ng in such language as this, "Here lies that
noble _imp_". Or what should we say of a poet who commenced a solemn
poem in this fashion,

"Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,
Oh Abraham's _brats_, oh brood of blessed seed"?

Could we conclude anything else but that he meant, by using low words on
lofty occasions, to turn sacred things into ridicule? Yet this was very
far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet whose lines I have just
quoted. "Abraham's _brats_" was used by him in perfect good faith, and
without the slightest feeling that anything ludicrous or contemptuous
adhered to the word 'brat', as indeed in his time there did not, any
more than adheres to 'brood', which is another form of the same word
now{222}.

Call a person 'pragmatical', and you now imply not merely that he is
busy, but _over_-busy, officious, self-important, and pompous to boot.
But it once meant nothing of the kind, and 'pragmatical' (like {Greek:
pragmatikos}) was one engaged in affairs, being an honourable title,
given to a man simply and industriously accomplishing the business which
properly concerned him{223}. So too to say that a person 'meddles' or is
a 'meddler' implies now that he interferes unduly in other men's
matters, without a call mixing himself up with them. This was not
insinuated in the earlier uses of the word. On the contrary three of our
earlier translations of the Bible have, "_Meddle_ with your own
business" (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at
some length the distinction between 'meddling' and "being _meddlesome_",
and only condemns the latter.

{Sidenote: '_Proser_'}

Or take again the words, 'to prose' or a 'proser'. It cannot indeed be
affirmed that they convey any _moral_ condemnation, yet they certainly
convey no compliment now; and are almost among the last which any one
would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his
writing. For 'to prose', as we all now know too well, is to talk or
write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but
once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a 'proser' the
antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid
and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would
have 'prosed' and been a 'proser', in the language of our ancestors.
Thus Drayton writes of his contemporary Nashe:

"And surely Nashe, though he a _proser_ were,
A branch of lau