namely, assuming the thing to be
proved, was a design to entrap the unwary? if so, it bangs Banagher. Was
his confounding two mean proportionals with one mean proportional found
twice over a trick of the same intent? if so, it beats cockfighting. That
Nauticus is Mr. Smith appears from other internal evidence. In 1819, Mr.
J. C. Hobhouse[222] was sent to Newgate for a {127} libel on the House of
Commons which was only intended for a libel on Lord Erskine.[223] The
ex-Chancellor had taken Mr. Hobhouse to be thinking of him in a certain
sentence; this Mr. Hobhouse denied, adding, "There is but one man in the
country who is always thinking of Lord Erskine." I say that there is but
one man of our day who would couple me and Mr. James Smith as a "brace of
mathematical birds."

Mr. Smith's "theory" is unscathed by me. Not a doubt about it: but how does
he himself come off? I should never think of refuting a theory proved by
assumption of itself. I left Mr. Smith's [pi] untouched: or, if I put in my
thumb and pulled out a plum, it was to give a notion of the cook, not of
the dish. The "important question at issue" was not the circle: it was,
wholly and solely, whether the abbreviation of _James_ might be spelled
_Jimm_.[224] This is personal to the verge of scurrility: but in literary
controversy the challenger names the weapons, and Mr. Smith begins with
charge of ignorance, folly, and dishonesty, by conditional implication. So
that the question is, not the personality of a word, but its applicability
to the person designated: it is enough if, as the Latin grammar has it,
_Verbum personale concordat cum nominativo_.[225]

I may plead precedent for taking a liberty with the orthography of _Jem_.
An instructor of youth was scandalized at the abrupt and irregular--but
very effective--opening of Wordsworth's little piece:

{128}

"A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?"

So he mended the matter by instructing his pupils to read the first line
thus:

"A simple child, dear brother ----."

The brother, we infer from sound, was to be James, and the blank must
therefore be filled up with _Jimb_.

I will notice one point of the letter, to make a little more distinction
between the two birds. Nauticus lays down--quite correctly--that the sine
of an angle is less than its circular measure. He then takes 3.1416 for
180 deg., and finds that 36