an--Papers of Perjury--Pilgrim's
Road--Capture of Henry VI.--Andrew
Beckett--Passage in Vida--Quem Deus--Countess
of Desmond--Confession--Cayell, Meaning of,--Lord
Kingsborough's Mexico--Aerostation--Concolinel--Andrewes's
Tortura Torti, &c. 315

MISCELLANEOUS:--
Notes on Books, Sales, Catalogues, &c. 319
Books and Odd Volumes Wanted. 319
Notices to Correspondents. 319
Advertisements. 320

* * * * *

NOTES.

A NOTE ON "SMALL WORDS."

"And ten small words creep on in one dull line."

Most ingenious! most felicitous! but let no man despise little words,
despite of the little man of Twickenham. He himself knew better, but
there was no resisting the temptation of such a line as that. Small
words he says, in plain prosaic criticism, are generally "stiff and
languishing, but they may be beautiful to express melancholy."

The English language is a language of small words. It is, says Swift,
"overstocked with monosyllables." It cuts down all its words to the
shortest possible dimensions: a sort of half-Procrustes, which lops but
never stretches. In one of the most magnificent passages in Holy Writ,
that, namely, which describes the death of Sisera:--

"At her feet he bowed, he fell: at her feet he bowed, he fell,
he lay down: where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

There are twenty-two monosyllables to three of greater length, or rather
to the same dissyllable thrice repeated; and that too in common parlance
proncounced as a monosyllable. The passage in the Book of Ezekiel, which
Coleride is said to have considered the most sublime in the whole
Bible,--

"And He said unto me, son of man, can these bones live? And I
answered, O Lord God, though knowest,"--

contains seventeen monosyllables to three others. And in the most grand
passage which commences the Gospel of St. John, from the first to the
fourteenth verses, inclusive, there are polysyllables twenty-eight,
monosyllables two hundred and one. This it may be said is poetry, but
not verse, and therefore makes but little against the critic. Well then,
out of his own mouth shall he be confuted. In the fourth epistle of his
_Essay on Man_, a specimen selected purely at random from his works, and
extending altogether to three hundred and ninety-eight lines, there are
no less than twenty-seven (that is, a trifle more than one out of every
fifteen,) made up _entirely_ of monosyllabl