rel yet deserves to bear";

that is, the ornament not of a 'proser', but of a poet. The tacit
assumption that vigour, animation, rapid movement, with all the
precipitation of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose, and
are the exclusive possession of it, is that which must explain the
changed uses of the word.

{Sidenote: '_Knave_'}

Still it is according to a word's present signification that we must
apply it now. It would be no excuse, having applied an insulting epithet
to any, if we should afterwards plead that, tried by its etymology and
primary usage, it had nothing offensive or insulting about it; although
indeed Swift assures us that in his time such a plea was made and was
allowed. "I remember", he says, "at a trial in Kent, where Sir George
Rooke was indicted for calling a gentleman 'knave' and 'villain', the
lawyer for the defendant brought off his client by alleging that the
words were not injurious; for 'knave' in the old and true signification
imported only a servant{224}; and 'villain' in Latin is villicus, which
is no more than a man employed in country labour, or rather a baily".
The lawyer may have deserved his success for his ingenuity and his
boldness; though, if Swift reports him aright, not certainly on the
ground of the strict accuracy either of his Anglo-Saxon or his Latin.

The moral sense and conviction of men is often at work upon their words,
giving them new turns in obedience to these convictions, of which their
changed use will then remain a permanent record. Let me illustrate this
by the history of our word 'sycophant'. You probably are acquainted with
the story which the Greek scholiasts invented by way of explaining a
word of which they knew nothing, namely that the 'sycophant' was a
"manifester of figs", one who detected others in the act of exporting
figs from Attica, an act forbidden, they asserted, by the Athenian law;
and accused them to the people. Be this explanation worth what it may,
the word obtained in Greek a more general sense; any accuser, and then
any _false_ accuser, was a 'sycophant'; and when the word was first
adopted into the English language, it was in this meaning: thus an old
English poet speaks of "the railing route of _sycophants_"; and Holland:
"The poor man that hath nought to lose, is not afraid of the
_sycophant_". But it has not kept this meaning; a 'sycophant' is now a
fawning flatterer; not one who speaks ill of you behind your back;
rather o