whimsically bordered the four sides of the pages of a Dictionary
with as many proverbs. The plan was ingenious, but the proverbs are
not. Triteness and triviality are fatal to a proverb.

[41] A new edition of Ray's book, with large additions, was
published by Bohn, in 1855, under the title of "A Handbook of
Proverbs." It is a vast collection of "wise saws" of all ages and
countries.

CONFUSION OF WORDS.

"There is nothing more common," says the lively Voltaire, "than to read
and to converse to no purpose. In history, in morals, in law, in physic,
and in divinity, be careful of equivocal terms." One of the ancients
wrote a book to prove that there was no word which did not convey an
ambiguous and uncertain meaning. If we possessed this lost book, our
ingenious dictionaries of "synonyms" would not probably prove its
uselessness. Whenever _the same word_ is associated by the parties with
_different ideas_, they may converse, or controverse, till "the crack of
doom!" This with a little obstinacy and some agility in shifting his
ground, makes the fortune of an opponent. While one party is worried in
disentangling a meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding about
him with another, a word of the kind we have mentioned, carelessly or
perversely slipped into an argument, may prolong it for a century or
two--as it has happened! Vaugelas, who passed his whole life in the
study of words, would not allow that the _sense_ was to determine the
meaning of _words_; for, says he, it is the business of _words_ to
explain the _sense_. Kant for a long while discovered in this way a
facility of arguing without end, as at this moment do our political
economists. "I beseech you," exclaims a poetical critic, in the agony of
a confusion of words, on the Pope controversy, "not to ask whether I
mean _this_ or _that_!" Our critic, positive that he has made himself
understood, has shown how a few vague terms may admit of volumes of
vindication. Throw out a word, capable of fifty senses, and you raise
fifty parties! Should some friend of peace enable the fifty to repose on
one sense, that innocent word, no longer ringing the _tocsin_ of a
party, would lie in forgetfulness in the Dictionary. Still more
provoking when an identity of meaning is only disguised by different
modes of expression, and when the term has been closely sifted, to their
mutual astonishment both parties discover the same thing lying under