sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared
himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip
Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought
him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man. A courtier,
who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the
blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. 'Thou hast reason,' replied
a great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a
two-legged animal WITH feathers.' The fatal habit became universal.
The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national
conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal
double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the
Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was
levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in
the age of the Stuarts."

Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the
Macaulay-flowers of literature?--There was a dead silence.--I said
calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a
hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If _I_
have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show
up a drunken helot. We have done with them.

--If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic?--I
should say that its most frequent work was to build a pons asinorum
over chasms which shrewd people can bestride without such a
structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove
anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show
that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was
ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide span, which
couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other.
Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these
are the true explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary
relations with truth, as I understand truth,--not for any secondary
artifice in handling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in
argument are notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust
the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that of a good
chess-player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not
necessarily because he wrangles or plays well.

The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer
lifts his forefoot, at the expression, "his relations with truth,
as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and
said I talke