliterated. Thus the fine distinction between "yea" and "yes," "nay" and
"no," that once existed in English has quite disappeared. "Yea"
and "nay," in Wiclif's time, and a good deal later, were the answers
to questions framed in the affirmative. "Will he come?" To this
it would have been replied, "' Yea" or " Nay," as the case might be.
But, "Will he not come!"-to this the answer would have been,
"Yes," or " No." Sir Thomas More finds fault with Tyndale, that
in his translation of the Bible he had not observed this distinction,
which was evidently therefore going out even then, that is in the
reign of Henry VIII.; and shortly after it was quite forgotten.




DIFFERENT SPELLING OF WORDS.          173
guages, and not the least in our own, a tendency to
the formation of new words out of what were at the
first no more than different pronunciations, or even
slightly different spellings, of one and the same
word; which yet in the end detach themselves from
one another, not again to reunite; just as accidental
varieties in fruits or flowers, produced at hazard, have
yet permanently separated off and settled into different kinds. Sometimes as the accent is placed on
one syllable of a word or another, it comes to have
different significations, and those so distinctly marked
that it may be considered out of one word to have
grown into two. Examples of this are the following:
" divers" and " div6rse;" "conjure" and " conjure;"
" antic" and " antique;" " human" and " humane;"
" gentle" and " gent6el;" " custom" and " custumre;"
" essay" and " assay;" " pr6perty" and " propriety."
Again a word is pronounced with a full sound of its
syllables or more shortly: thus " spirit" and " spright;"
"blossom" and " bloom;" " piety" and " pity;" " courtesy" and "curtsey;" "personality" and "personalty;"  "fantasy"  and  " fancy;"  " triumph"  and
" trump" (the winning card);* " happily" and " haply;" " eremite" and " hermit;" " poesy" and " posy;"
or with the dropping of the first syllable: " history"
and " story;" " etiquette" and " ticket" " estate"
* If there were any doubt about this matter, which indeed there
is not, a reference to Latimer's famous Sermon on Cards would abundantly remove it, where "triumph" and "trump" ar. interchangeably used.




174          THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
and  "state;"-or without losing a syllable, with
more or less stress laid on the close: " regiment" and
"regimen;"   corpse"  and  " corps;  "bite"  and
" bit;"  "sire" and  "sir;  " stripe' and " strip;"
" borne" and " born;" "clothes" and " cloths."  Or
there has grown up some other slight distinction, as
between  "ghostly"  and  "ghastly;"  "utter"  and
" outer;"  "mettle"  and  " metal;"  "parson"  and
" person;" "ingenious" and " ingenuous;" " prune"
and " preen;" " mister" and " master;" " villain"
and  " villein;"  " cleft" and  " clift,"  now  written
" cliff;" "cure" and "care;" "travel" and "travail;"
" pennon" and " pinion;" " can" and " ken;" " oaf"
and " elf;" " gambol' and " gamble;" " truth" and
" troth;" " quay" and " key;" "lose" and " loose;"
" cant" and " chant;" " price" and " prize;" " errant"
and " arrant;"   benefit' and " benefice;"  I do not
know whether we ought to add to these, " news" and
"noise," which some tell us to be the same word;
* Were there need of proving that these both lie in " beneficium,"
which there is not, for in Wiclifs translation of the Bible the distinction is still latent (1 Tim. vi. 2), one might adduce a singularly
characteristic little trait of papal policy which once turned upon the
double use of this word. Pope Adrian the Fourth writing to the
emperor Frederic the First to complain of certain conduct of his, reminded the emperor that he had placed the imperial crown upon his
head, and would willingly have conferred even greater "beneficia"
upon him than this. Had the word been allowed to pass, it would
no doubt have been afterward appealed to as an admission on the
part of the great emperor that he held the empire as a feud or fief
(for "beneficium" was then the technical word for this, though the
meaning has much narrowed since), from the pope-the very point
iu dispute between them. The word was indignantly repelled tw




ANTIC, ANTIQUE — HUMAN, HUMANE.    175
at any rate the identifying of them is instructive, for
how much news is but noise, and passes away like
a noise before long. Or, it may be, the difference
which constitutes the two forms of the word into two
words is one in the spelling, and so slight a one even
there as to be appreciable only by the eye, and to
escape altogether the ear: thus is it with " draft"
and " draught;" " plain" and " plane;" "flower" and
" flour;" " check" and " cheque."
Now  if you will follow up these instances, you
will find, I believe, in every case that there has
attached itself to the different forms of the words a
modification of meaning more or less sensible, that
each has won for itself an independent sphere of
meaning, in which it, and it only, moves.  For take
a few instances in proof.  "Divers" implies difference only, but " diverse" difference with opposition;
thus the several evangelists narrate the same events
in " divers" manners, but not in "diverse."  "Antique" is ancient, but " antic" is now the ancient regarded as overlived, out of date, and so in our days
grotesque, ridiculous; and then, with a dropping of
the reference to age, the grotesque, the ridiculous
alone.  " Human" is what every man is, " humane"
is what every man ought to be; for Johnson's sugthe emperor and the whole German nation, whereupon the pope appealed to the etymology, that "beneficium" was but "bonum facturn," and had the meanness to say that he meant no more than to
remind the emperor of the "benefits" which he had done him, and
which he would willingly multiply still more.




176          THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
gestion that " humane" is from the French feminine,
" humaine," and " human" from  the masculine, can
not for an instant be admitted.  " Ingenious" is an
adjective expressing a mental, "ingenuous" a moral
excellence. A gardiner " prunes," that is, trims his
trees, birds " preen" or trim their feathers. " Bloom"
is a finer and more delicate efflorescence even than
" blossom;" thus, the " bloom," but not the " blossom" of the cheek.  A  " curtsey" is one, and that
merely  an  external manifestation  of " courtesy."
" Gambling" may be, as with a fearful irony it is
called, play, but it is nearly as distant from  " gambolling" as hell is from heaven. Nor would it be
hard, in each other of the words which I have instanced, nor in others of like kind which no doubt
might be added  to them, to trace a distinction
which has made itself more or less strongly felt.*
Let us now take some words which are not thus
desynonymized by usage only, but which have an
inherent etymological distinction —one, however,
which it might be easy to overlook, which, so long
as we dwell on the surface of the word, we shall
overlook; and let us see whether we shall not be
* The same happens in other languages. Thus in Latin " pinna"
and "penna" are only different spellings of the same word, and signify alike a "wing;" while yet in practice "penna" has come to be
used for the wing of a bird, " pinna" (the diminutive of which, " pinnaculum," has given us "pinnacle") for that of a building. So is it
with "codex" and "caudex," "infacetus" and "inficetus;" in the
German with " rechtlich" and " redlich;" in French with " harnoi%,"
the armor, or "harness," of a soldier, "harnais" of a horse.




ARROGANCE, PRESUMPTION, INSOLENCE.  1? 7
gainers by bringing out the distinction into clear
consciousness.  Here are the words " arrogant,"
" presumptuous," and "insolent."  We often use
them  promiscuously; yet let us examine them  a
little more closely, and ask ourselves, as soon as we
have succeeded in tracing the lines of demarcation
between them, whether we are not now in possession
of three distinct thoughts, instead of a single confused one. Thus, he is "arrogant," who oversteps
the limits of what justly is his, claims the observance
and homage of others as his due (ad rogat), does not
wait for them to offer, but himself demands it; or
who, having right to one sort of observance, claims
another to which he has no right. Thus, it was " arrogance" in Nebuchadnezzar, when he required that
all men should fall down before the image which he
had reared. He, a man, was claiming for man's
work the homage which belonged only to God. But
one is " presumptuous" who takes tlings to himself
before he has acquired any right and title to them
(prae sumit), the young man who already takes the
place of the old, the learner who speaks as with the
authority of the teacher. By-and-by all this may
very justly be his, but it is " presumption" to anticipate it now. "Insolent" means properly no more
than unusual; to act " insolently" is to act unusually. The offensive sense which the word has acquired
rests upon the feeling that there is a certain wellunderstood rule of society, a recognised standard of
8*




178        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
moral behavior, to which each of its members should
conform. The " insolent" man is one who violates
this rule, who breaks through this order, acting in
an unaccustomed manner. The same sense of the
orderly being also the moral, speaks out in the word
"irregular;" a man of " irregular," is for us a man
of immoral life; and yet more strongly in the Latin
language, which has but one word (mores) for customs and morals.
Or consider the following awords; " to hate," " to
loathe," " to detest," and " to abhor." Each of them
rests on an image entirely distinct from the others;
two, that is the first and second, being Anglo-Saxon,
and the others Latin.  " To hate" is properly to be
inflamed with passionate dislike, the word being
connected with "heat," "hot;" just as we speak,
using the same figure, of persons being " incensed"
with anger, or of their anger " kindling:" " ira" and
" uro" being perhaps related.  " To loathe" is properly to feel nausea, the turning of the stomach at
that which excites first natural, and then by a transfer, moral disgust. " To detest" is to bear witness
against, not to be able to keep silence in regard of
something, to feel ourselves obliged to lift up our
voice and testimony against it. " To abhor" is to
shrink shuddering back, as one would from an object
of fear, a hissing serpent rising in one's path.  Our
blessed Lord " hated" to see his Father's house profaned, when, the zeal of that house consuming him,




WHATELY S SYNONYMS.            179
he drove forth in anger the profaners from it: he
"loathed" the lulewarmness of the Laodiceans,
when he threatened to reject them  out of his
mouth; he " detested" the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and scribes, when he proclaimed their sin
and uttered those eight woes against them  (Matt.
23). He " abhorred" the evil suggestions of Satan,
when he bade the tempter to get behind him, seeking to put a distance between himself and him.
You will observe that in most of the words which
I have adduced, I have sought to refer their usage
to their etymologies, to follow the guidance of these,
and by the same aid to trace the lines of demarcation which divide them. For I can not but think it
an omission in a very instructive little volume upon
synonyms which has lately been edited by Archbishop Whately, and a partial diminution of its usefulness, that in the valuation of words reference is so
seldom made to these, the writer relying almost entirely on present usage, and the tact and instinct of
a cultivated mind for the appreciation of them aright.
The accomplished author (or authoress) of this book
indeed justifies this omission on the ground that a
book of synonyms has to do with the present relative
value (:f words, not with their roots and derivations;
and further, that a reference to these brings in often
what is only a disturbing force in the process, tending to confuse rather than to clear.* But while it is
* Among the words of which the etymology, if we were to suffer




180           THE DISTINCTION  OF WORDS.
quite true that words may often ride very slackly at
anchor on  their etymologies, may be borne hither
and thither by the shifting tides and currents of
usage, yet are they for the most part still holden by
them.  Very  few  have  broken  away  and  drifted
from   their moorings  altogether.  A  "novelist," or
writer of new tales in the present day is very different from a " novelist" or upholder of new theories in
politics and religion of two hundred years ago; yet
the idea  of newness is common to them  both.  A
" naturalist" was then a denier of revealed truth, of
any but natural religion; he is now an investigator
and often a pious one of nature and of its laws; yet
the word has remained true to its etymology all the
ourselves to be led by it, would place us altogether on a wrong
track as to its present meaning, the writer adduces "allegiance,"
which by usage signifies "the fidelity of the subject to his prince,"
while the etymology would rather suggest "conformity to law."
But surely this derivation of it, as though it were " ad legem," is an
erroneous one. It is rather derived from  "alligo," as "liege" from
"ligo;" and thus is perfectly true to its etymology, signifying as it
does the obligation wherewith one is bound to his superior. Algernon Sidney, in his Discourse concerning Government, c. 3, ~ 36, falls
into the same mistake; for, replying to some who maintained that
submission was due to kings, even though they should act in direct
contradiction to the fundamental laws of the kingdom, he observes
that the very word " allegiance," of which they made so much, refuted them; for this was plainly " such an obedience as the law requires."  He would have done better appealing, as indeed on one
occasion he does to the word "loyalty," which, being derived from
"loi," expresses properly that fidelity which one owes according to
law, and does not necessarily include that attachment to the royal
person, which happily we in England have been able further to
throw into the word.




W )ORDS TRUE TO THEIR ETYMOLOGIIS.    181
while.  A  " methodist" was once a follower of a
certain "method" of philosophical induction, now
of a " method" in the fulfilment of religious duties;
but in either case "method," or orderly progression,
is the soul of the word. Take other words which
have changed or modified their meaning-" plantations," for instance, which were once colonies of men
(and indeed we still " plant" a colony), but are now
nurseries of young trees, and you will find the same
to hold good. " Ecstacy" was madness, it is delight,
but in neither case has it departed from  its fundamental meaning, since it is the nature alike of this
and that to set men out of and beside themselves.
And even when the matter is not so obvious as in
these cases, the etymology of a word exercises an
unconscious influence upon its usages, oftentimes
makes itself felt when least expected, so that a word,
after seeming quite to have forgotten, will, after
longest wanderings, return to it again. And one of
the arts of a great poet or prose-writer, who wishes
to add emphasis to his style, to bring out all the latent forces of his native tongue, will very often be to
reconnect by his use of it, a word with its original
derivation, and not suffer it to forget itself though it
would.  How often Milton does this.*  And even if
* Yet the best example which I have at hand is one from the
French, from Bossuet, who in his panegyric of the great Conde expresses himself thus: "On le vit etonner de ses regards etincelants
ceux qui echappaient B ses coups." Take etonner in its ordinary
secondary sense, and how feeble and pointless the whole; but doubt



182         TIlE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
all this were not so, yet the past history of a word,
which history must needs start from its derivation,
how soon soever that may be left behind, is surely a
necessary element in its present valuation. A man
may be wholly different now from what once he was,
yet not the less to know his antecedents is needful,
before we can ever perfectly understand his present
self; and the same holds good with a word.
There is often a moral value in the possession of
synonyms, enabling us, as they do, to say exactly
what we intend, without exaggeration or the putting
of more into our words than we feel in our hearts,
allowing us, as one has said, to be at once courteous
and precise. Such moral advantage there is, for example, in the choice which we have between the
words " to felicitate" and " to congratulate," for the
expressing of our sentiments and wishes in regard
of the good fortune that happens to others. " To
felicitate" another is to wish him happiness, without
affirming that his happiness is also ours. Thus out
of that general good will with which we ought to regard all, we might " felicitate" one almost a stranger
to us; nay, more, I can honestly felicitate one on
his appointment to a post, or attainment of an honor,
even though I may not consider him  the fittest to
have obtained it, though I should have been glad if
another had done so; I can desire and hope, that is,
less the orator brought it back to the " attonitus" from which it and
our "astonish" alike proceed, and then, how grand its employment




TO IN VENT, TO DISCOVER.        183
that it may bring all joy and happiness to him. But
I could not, without a violation of truth, " congratulate" him, or that stranger whose prosperity awoke
no lively delight in my heart; for when I " congratulate" a person (con gratulor), I declare that I am
sharer in his joy, that what has rejoiced him has rejoiced also me. We have all, I dare say, felt, even
without having made any such analysis of the distinction between the words, that " congratulate" is a
far heartier word than "felicitate," and one with
which it much better becomes us to welcome the
good fortune of a friend; and the analysis, as you
perceive, perfectly justifies the feeling. " Felicitations" are little better than compliments; "congratulations" are the expression of a genuine sympathy
and joy.
Let me illustrate the importance of synonymous
distinctions by another example, by the words, " to
invent" and " to discover;" " invention" and " discovery."  How slight may seem to us the distinction
between them, even if we see any at all. Yet try
them  a little closer, try them, which is true proof,
by aid of examples, and you will perceive that by no
means can they be indifferently used-that on the
contrary a great principle lies at the root of their
distinction. Thus we speak of the "invention" of
printing, the " discovery" of America. Shift these
words, and speak, for instance, of the " invention"
of America; you feel as once how unsuitable the




184        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
language is. And why? Because Columbus did
not make that to be which before him had not been.
America was there, before he revealed it to European eyes; but that which before was, he showed to
be; he withdrew the veil which hitherto had concealed it; he " discovered" it. So, too, we speak
of Newton "discovering" the law of gravity; he
drew aside the veil whereby men's eyes were hindered from perceiving it, but the law had existed from
the beginning of the world, and would have existed
whether he or any other man had traced it or no;
neither was it in any way affected by the discovery
of it which he had made. But Guttemburg, or whoever else it may have been to whom the honor belongs, " invented" printing; he made something to
be, which hitherto was not. In like manner Harvey
" discovered" the circulation of the blood; but Watt
" invented" the steam-engine; and we speak with a
true distinction of the " inventions" of art, the " discoveries" of science. In the very highest matters
of all, it is deeply important that we be aware of
and observe the distinction. In religion there have
been many " discoveries" but (in true religion I
mean), no "inventions."  Many discoveries-but
God in each case is the discoverer; he draws away
the veils, one veil after another, that have hidden
him fiom men; the discovery or revelation is from
himself, for no man by searching has found out
God; and, therefore, wherever anything offers itself




APPREHIEND, COMPREHEND.          1 5
as an " invention" in matters of religion, it proclaims
itself a lie-all self-devised worships, all religions
which man projects fiom his own heart. Just that
is known of God which he is pleased to make known,
and no more; and men's recognising or refusing to
recognise in nowise affects it. They may deny or
own him, but he continues the same.
As involving in like manner a distinction which
can not safely be lost sight of, how important is it to
keep in mind the difference, of which the existence
is asserted by the fact that we possess the two words,
"to apprehend" and "to comprehend," with their
substantives, "apprehension" and "' omprehension."
For indeed we " apprehend" many truths, which we
do not " comprehend."  The great mysteries of our
faith, the doctrine for instance of the Holy Trinity
-we lay hold upon it (ad preehendo), we hang on it,
our souls live by it; but we do not "comprehend"
it, that is, we do not take it all in; for it is a necessary attribute of God that he is incomprehensible;
if he were not so, he would not be God, or the being that comprehended him  would be God also.
But it also belongs to the idea of God that he may
be "apprehended," though not "comprehended,"
by his reasonable creatures; he has made them to
know him, though not to know him all, to " apprehend," though not to "comprehend"  him.  We
may transfer with profit the same distinction to matters not quite so solemn.  I read Goldsmith's Trav



186        TIHE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
eller, or one of Gay's fables, and I feel that I " comprehend" it. I do not believe, that is, that there
was anything in the poet's mind or intention, which
I have not in the reading reproduced in my own.
But I read Hamlet, or King Lear: here I " apprehend" much; I have wondrous glimpses of the poet's
intention and aim; but I do not for an instant suppose that I have " comprehended," taken in, that is,
all that was in his mind in the writing; or that his
purpose does not stretch in manifold directions far
beyond the range of my vision; and I am sure there
are few who would not shrink from  affirming, at
least if they at all realized the force of the words
they were using, that they "comprehended" Shakspere; however much they may "apprehend" in
him.
How often "opposite" and "contrary" are used
as if there was no difference between them, and yet
there is a most essential one, one which perhaps we
may best express by saying that " opposites" complete, while " contraries" exclude one another. Thus
the most " opposite" moral or mental characteristics
may meet in one and the same person, while to say
that the most " contrary" did so, would be manifestly absurd; for example, a man may be at once
prudent and bold, for these are opposites; he could
not be at once prudent and rash, for these are contraries.  We may love and fear at the same time
and the same person; we pray in the litany that we




OPPOSITE, CONTRARX.            187
may love and fear God, the two being opposites and
thus the complements of one another; but to pray
that we might love and hate would be as absurd as
it would be impious, for these are contraries, and
could no more co-exist together than white and black,
hot and cold, at the same time in the same subject;
or, to take another illustration, sweet and sour are
" opposites," sweet and bitter are " contraries."* It
will be seen then that there is always a certain relation between  opposites; they unfold  themselves
though in different directions from the same root,
as the positive and negative forces of electricity, and
in their very opposition uphold and sustain one another; while contraries encounter one another from
quarters diverse, and one only subsists in the exact
degree that it puts out of working the other. Surely
this distinction can not be an unimportant one either
in the region of ethics or elsewhere.
It will happen continually that rightly to distinguish between two words will throw great light upon
some controversy in which those words play a principal part, nay, will virtually put an end to that controversy altogether. Thus when Hobbes, with a true
instinct, would have laid deep the foundations of
atheism and despotism together, resolving all right
into might, and taking away from men, if he could,
not merely the power, but denying to them the duty
of obeying God rather than man, his moral sophisms
* See Coleridge's Church and State, p. 18.




188        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
could stand only so long as it was not perceived that
" compulsion" and " obligation," with which he juggled, conveyed two ideas perfectly distinct, indeed
disparate, in kind, and that what pertained to one had
been transferred to the other by a mere confusion of
terms and cunning sleight of hand, the one being a
physical, the other a moral necessity. There is indeed no such fruitful source of confusion and mischief as this -to words are tacitly assumed as equivalent, and therefore exchangeable, and then that
which may be assumed, and with truth, of one, is
assumed also of the other, of which it is not true.
Thus, for instance, it often is with " instruction" and
" education."  Can not we "instruct" a child, it is
asked, can not we teach it geography, or arithmetic,
or grammar, quite independently of the catechism,
or even of the Scriptures? No doubt you may, but
can you "educate," without bringing moral and
spiritual forces to bear upon the mind and affections
of the child?  And you must not be permitted to
transfer the admissions which we freely make in regard of " instruction," as though they also held good
in respect of " education."  For what is " education"   Is it a furnishing of a man from without
with knowledge and facts and information? or is it
a drawing forth from within and a training of the
spirit, of the true humanity which is latent within
him? Is the process of education the filling of the
child's mind, as a cistern is filled with waters brought




INSTRUCTION, EDUCATION.         189
in buckets from some other source, or the opening
up of its own fountains? Now if we give any heed
to the word "education," and to the voice which
speaks in the word, we shall not long be in doubt.
Education must educe, being from " educare," which
is but another form of " educere;" and that is " to
draw out," and not "to put in."  "To draw out"
what is in the child, the immortal spirit which is
there, this is the end of education; and so much the
word declares. The putting in is indeed most needful, that is, the child must be instructed as well as
educated, and the word "instruction" just means
furnishing; but not instructed instead of educated.
He must first have powers awakened in him, measures of spiritual value given him; and then he will
know how to deal with the facts of this outward
world; then instruction in these will profit him; but
not without the higher training, still less as a substitute for it.
It has occasionally happened that the question of
which out of two apparent synonyms should be
adopted in some important state document has been
debated with no little earnestness and vigor. Thus
was it, for example, at the great English revolution
of 1688, when the two houses of parliament were for
a considerable time at issue whether it should be declared of James the Second, that he had " abdicated,"
or " deserted," the throne. This might seem at first
sight a mere strife about words, and yet, in reality,




190        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
serious constitutional questions were involved in the
selection of the one word or the other. The commons
insisted on the word " abdicated," not as wishing to
imply that in any act of the late king there had been
an official renunciation of the crown, which would
have been manifestly untrue; but because " abdicated" to their minds alone expressed the fact that
James had so borne himself as virtually to have entirely renounced, disowned, and relinquished the
crown, to have irrevocably forfeited and separated
himself from it, and from any right to it for ever;
while " deserted" would have seemed to leave room
and an opening for a return, which they were determined to declare for ever excluded; as, were it said
of a husband that he had " deserted" his wife, or of
a soldier that he had " deserted" his colors, this language would imply not only that he might, but that
he ought and was bound to return. Lord Somers'
speech on the occasion is a masterly specimen of
synonymous discrimination, and an evidence of the
uses in highest matters of state to which it may be
turned.
Let me press upon you in conclusion some few of
the many advantages to be derived from the habit
of distinguishing synonyms. These advantages we
might presume to be many, even though we could
not ourselves perceive them; for how often do the
great masters of style in every tongue, perhaps none




DISTINGUISHING SYNONYMS.                 191
so often as Cicero, the greatest of all,* pause to discriminate between the words they are using; how
much care and labor, how much subtlety of thought,
they have counted well bestowed on the operation;
how much importance do they avowedly attach to it;
not to say that their works, even where they do not
intend it, will be a continual lesson in this respect
a great writer merely in the accuracy with which he
employs words will always be exercising us in synon
ymous discrimination.   But the advantages of at
tending to them need not be taken on trust; they
are evident. How great a part of true wisdom it is
to be able to distinguish between things that differ,
things  seemingly, but not really alike, this  is remarkably attested by our words " discernment" and
" discretion;" which are now used as equivalent, the
first to " insight," the second to " prudence;" while
yet in their earlier usage, and according to their
etymology, being both from  " discerno," they signify
* Thus he distinguishes between voluntas and cupiditas; cautio
and metus (Tusc. 4, 6); gaudium, lIetitia, voluptas (Tusc. 4, 6; Fin.
2, 4); caritas and amor (De Part. Or. 25); ebrius and ebriosus, iracundus and iratus, anxietas and angor (Tusc. 4, 12); vitium, morbus,
segrotatio (Tusc. 4, 13); labor and dolor (Tusc. 2, 15); malitia and
vitiositas (Tusc. 4, 15); Quintilian also often bestows attention on
synonyms, observing well (vi. 3, 17): "Pluribus nominibus in eadem
re vulgo utimur; qume tamen si diducas, suam quandam propriam
vim ostendent:" and among church writers, Augustine is a frequent
and mostly a successful discriminator of words. Thus he separates
off from one another flagitium and facinus (De Doct. Christ. 3, 10);
semulatio and invidia (Exp. ad Gal. v. 20); arrha and pignus (Serm.
23, 8, 9); with many more.




192         THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
the power of so seeing things that in the seeing we
distinguish and separate them  one from  another.
Such were originally " discernment" and " discretion," and such in great measure they are still. And
in words is a material ever at hand on which to train
the spirit to a skilfulness in this; on which to exercise its sagacity through the habit of distinguishing
there where it would be so easy to confound. Nor is
this habit of discrimination only valuable as a part
of our intellectual training; but what a positive increase is it of mental wealth when we have learned
to discern between things, which really differ, but
have been hitherto confused in our minds; and have
made these distinctions permanently our own in the
only way by which they can be made secure, that is,
by assigning to each its appropriate word and peculiar sign.
What a help moreover will it prove to the writing
of a good English style, if instead of having many
words before us, and choosing almost at random and
at hap-hazard from  among them, we at once know
which, and which only, we ought in the case before
us to employ, which will be the exact vesture of our
thoughts. It is the first characteristic of a well-dressed
man that his clothes fit him: they are not too small
and shrunken here, too large and loose there. Now
it is precisely such a prime characteristic of a good
style that the words fit close to the thoughts: they
will not be too big here, hanging like a giant's robe




APPROPRIATE USE OF WORDS.          193
on the limbs of a dwarf; nor too small there, as a
boy's garments into which the man has with difficulty
and ridiculously thrust himself. You do not feel in
one place that the writer means more than he has
succeeded in saying; in another that he has said
more than he means; or in a third something beside
what his intention was: aqnd all this, from a lack of
dexterity in employing the instrument of language,
of precision in knowing what words would be the
exactest correspondents and fittest exponents of his
thought.
Now let us suppose this power of exactly saying
what we mean, and neither more nor less than we
mean, to be merely an elegant mental accomplishment. It is indeed this, and perhaps there is no
power so surely indicative of a high and accurate
training of the intellectual faculties. But it is also
much more than this: it has a moral meaning as well.
It is nearly allied to morality, inasmuch as it is nearly connected with truthfulness. Every man who has
himself in any degree cared for the truth, and occupied himself in seeking it, is more or less aware how
much of the falsehood in the world passes current
under the concealment of words, how many strifes
and controversies,
" Which feed the simple, and offend the wise,"
find all or nearly all their fuel and their nourishment
in words carelessly or dishonestly employed. And
when a man has had any actual experience of this
9




194        THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.
fact, and has at all perceived how far this mischief
reaches, he is sometimes almost tempted to say with
Shakspere's clown, "Words are grown so false, I am
loath to prove reason with them." He can not, however, forego their employment, not to say that he will
presently perceive that this falseness of theirs whereof he accuses them, this cheating power of words, is
not of their proper use, but their abuse; that however they may have been enlisted in the service of
lies, they are yet of themselves most true, and that
where the bane is, there the antidote should be sought
as well. Ask then words what they mean, that you
may deliver yourselves, that you may help to deliver
others from the tyranny of words, and from the strife
of " word-warriors.'  Learn to distinguish between
them, for you have the authority of Hooker, that " the
mixture of those things by speech, which by nature
are divided, is the mother of all error." And although
I can not promise you that the study of synonyms,
or the acquaintance with derivations, or any other
knowledge but the very highest knowledge of all,
will deliver you from the temptation to misuse this
or any other gift of God — a temptation which always lies so near us-yet I am sure that these studies
rightly pursued will do much in leading us to stand
in awe of this divine gift of words, and to tremble
at the thought of turning it to any other than those
worthy ends for which God has endowed us with it.




LECTURE  VI.
THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
I SHALL now attempt to apply, and to suggest some
ways in which you may apply, what has been hitherto spoken to practical ends, and make this study
of words, which I have been pressing upon you, to
tell upon your own teaching hereafter; for assuredly we ought never to disconnect what we ourselves
may learn, from the hope and expectation of being
able by its aid to teach others more effectually; our
studies, when we do so, become instantly a selfish
thing. There is a noble line in Chaucer, where, characterizing the true scholar, he says of him,
" And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach,"
and in the spirit of this line I trust that we shall each
one of us work and live.
But to address ourselves to the matter more directly
in hand. You all here are made acquainted with a
good deal more than the first rudiments of the Latin
tongue.  Every one who can at all appreciate what
your future task will be, must rejoice that it is so.
Indeed, it is hard to understand how you could be
otherwise fitted and accomplished for the work which




196    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
you have before you. It is conceivable in languages
like the Greek and the German, which, for all practical purposes, may be considered rounded and complete in themselves, which contain all the resources
for discovering the origin and meaning of their words
in their own bosom, or so nearly so, that the few exceptions need not be taken into account, in such languages, I say, it is conceivable that a thorough knowledge of his own tongue may be attained by one who
remains ignorant of any other, and that himself possessing, he may be able to impart this same knowledge to others. In fact, the Greek, who certainly
understood his own language thoroughly, never did
extend his knowledge beyond it. But it is different
with English. Would we follow up its words, not to
their remotest sources, but only a step or two, it carries us at once beyond itself and to a foreign soil, and
mainly to the Latin. This being the case, he who has
not some acquaintance with Latin can only explain a
vast number of words loosely and at hazard; he has
some general sense or impression of what they intend,
of the ideas which they represent, but nothing certain. He stands on no solid ground; he does not
feel able to plant himself securely as at a middle
point, from which, as from a common centre, all its
different meanings diverge.
And having these convictions in regard of the advantage of following up words to their sources of
"deriving" them, that is, of tracing each little rill to




PHONETIC SPELLING.             197
the river fiom which it first was drawn, let me here
observe, as something not remote from our subject,
but, on the contrary, directly bearing upon it, that I
can conceive no method of so effectually defacing
and barbarizing our English tongue, no scheme that
would go so far to empty it, practically at least and
for us, of all the hoarded wit, wisdom, imagination,
and history which it contains, to cut the vital nerve
which connects its present with the past, as the introduction of the scheme of "phonetic spelling,"
which some have lately been zealously advocating
among us; the principle of which is that all words
should be spelt according as they are sounded, that
the writing should be, in every case, subordinated to
the speaking.
The tacit assumption that it ought so to be is the
pervading'error running through the whole system.
But there is no necessity that it should; every word
on the contrary has two existences, as a spoken word
and a written; and you have no right to sacrifice one
of these, or even to subordinate it wholly, to the other. A word exists as truly for the eye as for the ear,
and in a highly advanced state of society, where
reading is almost as universal as speaking, as much
perhaps for the first as for the last. That in the
written word moreover is the permanence and continuity of language and of learning, and that the
connection is most intimate of a true orthography with
all this, is affirmed in our words " letters," " litera



198    THE SCHOOLMASTERI'S USE OF WORDS.
ture," "unlettered," even as in other languages by
words entirely corresponding to these.*
The gains consequent on the introduction of such
a change as is proposed would be insignificantly
small, while the losses would be enormously great.
The gains would be the saving of a certain amount
of labor in the learning to spell; an amount of labor,
however, absurdly exaggerated by the promoters of
the scheme. This labor, whatever it is, would be in
great part saved, as the pronunciation would at once
put in possession of the spelling; if, indeed, spelling
or orthography could then be said to exist. But even
this insignificant gain would not long remain, seeing
that pronunciation is itself continually altering; custom is lord here for better or for worse; and a multitude of words are now pronounced in a different
manner from that of a hundred years ago, so that,
ere very long, there would again be a chasm between
the spelling and pronunciation of words;-unless
indeed the former were to vary, as I do not see well
how it could consistently refuse to do with each variation of the latter, reproducing each one of its barbarous or capricious alterations; which thus it must
be remembered, would be changes not in the pronunciation only, but in the word itself, for the word
would only exist as a pronounced word, the written
being a mere shadow of this. When these had multiplied a little, and they would indeed multiply ex* As litterce, ypdapara, dypaplarog.




THE ANCESTRY OF WORDS.          199
ceedingly, so soon as the barrier against them which
now exists was removed, what the language would
ere long become, it is not easy to guess.
This fact, however, though alone sufficient to show
how little the scheme of phonetic spelling would remove even those inconveniences which it proposes to
remedy, is only the smallest objection to it. The far
deeper and more serious one is, that in innumerable
instances, it would obliterate altogether those clear
marks of birth and parentage, which, if not all, yet
so many of our words bear now upon their very fronts,
or are ready, upon a very slight interrogation, to
declare to us. Words have now an ancestry; and
the ancestry of words as of men is often a very noble
part of them, making them capable of great things,
because those from whom they are descended have
done great things before them; but this would deface
their scutcheon, and bring them all to the same ignoble level. Words are now a nation, grouped into
tribes and families, some smaller, some larger; this
change would go far to reduce them to a promiscuous and barbarous horde. Now they are often translucent with their idea, as an alabaster vase is lighted
up by a lamp placed within it; in how many cases
would this inner light be then quenched. They have
now a body and a soul, and the soul looking through
the body; oftentimes then nothing but the body, not
seldom nothing but the carcase, of the word would
remain. Both these objections were urged long ago




200    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
by Bacon, who characterizes this so-called reform ation, " that writing should be consonant to speaking,"
as " a branch of unprofitable subtlety;" and especially urges that thereby " the derivations of words,
especially from foreign languages are utterly defaced and extinguished."
From the results of various approximations to phonetic spelling, which from time to time have been
made, and the losses which have thereon ensued, we
may guess what the loss would be were the system
fully carried out. When " fancy" was spelt " phantsy," as by Sylvester in his translation of Du Bartas,
and by the other scholarlike writers of that time, no
one could then doubt of its connection, or rather its
original identity, with "phantasy," as no Greek
scholar could miss its relation with 0avracia.  Of those
sufficiently acquainted with Latin, it would be curious to know how many have seen "silva" in " savage," since it has been so written, and not " salvage,"
as of old? or have been reminded of the hinderances
to a civilized state of existence which the indomitable
forest, more perhaps than any other obstacle, presents. Spell " analyse" as I have sometimes seen it,
and as phonetically it ought to be, "analize," and
the tap-root of the word is cut. What number of
readers will recognise in it then the image of dissolving and resolving aught into its elements, and use it
with a more or less conscious reference to this? It
may be urged that few do so even now among those




THE RELATIONSHIP OF WORDS.                   2(1
who employ the  word.  The more need  they should
not be fewer; foi these few do in fact retain the word
in its place, prevent it from gradually drifting from
it, preserve its vitality not merely for themselves, but
also for the others that have not this knowledge. In
phonetic spelling is in fact the proposal that the educated should voluntarily place themselves in the conditions and under the disadvantages of the ignorant
and uneducated, instead of seeking to elevate these
last to theirs.*
Even now the relationship of words, which are so
important for our right understanding of them, are
continually overlooked; a very little thing serving to
conceal them  from  us.  For example, what a multitude of our nouns substantive and adjective are, in
fact, unsuspected  participles, or are otherwise  most
* The same attempt to introduce phonetic spelling, or "phonography" as it is there called, has been several times made, once in the
sixteenth century, and again some twenty years ago, in France. Let
us see by one or two examples what would be the results there.
Here is the word "temps;" from which the phronographists omit the
p as superfluous. What is the consequence? at once its visible connection with the Latin "tempus," with the Spanish "tiempo," with
the Italian "tempo," with its own "temporel" and "temporaire," is
broken, and for many effaced. Or again, here are "poids" a weight,
"poix" pitch,'"pois" peas. I do not suppose the Frenchman who
spoke his own language the best, could mark in pronunciation the
distinction between these; and thus to the ear there may be confusion between them, but to the eye there is none; not to say that the
d in "poids" puts it for us at once in relation with "pondus," the x
in "poix" with "pix," the s in "pois" with the low Latin "pisum."
In each case the letter which these improvers of orthography would
dismiss as useless and worse than useless, contains the secret of the
word.
*




202    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
closely connected with verbs, with which, notwithstanding, until some one points out the fact to us, we
probably never think of putting them in any relation.
And yet with how lively an interest shall we discover
words to be of closest kin, which we had never considered till now, but as entire strangers to one another;
what a real increase will it be in our acquaintance
with, and mastery of, English to become aware of
such relationship. Thus " heaven" is only the perfect
of  to heave;" and is so called because it is " heaved"
or "heaven" up, being properly the sky as it is raised
aloft; the "smith" has his name from  the sturdy
blows that he "smites" upon the anvil; "wrong" is
the perfect participle of " to wring," that which one
has " wrung" or wrested from the right; just as in
French " tort," from " torqueo," is that which is
twisted; " guilt" of " to guile" or " beguile;" to find
" guilt" in a man is to find that he has been "beguiled," that is by the devil, "instigante diabolo,"
as it is inserted in all indictments for murder, the
forms of which come down to us fiom a time when
men were not ashamed of tracing evil to his inspiration. The " brunt" of the battle is the " heat" of the
battle, where it " burns" the most fiercely.  " Iaft,"
as of a knife, is properly only the participle perfect
of " to have," that whereby you " have" or hold it.
(r take two or three nouns adjective; " strong" is
the participle past of "to string;" a " strong" mai*
means no more than one whose sinews are firmly




COMMON PARENTAGE OF MANY WORDS.   203
" strung."  The "left" hand, as distinguished from
the right, is the hand which we "leave;" inasmuch
as for twenty times we use the right hand, we do not
once employ it; and it obtains its name from being
"left" unused so often. " Odd" is, I believe, properly " owed;" an "odd" glove, or an "odd" shoe is
one that is " owed" to another, or to which another
is " owed," for the making of a pair-just as we
speak of a man being " singular," wanting, that is,
his match. -" Wild" is the participle past of " to
will;" a "wild" horse is a "willed" or self-willed
horse, one that has been never tamed or taught to
submit its will to the will of another; and so with a
man.
This exercise of putting words in their true relation
and connection with one another might be carried
much further.  We might take whole groups of
words, which seem to us at first sight to acknowledge
hardly any kinship, if indeed any, with one another,
and yet with no great difficulty show that they had
a common parentage and descent.  For instance,
here  are " shire,"  " shore,"  " share," " sheers;"
"shred," "sherd;" they all are derived from one
Anglo-Saxon word, which signifies to separate or divide, nld still exists with us in the shape of "to
sheer," which made once the three perfects, " shore,"
" share," " shered." " Shire" is a district in England,
as it is separated from the rest; a " share" is a portion of anything thus divided off; "sheers" are in



204'THE SCHOOLMASTER S USE OF WORDS.
stullments effecting this process of separation; the
" shore" is the place where the continuity of the land
is interrupted or separated by the sea; a " shred" is
that which is " shered" or shorn from the main piece;
a " sherd" as a pot-" sherd" that which is broken off
and thus divided from the vessel; and these which
I have adduced by no means exhaust this group or
family of words, though it would take more time
than I can spare to put some other words in relation
with it.
But this analyzing of groups of words for the detecting of the bond of relationship between them, and
the one root out of which they all grow, is a process
which may require more etymological knowledge
than you possess, and more helps fi'om books than
you can always expect to command. There is another process, and one which may prove no less useful to yourselves and to others, which will lie more
certainly within your reach. It will often happen
that you will meet in books, sometimes in the same
book, and perhaps in the same page of this book, a
word used in senses so far apart from one another,
that it will seem to you at first sight almost absurd
to assume as possible that there can be any bond of
connection between them. Now when you do thus
ftll in with a word employed in these two or more
senses seemingly far removed firom one another, accustom yourselves to seek out the bond which there
certainly is )between these its several uses. This




THE WORD POST.                205
tracing of that which is common to and connects all
its meanings can of course only be done by getting
to its'heart, to the seminal meaning, from which, as
from a fruitful seed, all the others unfold themselves;
to the first link in the chain, from which every later
one, in a direct line or a lateral, depends.  And we
may proceed in this investigation, certain that we
shall find such, or at least that such there is to be
found. For this we may start with, as being lifted
above all doubt (and the non-recognition of it is the
great fault in Johnson's dictionary), that a word has
originally but one meaning, and that all the others,
however widely they may diverge from one another
and seem to recede from this one, may yet be affiliated upon it, may be brought back to the one central
meaning, which grasps and knits them all together;
just as the races of men, black, white, and red, despite of all their present diversity and dispersion,
have a central point of unity in their first parents.
Let me illustrate what I mean by two or three
familiar examples.  Here is the word "post;" how
various are the senses in which it is employed; "post"office; " post"-haste; a " post" standing in the ground;
a military " post;" an official " post;" "to post" a
leger. Might one not at first presume it impossible
to bring all these uses of " post" to a common centre?
Yet indeed when once on the right track, nothing is
easier; " post" is the Latin " positus," that which is
placed; the piece of timber is "placed" in the




206    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
ground, and so a "post;" a military station is a
"post," for a man is "placed" in it, and must not
quit it without orders; to travel " post," is tT have
certain relays of horses "placed" at intervals, that
so no delay on the road may occur; the " post"-office
is that which avails itself of this mode of communication; to " post" a leger is to " place" or register
its several items.
Or take the word " stock;" in what an almost infinite number of senses it is employed; we have live
" stock," " stock" in trade, the village " stocks," the
"stock" of a gun, the " stock" dove, the " stocks" on
which ships are built, the "stock" which goes round
the neck, the family " stock," the " stocks," or public
funds, in which money is invested, and other " stocks"
very likely besides these. What point in common
can we find between them all?  This, that they are
all derived from, and were originally the past participle of " to stick," which as it now makes " stuck,"
made formerly " stock;" and they cohere in the idea
of'fixedness, which is common to every one. Thus,
the " stock" of a gun is that in which the barrel is
fixed; the village "stocks" are those in which the
feet are fastened; the " stock" in trade is the fixed
capital; and so, too, the " stock" on the farm, although the fixed capital has there taken the shape
of horses and cattle.; in the " stocks," or public funds,
money sticks fast, inasmuch as those who place it
there can not withdraw or demand the capital, but




THE WORD QUICK.                207
receive only the interest; the "stock" of a tree
is fast set in the ground; and from this use of the
word it is transferred to a family; the "stock" or
" stirps" is that from  which it grows, and out of
which it unfolds itself. And here we may bring in
the " stock"-dove, as being the " stock" or stirps
of the domestic kinds. I might group with these,
"stake" in both its spellings; a " stake" in the
hedge is stuck and fixed there; the " stakes" which
men wager against the issue of a race are paid down,
and thus fixed or deposited to answer the event; a
beef-" steak" is a piece of meat so small that it can
be stuck on the point of a fork; with much more of
the same kind.
How often does the word " quick" in the creed
perplex children; and even after they have learned
that " the quick and the dead" mean the living and
the dead, they know it only on trust; for they fail
to put this " quick" in any connection with the
" quick" of their own vocabulary, the " quick" with
which they bid one another to throw up the ball, or
the " quick"-set hedge which runs round their father's garden, or the " quick" parts for which some
unwise person has praised one of them at school:
yet that all these are one and the same " quick" it is
of course very easy to show. Life is the fundamental idea of the word " quick," and in this its primary
sense it is used in the creed, " the quick and the
dead:" so too the " quick"-set hedge is properly the




208    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
living fence, as contrasted with those made of dead
timbers. But motion, as it is at once of the essence,
so it is also one of the most obvious signs of life; and
thus " quick" in a secondary sense was applied to
all which was rapid or prompt in its motions, whether bodily or mental; thus a " quick" runner, a boy
of " quik" parts; and so too " quick"-silver, and
" quick" or fast shifting sands.  The same sense of
the connection between life and motion has given us
our secondary use of the words, " animated" and
" lively."
Sometimes a slightly-different spelling comes in
aid of an enormous divergence of meaning, to disguise the fact of two words having originally rested
on one and the same etymology, and really being so
closely related to one another, that we may say, in
fact, they are one and the same word. I would instance as a notable example of this, " canon" with a
single n, as the " canon" of scripture, and " cannon,"
or heavy artillery. Can there, it may well be asked,
be any point in common between them? can they
be resolved ultimately into the same word? I believe they can. The word " canon" with the single
n, which is a Greek word, means properly " rule;"
first, the measuring rule or line of the carpenter;
and then figuratively any measure or rule by which
we try other things; and in its crowning use, the
Holy Scriptures, as being regulative of life and doctrine in the church.  But the carpenter's rule was




CANON, CANNON.                  209
conmmonly a reed (canna), that being selected on account of its straightness; you may remember in
scripture mention once or twice being made of the
measuring "reed" (Rev. xxi. 15, 16); and from  this
reed or " canna," the rule or line (the " canon") had
its name, or at any rate the words are most closely
allied. A reed, however, as we all know, besides
being straight is also hollow, and thus it came to
pass when the hollow engines of war, our modern
artillery, were invented, and were feeling about for
their appropriate name, none was nearer at hand
than this which the reed supplied, and they were
called " cannon" too.*
When it is thus said that we can always reduce
tile different meanings in which a word is employed
to some one point from which they all immediately
or mediately proceed, that no word has primarily
more than one meaning, it must be remembered that
it is quite possible there may be two words pronounced and even spelled exactly alike, which yet
are wholly different in their derivation and primary
usage; and that of course between these no bond of
union on the score of this identity is to be sought;
neither does this fact in the least invalidate the assertion.  We have in such cases, as Cobbett has ex* In confirmation of this view of the derivation of " cannon," and
in proof that it lay very near to the imagination of men to liken
them to reeds, we have the application of " Rohr" in German, which,
at first signifying a cane or reed, has in like manner been applied to
the barrel of r. gun.




210    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
pressed it well, the same combination of letters, but
not the same word. Thus we have " page," one side
of a leaf, fiom "pagina," and "page," a youthful'attendant, from  quite another word; "league," a
treaty, from  " ligare," to bind, and "league," a
measure of distance, thought to be a word of Gallic
origin; we have "host," an army, from  "hostis,"
and " host," in the Roman catholic sacrifice of the
mass, from  " hostia;" so, too, " stories," which we
tell, and " stories" or " stayeries" of a house, which
we mount; " Mosaic," as the " Mosaic" law, derived
from the name of the great lawgiver of Israel, " mosaic," as "mosaic work," which is " opus musvu;"
with other words, such as " date," "mint," " ounce,"
"dole," "bull," "plain," not a few. In all these
the identity is merely on the surface, and it would
of course be lost labor to seek for a point of contact
between meanings which have not any closer connection really than apparently with one another.
Let me suggest some further exercises in this region
of words, which I will venture to promise that you
will find profitable as ministering to the activity of
your own minds, as helping to call out a like activity
in those of others. Do not, I would say then once
more, suffer words to pass you by, which at once
provoke and promise to reward inquiry, by the
readiness with which evidently they will yield up
the secret of their birth or of their use, if duly interrogated by us. Many we must all be content to




WHAT CANDIDATE MEANS.            211
leave, whi h will defy all efforts to dissipate the
mystery which hangs over them, but of many also it
is evident on their surface that these explanations
can not be very far to seek. I would instance such
a word as " candidate."  At a contested election
how familiar are the ears of all with this word, nor
can it be said to be strange to us at other times.
Now does it not argue an incurious spirit to be content that this word should thus be given and received by us a hundred times, and we never to ask
ourselves, What does it mean? Why is one seeking to be elected to a seat in parliament, or otherwise offering himself to the choice of his fellows,
called a " candidate"?  If the word lay evidently
beyond our reach, we might acquiesce in our ignorance here, as in such infinite other matters; but
resting, as on the face of it it does, upon the Latin
"candidus," it challenges inquiry, and a very little
of this would at once put us in possession of the Ioman custom  out of which the word grew, and to
which it alludes-namely, that those who intended
to offer themselves to the suffrages of the people for
any of the great offices of the state, presented themselves beforehand to them in a white toga, being
called therefore "candidati," with other not uninteresting particulars. And as it so often happens
that in the act of seeking information on one subject
we obtain it upon another, so will it probably be
here; for in making yourself fully aware of what




212    THE SCHOOLMASTER S USE OF WORDS.
this custom was, you will hardly fail to learn the
original meaning of " ambition," and whence we
have obtained the word.
Or, again, any one who knows so much as that
" verbum" means a "word," might well be struck
by the fact, and if he followed it up would be led
far into the relation of the parts of speech to one another, that grammarians do not employ "verbum,"
as one might previously have expected, to signify
any word whatsoever, but restrict it to the verb
alone; "verbum" is the verb. Surely here is matter for thought; why does the verb monopolize the
dignity of being the " word"? what is there in it
which gives it the right to do so? Is it because the
verb is the animating power, the vital principle of
every sentence, and that without which, either understood or uttered, no sentence can exists or is
there any other cause?  I leave this to your own
consideration.
Again, here is " conscience," a solemn word, if
there be such in the world. Now there is not one
of us whose Latin will not bring him so far as to tell
him that this word is from " con" and " scire." But
what does that " con" intend? " Conscience" is not
merely that which I know, but that which I know
with some one else; for this prefix can not, as I think,
be esteemed superfluous, or taken to imply merely
that which I know with or to myself. That other
knower whom the word implies is God, his law ma



CONSCIENCE -  CLASSICS.                213
king itself known and felt in the heart; and the
work of " conscience" is the bringing of each of our
acts and thoughts as a lesser, to be tried and measured by this as a greater, the word growing out of
and declaring that awful duplicity of our moral being which arises from the presence of God in the
soul —our thoughts  by  the  standard  which  that
presence supplies, and as the result of a comparison
with it, " accusing or excusing one another."*
Once  more, you  call certain  books  " classics."
You have indeed a double use of the word, for you
speak of Greek and Latin as the classical languages,
and  the great writers in  these as " the classics;"
while at other times you hear of a " classical" English style, or of English " classics."   Now  " classic"
is connected plainly, as we all perceive, with " classis."   What then does it mean in itself, and how
has it arrived  at this double use?  "The term  is
* Many ethical writers, as is well known, pass by the " con" in
their explanation of "conscience," finding merely the expression of
the certainty of the inner moral conviction in the word; for which
view they sometimes adduce the German "gewissen;" yet I can not
think but that herein they err: " conscience," in the words.of South,
" according to the very notation of it, importing a double or joint
knowledge; to wit, one of a divine law or rule, and the other of a
man's own action; and so is properly the application of a general
law to a particular instance of practice. And Vossius (De Theol.
Gent. 3, 42): "Est enim conscientia syllogismus, cujus major est
principium practicum a conscientia suggestum; minor est bona, malave actio nostra; conclusio autem actionem ad normam istius principii collatam, ant probat, ant improbat; ex quo, pro conclusionis
diversitate, vel tranquilitas animi sequitur, vel intranquillitas."




214    rHE SCHOOLMASTER S USE OF WORDS.
drawn from the political economy of Rome. Such
a man was rated as to his income in the third class,
such another in the fourth, and so on; but he who
was in the highest was emphatically said to be of
the class,'classicus'- a class-man, without adding
the number, as in that case superfluous; while all
others were infra classem. Hence, by an obvious
analogy, the best authors were rated as'classici,'
or men of the highest class; just as in English we
say'men of rank,' absolutely for men who are in
the highest ranks of the state." The mental process
by which this title, which would apply rightly to
the best authors in all languages, came to be often
confined to those only in two, and those two to be
claimed, to the seeming exclusion of all others, as
the classical languages, is one of the most constantly
recurring, and most widely extended, making itself
felt in all times and in all regions of human life, and
one to which I would in passing just direct your attention, though I can not here do more.
But seek, I would further urge you, to attain a consciousness of the multitude of words which there are,
that now use only in a figurative sense, did yet
originally rest on some fact of the outward world,
vividly presenting itself to the imagination; a fact
which the word has incorporated for ever, having
become, as all words originally were, the indestructible vesture of a thought. If I may judge from my
own experience, I think there are few intelligent




IMAGERY IN WORDS.             215
boys in your schools, who would not feel that they
had gotten something, when you had shown them
that "to insult" means properly to leap as on the
prostrate body of a foe; " to affront," to strike him
on the face; that "to succor" means to run and
place oneself under one that is falling, and thus support and sustain him; "to relent" (connected with
"lentus," not " lenis"), to slacken the swiftness of
one's pursuit; "to reprehend," to lay hold of one
with the intention of forcibly pulling him back from
the way of his error; that " to be examined" means
to be weighed. They would be pleased to learn that
a man is called " supercilious," because haughtiness
with contempt of others expresses itself by the raising of the eyebrows or " supercilium;" that " subtle"
is literally " fine-spun;"* that " imbecile," which we
use for weak, and now always for weak in intellect,
means strictly (unless indeed we must renounce this
etymology), leaning upon a staff (in bacillo), as one
aged or infirm might do; that " chaste" is properly
white, "castus" being the participle of " candeo,"
as is now  generally allowed; that " astonished"
means struck with thunder; that " sincere" may be,
I will not say that it is, without wax (sine cera), as
the best and finest honey should be; that a " companion" is one with whom we share our bread, a
messmate; that "desultory," which perhaps they
have been warned they should not be in thein
* Subtilis- subtexilis.




216    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
studies, but have never attached any very definite
meaning to the warning, means properly leaping as
a rider in the circus does from the back of one running horse to the back of another, this rider being
technically called a " desultor;" and the word being
transferred from  him  to those who suddenly and
abruptly change their courses of study.
"Trivial," again, is a word borrowed from  the
life; mark three or four persons standing idly at
the point where one street bisects at right angles another, and discussing there the worthless gossip, the
idle nothings of the day; there you have the living
explanation of the words " trivial," "trivialities,"
such as no explanation which did not thus root itself
in the etymology would ever give you, or enable you
to give to others.  For there you have the "tres
vise," the "trivium;" and "trivialities" properly
mean such talk as is holden by those idle loiterers
that gather at these meetings of three roads. And
"rivals" by curious steps has attained its present
meaning; the history of which steps can hardly fail
to interest. " Rivals," in the primary sense of the
word, are those who dwell on the banks of the same
stream. But since, as all experience shows, there is
no such fruitful source of contention as a water-right,
it would continually happen that these occupants of
the opposite banks would be at strife with one another in regard of the periods during which they
severally had a right to the use of the stream. turn



NAMES OF ENGLISH BIRDS.         217
ing it off into their own fields before the time, or
leaving open the sluices beyond the time, or in other
ways interfering, or being counted to interfere, with
the rights of their opposite neighbors. And thus
" rivals," which at first applied only to those dwellers on opposite banks of a river, came afterward to
be used of any who were on any grounds in more
or less unfriendly competition with one another.
Or if your future pupils shall be your companions
in your walks (as it always speaks well for a teacher's influence that he is sought, not shunned by his
pupils in play hours), how much will there be which
you may profitably impart to them, suggested by the
names of common things which will meet you there;
how much which you, if you know it, will love to
tell, and they will be well pleased to hear. Who
would not care, for instance, to know something about
the names of our English birds; that the " king-fisher," which attracted all eyes as it darted swiftly by
the river's edge, was so called from the royal beauty,
the kingly splendor of its plumage; that the "hawk,"
if it be not the same word with " havoc" (and it was
called " hafoc" in Anglo-Saxon), has at least a common origin; its very name announcing the "havoc"
and destruction which it makes among the smaller
birds, just as in the " raven's" name is expressed its
greedy, or as we say "ravenous," disposition? Or
when they are listening of an evening to the harsh
10




218    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
shriekings of the " owl," that the name of this disso
nant night-bird is in fact the past participle of " to
yell," and differs from "howl" in nothing but its
spelling, as plainly comes out in the fact that the
diminutive is as often spelt with an h as without it"howlets" as often as " owlets" 2  Even the little
"dabchick" which so haunts our waters here, diving
and dipping when any one approaches, it may be as
well to know why it has this name, that the first syllable would more correctly be spelt with ap than a
), this " dap" being the old perfect of "to dip," so
that the name is no idle unmeaning thing, but brings
out the most salient characteristic of the bird which
bears it, it swift diving and "dipping" under the
water at every apprehension of danger: just as in
Latin a certain water-fowl is called " mergus," from
" mergo."
Or taking them into the corn-fields, you miay point
out how the " cockle" which springs up only too luxuriantly in some of our Iampshire furrows, acquires
its name from that which often it effectually does,
namely from its "choking" or strangling the good seed.
And the word " field" itself is worth taking note of,
for it throws us back upon a period when England
was covered, as is a great part of America now, with
forests; "field" meaning properly a clearing where
the trees have been " felled," or cut down, as in all
our early English writers it is spelt without the i,
"feld" and not "field," even as you will find in then




AMUSEMENT, RELAXATION.            219
that "wood" and " feld" are continually set over,
and contrasted with, one another.
In such ways you may often improve, and without
turning play-time into lesson-time, the hours of relaxation and amusement.  But I must not here let escape me these words, " relaxation" and " amusement,"
on which I have lighted as by chance.  "Amusement," or as with another striking image we call it,
" recreation," what is it, and what does it affirm of
itself? Why plainly this, that it must be first earned;
for let us only question the word a little closer, and
see what it involves.  It is plainly, "a musis," that
is, a temporary suspension of, and turning away from,
severer studies, which severer studies are represented
here by the Muses, who, I may just remind you,
were the patronesses in old time not of poetry alone,
but of history, geometry, and all other studies as
well.  What shall we then say of them, who would
fain have their lives to be all " amusement," or who
claim it otherwise than as this temporary withdrawal
"A inusis"  The very word condemns them; even
as that other word " relaxation" does the same.  Iow
can the bow be relaxed or slackened, for this of course
is the image, which has not ever been bent, whose
string has never been drawn tight? Let us draw it
tight by earnest toil, and then we may look to have
it from time to time relaxed. IHaving been attentive
and assiduous, then, but not otherwise, we may claim
relaxation and amusement.  But "attentive" and




220    THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
" assiduous," are themselves words which it is worth
our while to realize what they mean.  He then is
"assiduous," who sits close to his work; he is " attentive," who stretches out his neck that so he may bring
the organ of hearing nearer to the speaker, and lose
none of his words. And then what a lesson the word
" diligence" contains.  How profitable is it for every
one of us to be reminded, as we are reminded when
we make ourselves aware of its derivation from
" diligo," to love, that the only secret of true industry
in our work is love of that work.  And as there is a
great truth wrapped up in " diligence," what a lie on
the other hand lurks at the root of our present use of
the word " indolence."  This is from " in" and " doleo," not to grieve; and " indolence" is thus a state
in which we have no grief or pain; so that the word,
employed as we now employ it, seems to affirm that
indulgence in sloth and ease is that which would
constitute for us the absence of all pain. Now it
may be quite true that " pain" and " pains" are often
nearly allied; no one would wish to deny this; but
yet these pains hand us over to true pleasures; while
indolence is so far from yielding what it is so forward
to promise, and we with our slothful self-indulgent
hearts are so ready to expect, that Cowper spoke only
truth, when, perhaps purposing expressly to witness
against the falsehood of this word, he spoke of
Lives spent in indolence, and therefore sad."
not "therefore glad,' as the word would promise.




FOSTERING A NATIONAL SPIRIT.        221
Let me mention another method in which these
studies which I have been urging upon you, may be
turned to account in your future work. Doubtless
you will ever seek to cherish in your scholars, to keep
lively in yourselves, that spirit and temper which attach a special value aid interest to all having to do
with the land of our birth, that land which the providence of God has assigned as the sphere of our life's
work and of theirs. Our schools are called " national," and if we would have them  such more than in
name we must neglect nothing that will assist us in
fostering a national spirit in them.  I know not
whether this is sufficiently considered among us, and
yet I am sure that we can not have church schools
worthy the name, and least of all in England, unless
they are truly national as well. It is the anti-national character of the Romish system, though I do not
in the least separate this from its anti-scriptural, but
rather regard the two as most intimately cohering
with one another, which mainly revolts Englishmen;
as we have lately very plainly seen; and if their
sense of this should ever grow weak, their protest
against that system would soon lose nearly all of its
energy and strength. Now here, as everywhere else,
knowledge must be the food of love. Your pupils
must know something about England, if they are to
love it; they must see some connection of its past
with its present, of what it has been with what it now
is, if they are to feel that past as anything to them.




22 2    TIlE SCHOOLMASTER'S USEl OF WORIS.
And as no impresses of the past upon the present
are so abiding, so none, when once attention has been
awakened to them, are so self-evident as those which
names preserve; although, without this calling of the
attention to them, the most broad and obvious of
these foot-prints of time may very probably continue
to escape our observation to the end of our lives.
Leibnitz tell us, and one can quite understand, the
delight with which a great German emperor, Maximilian the First, discovered that " Habsburg," the
ancestral name of his house, really had a meaning,
one moreover full of vigor and poetry. This he did,
when he heard it by accident on the lips of a Swiss
peasant, no longer cut short and thus disguised, but
in its original fullness, " Habichtsburg," or " Hawk's
tower," being no doubt the name of the castle which
was the cradle of his race. Of all the thousands of
Englishmen who are aware that the Angles and Saxons established themselves in this island, and that we
are in the main descended from them, it would
be curious to know how many have realized that
this " England" means " Angle-land," or that in the
names Essex, Sussex, and Middlesex, we preserve a
record to this day of East-Saxons, South-Saxons, and
Middle-Saxons, who occupied those several portions
of the land; or that Norfolk and Suffolk are two
broad divisions of "northern" and " southern folk,"
into which the East-Anglian kingdom was divided.
I can not but believe that these Angles and these




MARKS LEFT BY THE DANES.           223
Saxons, about whom our pupils may be reading, will
be to them more like actual men of flesh and blood,
who indeed trod this same soil which we are treading now, when we can thus point to the traces of
them surviving to the present day, which they have
left behind them, and which England, as long as it
is England, will retain.
And then as regards the Danes-all of us who are
at all acquainted with the early history of our land,
will be aware how much Danish blood there is in
the veins of Englishmen; what large colonies from
Scandinavia (for probably as many came from Nor
way as from modern Denmark), settled in some parts
of this island. It will be interesting to show that
the limits of this Danish settlement and occupation
may even now be confidently traced by the frequent
occurrence in all such districts of the names of towns
and villages ending in " bye," which word signified
in their language, " town," as Netherby, Appleby,
Derby. Thus if you examine closely a map of Lincolnshire, one of the chief seats, as is well known, of
Danish immigration, you will find that well-nigh a
fourth part of the towns and villages have this ending; the whole coast is indeed studded with them;
while here in Hampshire it is utterly unknown.
Who that has seen London from one of its bridges,
with that wondrous forest of masts stretching down
the river, or that has only heard of its commerce, but
would learn with interest that " London," according




224    THE SCHOOLMASTER S USE OF WORDS.
to the most probable etymology, is a name formed
out of two Celtic words, and means, "city of ships' "
Such a prophecy of the fiture greatness of the great
commercial capital of England and of the world lay
from the very first in the name which it bore; not to
say that this name indicates that from earliest times,
before a Roman had set his foot upon the soil, the
wonderfully advantageous position of London for
commerce had been discovered and improved.
You are yourselves learning, or hereafter you may
be teaching others, the names and number of the
English counties or shires. What a dull routine task
for them and for you this may be, tasking the memory,
but supplying no food for the intellect, no points of
attachment for any of its higher powers to take hold
of. And yet in these two little words " shire" and
" county," if you would make them render up even
a small part of their treasure, what lessons of English
history are contained. One who knows the origin of
these names, and how we come to possess such a
double nomenclature, looks far into the social condition of England in that period when the rudimental
germs of all that has since made it glorious and great
were being laid, and by these words may show how the
present links itself with the remotest past; how of a
land as of a person, it may be truly said, " the child is
father of the man." " Shire," as I observed just now,*
is connected with " shear," "share," and is properly
* See page 203.




SHIRE AND COUNTY.              225
a portion " sheared" or " shorn" off. When a Saxon
king would create an earl, it did not lie in men's
thoughts, accustomed as they then were to deal wit}'
realities, that such could be, as now it may, a mnerel]
titular creation, or could exist without territoria
jurisdiction; and a " share" or " shire" was assigned
him to govern, which also gave him his title.  But
at the Conquest this Saxon officer was displaced by
a Norman, the " earl" by the " count" -this title of
"count," borrowed from  the later Roman empire,
meaning originally " companion" (comes), one who
had the honor of being closest companion to his leader; and the " shire" was now the " county" (corni
tatus), as governed by this " comes."  In that singular and inexplicable fortune of words, which causes
some to disappear and die out under circumstances
most favorable for life, others to hold their ground
when all seemed against them, " count" has disappeared from  the titles of English nobility, while
" earl" has recovered its place; although in evidence of the essential identity of the two titles, or
offices rather, the wife of the earl is entitled a " countess;" and in further memorial of these great changes
that so long ago came over our land, the two names' shire" and "' county" equally survive as household
and in the main interchangeable words in our mouths.
Let us a little consider, in conclusion, how we
may usefully bring our etymologies and our other




226    THE SCHOOLMASTER' S USE OF WORDS.
notices of words to bear on the religious teaching
which we would impart in our schools. To do thlis
with much profit we must often deal with words as
the queen does with the gold and silver coin of the
realm, When this has been current long, and by
much use and often passing from man to man, with
perhaps occasional clipping in dishonest hands, has
quite lost the clear brightness, the well-defined sharpness of outline, and a good part of the weight and
intrinsic value which it had when first issued from
the royal mint, it is the sovereign's prerogative to recall it, and issue it anew, with her image stamped
on it afiesh, bright, and sharp, weighty and full as
at first. Now to a process such as this the true
mint-masters of language will often submit the words
which they use; and something of this kind we all
of us may do. Where use and custom have worn
away the significance of words, we too may recall
and issue them afresh. And this has been the case
with how many; for example, with a word which
will be often in your mouths-the "lessons" of the
day. What is " lessons" here for most of us but a
lazy synonym for the morning and evening chapters
appointed to be read in church? But realize the
word " lessons," and what the church intended in
calling these chapters by this name; namely, that
they are to be the daily instruction of her children.
Listen to them as such; address yourselves to their
explanation in the spirit of this word; make your




BIBLE-COLLECT.               227
pupils regard them in this light; show them that,
using this name in regard of them, they affirm them
to be such, to be not in word only but in truth
daily "lessons" for every one.
The "Bible" itself-with no irreverent use of the
word, it may yet be no more to us than the sign by
which we designate the written word of God. But
if we ask ourselves what the word means, and know
that it means simply " the book," so that there was
a time when " bible" in English would be applied
to any book (in Chaucer it is so), then how much
matter of thought and reflection is here, and in this
our present restriction of the word to one book, to
the exclusion of all others. So prevailing, that is,
has been the sense of Holy Scripture being the
Book, the worthiest and best, that one which explained all other books, standing up in their midst
-like Joseph's kingly sheaf, to which all the other
sheaves did obeisance-that this name of "bible"
or "book" has come to be restricted to it alone: just
as " scripture" means no more than " writing;" but
this inspired writing has been felt to be so far above
all other writings, that this name also it has challenged as exclusively its own.
You will present, I think, to your pupils the collects wh'ch they learn from Sunday to Sunday under
a more interesting aspect, when you have taught
them that they probably are so called because they
" collect," as into a focus, the teaching of the epistle




228    rlTHEl SCITOOLMASTER'S USE-OF WORDS.
and gospel, gathering them up in a single petition;
and from this you may profitably exercise them in
tracing the bond of relation which thus will be found
ever to exist between the collect, and the epistle and
gospel which follow it.  Who again will not be
pleased to know that " Whit"-Sunday is  "White"
Sunday, in all likelihood so called because of the
multitude of " white"-robed catechumens that used
upon this day of the pentecostal gifts to be presented
at the font?  And I am sure there is much to be
learned from knowing that the "surname," as distinguished from the Christian name, is the name
over and above, not the "sire"-name, or name received from the father, but " sur"-name (super nomen) -that, while there never was a time when
every baptized man had not a Christian name, inasmuch as his personality before God was recognised,
yet the surname, the name expressing a man's relation, not to the kingdom of God, but to the worldly
society in which he lives, is only of a much later
growth, an addition to the other, as the word itself
declares. And what a lesson at once in the upgrowth of human society, and in the contrast between
it and the heavenly society, might be appended to
this explanation. There was a period when only a
few had surnames, only a few, that is, had any significance or importance in the order of things temporal; while the Christian name from the first was
common to every man. Surely this may be brought




RIE ELATION -ABSOLUTION.        229
usefully to bear on your exposition of the first words
in the Catechism.
And then, further, in regard of the long Latin
words, which, with all our desire to use all plainness
of speech, we yet can not do without, nor find their
adequate substitutes in the other parts of our language, but which must remain the vehicles of so
much of the truth by which we live -in explaining
these, make it, I would say, your rule always to
start, where you can, from the derivation, and to return to that as often as you can. Thus you have before you the word "revelation." How great a matter, if you can attach some distinct image to the
word, and one to which your scholars, as often as
they hear the word, may mentally recur. Nor is
this impossible. God's revelation of himself is the
drawing back of the veil or curtain which concealed
lhim fiom men; not man finding out God, but God
declaring or discovering himself to man; all which
lies plainly in the word. Or you have the word
" absolution:" many will know that it has something to do with the pardon of sins; but in how
much more lively a way, to say the least, will they
know this, when they know that " to absolve" means
" to loosen from:" God's " absolution" of men is his
releasing of them from the bands of sin with which
they were tied and bound. Here every one will
connect a distinct image with the word, one that
will always come to his help when he would realize




230      THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.
what its actual meaning is. That which was done
for Lazarus naturally, the Lord saying in regard of
him, " Loose him, and let him  go," the same is done
spiritually for us, when we receive the " absolution"
of our sins.
Many words more suggest themselves;'  but only
one more I will bring forward; and that one because
we shall find in it a lesson  more for ourselves than
for others, and  it is with  such a one I would  fain
bring  these lectures to a close.  How  important, I
would observe then, is the truth which we express
* Several of the following I had marked down, while sketching
out these lectures, with the intention of using them therein; but
from lack of space, or from one cause or another, have not employed
them. They contain, I believe, every one of them, in their derivation or their use, or in both, something that will make it worth your
pains to acquaint yourselves with them; either some fact of history,
some custom of past times, some truth of the moral or spiritual
world, some lively and impressive. image, or other noticeable circumstance about them. In most cases Richardson's dictionary, the
only one from which I can promise you effectual help, for it is the
only English one in which etymology assumes the dignity of a science, will put you in the right position for judging why the word
has been suggested to you. The words, to which many as good,
some no doubt still better, might easily be added, are these: absurd,
affable, anthem, barbarous, belief, caricature, civility, civilization,
clerk, constable, courtesy, danger, delirium, devotion, dispute, enthusiasm, fanatic, feudal, fortnight, gazette, generous, genius, gentleman, gossip, habit, heresy, history, homage, husbandry, hypocrite,
iniquity, integrity, intoxication, knight, legend, maxim, mercy, misunderstanding, mountebank, naughtiness, novel, obligation, peers,
physician, politics, precarious, prerogative, prodigy, profane, prose,
rebellion, recreant, refinement, reflection, religion, reprobate, reputation, right, romance, salary, sarcasm, sedition, sincere, sophistry,
speculation, stationer, superstition, sycophant, transgression, uni
versity, urbane, verse, villany, wassail, worship.




VOCATION, CALLING.            231
in the naming of our work in this world our " vocation," or, which is the same finding utterance in
homelier Anglo-Saxon, our "calling."   What a
calming, elevating, solemnizing view of the tasks
which we find ourselves set in this world to do, this
word would give us, if we did but realize it to the
full. We did not come to our work by accident; we
did not choose it for ourselves; but, under much
which may wear the appearance of accident and
self-choosing, came to it by God's leading and appointment. What a help is this thought to enable
us to appreciate justly the dignity of our work,
though it were far humbler work, even in eyes of
men, than that of any one of us present! What an
assistance in calming unsettled thoughts and desires,
such as would make us wish to be something else
than that which we are! What a source of confidence, when we are tempted to lose heart, and to
doubt whether we shall be able to carry through our
work with any blessing or profit to ourselves or to
others! It is our "vocation," our "calling;" and
He who " called" us to it, will fit us for it, and
strengthen us in it.








INDEX OF WORDS.
Absolution...........PAGE  229   Camelopard.........IAGE  132
Allegiance.............. 180   Camlet.................   98
Alligator................ 133   Canada.................. 153
Alms................. 149   Candidate................ 211
Ambition.............  212   Cannon.................  208
America..............98, 111   Canon.................   208
Amusement.............. 219   Canonical............... 208
Analyze............  200   Carbunculus.............  154
Anglia............. 115   Cardinal.................   89
Animosity...............   43   Castus.................  215
Ascendency............. 105   Catholic................. 110
Asia Mlinor.............  111   Caucus.................  153
Assassin.................   86   Cerf-volant............... 132
Assentator......   50   Chaste................ 215
Assentation..............   50   Chrestus.................   57
Assiduous...........   220   Christian................ 112
Astonish................ 181   Christology............  147
Atonement..............  230   Christus.................   57
Attention............. 219   Church..................   79
Churl...................   41
Bayonet.................   98   Cicerone.................   69
Beatitas, beatitude........ 128   Classics................. 213
Benefice................. 14   Club....................  70
Bible.................... 227   Cockle.................. 218
Bigot.............   93   Collect.................. 227
Bishop............. 149   Companion.............. 215
Blackbird............... 106   Conciliatrix..............   62
Board..................                  7   Conscience..............  213
Bohemian.............   99   Cordwain...............   98
Boor.............  41   Cosmos.................  112
Brunt................... 202   Count...................  225
Burgeon............ 135   County..................  224
Burk................... 141   Crafty............   41
Craven..................   89
Caitiff...................   88   Curfew................  102
Calamitas................ 101   Currant.................   98
Calico...................   98
Calculation.............. 103   Dabchick................ 218
Cambric............   98   Damask.................   98




234                          INDZEX OF WORDS.
Days of Week....... PAGE  106  Humor, humorous.....PAGE  103
Delinquent.............. 140   Ilrricane.............. 101
Demure...............  41  Husband............       54
D1nigreur.............    50
Derivation.............    196   Idiot................  65
)esultory............... 215   Imbecile............ 215
Dilapidated..............   14   Impotens................   52
Diligent................. 220   Incivisme............ 138
Dinde...................   99   Indolence............ 220
Disaster................. 105  Indolentia............    127
Discernment............. 191  Influence.............. 105
I)iscretion............... 191   Innocent..............     57
Distemper...............  103   Insult................... 215
Diversion................   18   Invidentia........... 127
Dragonnade............ 137   Invidia.................. 127
Dunce..................   90   Italy.................           11C
Duplicity................  56
Jaherr.................    50
Ecstacy.................. 181  Jehovah.............. 100
Eleemosynary............ 149   Journal................. 106
England................. 115  Jove.............. 100
Episcopal............... 149  Jovial............. 104
Essay................... 146  Jutland............. 100
Etonner................. 181
Evangelize............... 144   Karfunkel............. 151
Kickshaws.............  154
Fancy................... 200  Kind....................  52
Favor.................. 143  Kingfisher............. 217
Field.................... 218   Knave.................  41
Fortunate..............   58
Frank..................20, 85   Left................. 203
Frugality............. 143   Lessons............  226
Letters............. 197
Germany................ 111   Lewd................   20
Gloze...................   59   Libertine................   50
Gnostic.................   96   Libraryy............ 103
Guillotine............... 138   Lierre................    134
Guilt.................. 202   London............  223
Guinea..................   98   Loutre.............       134
Gypsy..................   99   Love-child.............   61
Loyalty................. 180
Habsburg................ 222   Lunacy.............. 107
Haft.................... 202   Lusinia............ 151
Happiness...............  58
Hawk................... 217   Magnanimity........... 143
eaten.................   81  Malapert................ 136
Heaven.................. 202  Malevolentia.............  40
Honnatete......... 69 Mammnet.............  92
Huguenot............... 153   Mankind............       53
Humility................  45  Maudlin............  41




INDEX OF WORDS.?35
Megrim.............AGE  150   Rationalist...........PAGE  3 1-7
Mercurial................ 104   Raven.................. 217
Methodist................ 181   Razzia............. 139
Miscreant................   86   Redemption.............. 230
Miser....................   49   Regeneration............   46
Mob.................... 140   Rejoice.............   66
Morimo.................   27   Relaxation............ 219
Muslin.................   98   Relent.............  215
Religion.................   19
Naturalist................ 180   Reprehend............  215
Neophyte................ 144   Resentment..........   42
Norman................. 111   Retaliation...........   43
Novelist................. 180   Retract............   44
Noyade.................. 138   Revelation........... 229
Rivals............. 216
Odd................... 203   Rome............. 110
Orichalcum.............. 101   Rossignol.............   151
Owl..................... 218   Roue................... 137
Roundhead........... 153
Pagan..............   81
Pain....................   47   Scrament...........   83
Paer................... 103   Salvator.................    121
Paradise.................   46   Sardonie............ 105
Passion..................   51   Saturnine............ 105
Pastime.................   18   Saunterer................   87
Peace...................   66   Savage............. 200
Perfide..................   65   Scandal.................. 144
Pert.................... 136   Schadenfreude............   40
Philosoher......... 146   Scripture............ 227
Phcebe.................. 108   Selfish.................. 144
Picts.................... 100   Self-sufficient.............   67
Pinnacle................. 176   Servator............  121
Plague................                48   Sham.... 140
Plantation............... 181   Shamefastness..........   101
Plunder................. 139   Shire..............    203
Poids....................    201   Sierra...................   15
Pois.................... 201   Silly..............   56
Poix.................... 201   Simple..................   55
Poltroon.................   87   Sincere............. 215
Post..................... 205   Slave..............   21
Posthumous............. 101   Smith............. 202
Prejudice................   43   Sobriety................. 143
Pretentious.............. 145   Soliloquium...........    143
Prude...............   55   Stipulation........... 102
Stock............. 206
Quarantine............... 106   Strong..................  202
Quarrel.................   68   Subtle.................   210
Quick...................  207   Succinum............  161
Supercilious........... 215
Rational...............  144   Surname..............101, 228




236                             INDEX OF WORDS.
SYNONYMS-                                       Talent............... PAGE   52
Abdicate, desert....  PAGE  189   Tansy................... 150
Abhor, detest, hate, loath   178   Tariff...................    92
Antic, antique.....   175   Tawdry.................   42
Apprehend, comprehend. 185   Temper.................   103
Arrogant,   insolent,  pre-                  Temperance.............. 143
sumptuous.......... 177   Timeserver..............    41
Astrology, astrono y.....  170   Tinsel...................   41
Benefice, benefit........ 174   Topaz................... 105
Blanch, whiten......... 169   Tory....................   96
Bloom, blossom......... 176   Tour.................... 145
Charity, love........... 169   Tribulations.............    15
Cloak, palliate.........  167   Trinity................. 110
Compulsion, obligation... 188   Trivial.................. 216
Congratulate, felicitate..  182   Trum.................. 173
Contrary, opposite...... 186   Tunic................... 144
Courtesy, curtsey.......  176   Turkey                                                 99
Despair, diffidence......  170   Tyrant................. 111
Divers, diverse.........  175
Discover, invent........ 183   Urbanus................. 143
Education, instruction... 188
Enthusiasm, fanaticism...  165   Vaillant................. 135
Fancy, imagination...... 164   Verb.................... 212
Gamble, gambol........ 176   Villain..................   41
Human, humane........ 175   Virtuoso................   68
Illegible, unreadable.... 169   Virtus.................   69
Ingenious, ingenuous.... 176   Vocation................ 231
Interference, interposition  171
Nave, ship............. 169   Whig...................   96
Nay, no............... 172   Whitsunday............. 228
News, noise............ 174   Wife....................   54
Penna, pinna........... 176   Wild.................... 203
Puerile, boyish......... 169   Wrong.................. 202
Revenge, vengeance..... 165
Yea, yes............... 172   Zigeuner...............                                 99
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