accurate.
But I never meant it to remain without justification, and I will give
the justification here at once.

Take your Johnson, and look out the adjective Scurvy, in its higher or
figurative sense.

You find the first quotation he gives is from 'Measure for Measure,'
spoken of the Duke, in monk's disguise:

"I know him for a man divine and holy;
Not scurvy, nor a temporary meddler."

In which passage, Shakspeare, who never uses words in vain, nor with a
grain less than their full weight, opposes the divineness of men, or
their walking with God, to the scurviness of men, or their wallowing
with swine; and again, he opposes the holiness of men,--in the sense of
"Holy--harmless, undefiled," and more than that, helpful or healthful
in action--to the harmful and filthy action of temporary meddlers, such
as the hanging of seventeen priests before breakfast, and our
profitable military successes, in such a prolonged piece of 'temporary
meddling' as the Crimean war.

134. But, secondly, if you look down Johnson's column, you will find
his last quotation is not in the higher or figurative, but the lower
and literal sense, from Swift, to the effect that "it would be
convenient to prevent the excess of drink, with that scurvy custom of
taking tobacco." And you will also find, if you ever have the sense or
courage to look the facts of modern history in the face, that those two
itches, for the pot and the pipe, have been the roots of every other
demoralization of the filthiest and literally 'scurviest' sort among
_all_ classes;--the dirty pack of cards; the church pavement _running_
with human saliva,--(I have seen the spittings in ponds half an inch
deep, in the choir of Rouen cathedral); and the entirely infernal
atmosphere of the common cafes and gambling-houses of European
festivity, infecting every condition of what they call 'aesthesis,' left
in the bodies of men, until they cannot be happy with the pines and
pansies of the Alps, until they have mixed tobacco smoke with the scent
of them; and the whole concluding in the endurance--or even
enjoyment--of the most squalid conditions of filth in our capital
cities, that have ever been yet recorded, among the disgraces of
mankind.

135. But, thirdly, Johnson's central quotation is again from 'Measure
for Measure':--

"He spoke _scurvy_ and _provoking_ terms against your honor."

The debates in the English House of Commons, for the last half-century,
hav