r in
Todd's, and has not even been preserved, where it is quite
indispensable, in Millin's _Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts_! It is little
suspected that this innocent term originated in a political nickname!
_Silhouette_ was a minister of state in France in 1759; that period was
a critical one; the treasury was in an exhausted condition, and
Silhouette, a very honest man, who would hold no intercourse with
financiers or loan-mongers, could contrive no other expedient to prevent
a national bankruptcy, than excessive economy and interminable reform!
Paris was not the metropolis, any more than London, where a Plato or a
Zeno could long be minister of state without incurring all the ridicule
of the wretched wits! At first they pretended to take his advice, merely
to laugh at him:--they cut their coats shorter, and wore them without
sleeves; they turned their gold snuff-boxes into rough wooden ones; and
the new-fashioned portraits were now only profiles of a face, traced by
a black pencil on the shadow cast by a candle on white paper! All the
fashions assumed an air of niggardly economy, till poor Silhouette was
driven into retirement, with all his projects of savings and reforms;
but he left his name to describe the most economical sort of portrait,
and one as melancholy as his own fate!

This political artifice of appropriating cant terms, or odious
nicknames, could not fail to flourish among a people so perpetually
divided by contending interests as ourselves; every party with us have
had their watchword, which has served either to congregate themselves,
or to set on the ban-dogs of one faction to worry and tear those of
another. We practised it early, and we find it still prospering! The
_Puritan_ of Elizabeth's reign survives to this hour; the trying
difficulties which that wise sovereign had to overcome in settling the
national religion, found no sympathy in either of the great divisions of
her people; she retained as much of the catholic rites as might be
decorous in the new religion, and sought to unite, and not to separate,
her children. John Knox, in the spirit of charity, declared, that "she
was neither gude protestant, nor yet resolute papist; let the world
judge quilk is the third."

A jealous party arose, who were for reforming the reformation. In their
attempt at more than human purity, they obtained the nickname of
_Puritans_; and from their fastidiousness about very small matters,
_Precisians_; these Drayton