hing". This, at present its sole meaning,
was once only the secondary and superinduced; 'bombast' being properly
the cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with which garments were
stuffed out and lined. You remember perhaps how Prince Hal addresses
Falstaff, "How now, my sweet creature of _bombast_"; using the word in
its literal sense; and another early poet has this line:

"Thy body's bolstered out with _bombast_ and with bags".

'Bombast' was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big words
without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were
stuffed out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning. So too 'to
garble' was once "to cleanse from dross and dirt, as grocers do their
spices, to pick or cull out"{219}. It is never used now in this its
primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while
once 'to garble' was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it
is now to sift with a view of picking out the worst{220}. 'Polite' is
another word which in the figurative sense has quite extinguished the
literal. We still speak of 'polished' surfaces; but not any more, with
Cudworth, of "_polite_ bodies, as looking glasses". Neither do we now
'exonerate' a ship (Burton); nor 'stigmatize', at least otherwise than
figuratively, a 'malefactor' (the same); nor 'corroborate' our health
(Sir Thomas Elyot).

Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses
of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in
the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. The
process of this it is often very curious to observe; capable as not
seldom it is of being watched step by step in its advances to the final
consummation. There may be said to be three leading phases which the
word successively presents, three steps in its history. At first it
grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with its own natural
meaning. Presently the word allows another meaning, one superinduced on
the former, and foreign to its etymology, to share with the other in the
possession of it, on the ground that where the former exists, the latter
commonly co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced
meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with dividing the possession of
the word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor altogether,
and remains in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive
stages may be represented by _a_,