CONFUSION OF WORDS.

"There is nothing more common," says the lively Voltaire, "than to read

and to converse to no purpose. In history, in morals, in law, in physic,

and in divinity, be careful of equivocal terms." One of the ancients

wrote a book to prove that there was no word which did not convey an

ambiguous and uncertain meaning. If we possessed this lost book, our

ingenious dictionaries of "synonyms" would not probably prove its

uselessness. Whenever _the same word_ is associated by the parties with

_different ideas_, they may converse, or controverse, till "the crack of

doom!" This with a little obstinacy and some agility in shifting his

ground, makes the fortune of an opponent. While one party is worried in

disentangling a meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding about

him with another, a word of the kind we have mentioned, carelessly or

perversely slipped into an argument, may prolong it for a century or

two--as it has happened! Vaugelas, who passed his whole life in the

study of words, would not allow that the _sense_ was to determine the

meaning of _words_; for, says he, it is the business of _words_ to

explain the _sense_. Kant for a long while discovered in this way a

facility of arguing without end, as at this moment do our political

economists. "I beseech you," exclaims a poetical critic, in the agony of

a confusion of words, on the Pope controversy, "not to ask whether I

mean _this_ or _that_!" Our critic, positive that he has made himself

understood, has shown how a few vague terms may admit of volumes of

vindication. Throw out a word, capable of fifty senses, and you raise

fifty parties! Should some friend of peace enable the fifty to repose on

one sense, that innocent word, no longer ringing the _tocsin_ of a

party, would lie in forgetfulness in the Dictionary. Still more

provoking when an identity of meaning is only disguised by different

modes of expression, and when the term has been closely sifted, to their

mutual astonishment both parties discover the same thing lying under the

bran and chaff after this heated operation. Plato and Aristotle probably

agreed much better than the opposite parties they raised up imagined;

their difference was in the manner of expression, rather than in the

points discussed. The Nominalists and the Realists, who once filled the

world with their brawls, and who from irregular words came to regular

blows, could never comprehend their alternate nonsense; "whether in

employing general terms we use _words_ or _names_ only, or whether there

is _in nature anything_ corresponding to what we mean by a _general

idea_?" The Nominalists only denied what no one in his senses would

affirm; and the Realists only contended for what no one in his senses

would deny; a hair's breadth might have joined what the spirit of party

had sundered!

Do we flatter ourselves that the Logomachies of the Nominalists and the

Realists terminated with these scolding schoolmen? Modern nonsense,

weighed against the obsolete, may make the scales tremble for awhile,

but it will lose its agreeable quality of freshness, and subside into an

equipoise. We find their spirit still lurking among our own

metaphysicians! "Lo! the Nominalists and the Realists again!" exclaimed

my learned friend, Sharon Turner, alluding to our modern doctrines on

_abstract ideas_, on which there is still a doubt whether they are

anything more than _generalising terms_.[42] Leibnitz confused his

philosophy by the term _sufficient reason_: for every existence, for

every event, and for every truth there must be a _sufficient reason_.

This vagueness of language produced a perpetual misconception, and

Leibnitz was proud of his equivocal triumphs in always affording a new

interpretation! It is conjectured that he only employed his term of

_sufficient reason_ for the plain simple word of _cause_. Even Locke,

who has himself so admirably noticed the "abuse of words," has been

charged with using vague and indefinite ones; he has sometimes employed

the words _reflection_, _mind_, and _spirit_ in so indefinite a way,

that they have confused his philosophy: thus by some ambiguous

expressions, our great metaphysician has been made to establish

doctrines fatal to the immutability of moral distinctions. Even the

eagle-eye of the intellectual Newton grew dim in the obscurity of the

language of Locke. We are astonished to discover that two such

intellects should not comprehend the same ideas; for Newton wrote to

Locke, "I beg your pardon for representing that you struck at the root

of morality in a principle laid down in your book of Ideas--and that I

took you for a Hobbist!"[43] The difference of opinion between Locke and

Reid is in consequence of an ambiguity in the word _principle_, as

employed by Reid. The removal of a solitary word may cast a luminous ray

over a whole body of philosophy: "If we had called the _infinite_ the

_indefinite_," says Condillac, in his _Traite des Sensations_, "by this

small change of a word we should have avoided the error of imagining

that we have a positive idea of _infinity_, from whence so many false

reasonings have been carried on, not only by metaphysicians, but even by

geometricians." The word _reason_ has been used with different meanings

by different writers; _reasoning_ and _reason_ have been often

confounded; a man may have an endless capacity for _reasoning_, without

being much influenced by _reason_, and to be _reasonable_, perhaps

differs from both! So Moliere tells us,

Raisonner est l'emploi de toute ma maison;

Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison!

In this research on "confusion of words," might enter the voluminous

history of the founders of sects, who have usually employed terms which

had no meaning attached to them, or were so ambiguous that their real

notions have never been comprehended; hence the most chimerical opinions

have been imputed to founders of sects. We may instance that of the

_Antinomians_, whose remarkable denomination explains their doctrine,

expressing that they were "against law!" Their founder was John

Agricola, a follower of Luther, who, while he lived, had kept Agricola's

follies from exploding, which they did when he asserted that there was

no such thing as sin, our salvation depending on faith, and not on

works; and when he declaimed against the _Law of God_. To what length

some of his sect pushed this verbal doctrine is known; but the real

notions of this Agricola probably never will be! Bayle considered him as

a harmless dreamer in theology, who had confused his head by Paul's

controversies with the Jews; but Mosheim, who bestows on this early

reformer the epithets of _ventosus_ and _versipellis_, windy and crafty!

or, as his translator has it, charges him with "vanity, presumption, and

artifice," tells us by the term "law," Agricola only meant the ten

commandments of Moses, which he considered were abrogated by the Gospel,

being designed for the Jews and not for the Christians. Agricola then,

by the words the "Law of God," and "that there was no such thing as

sin," must have said one thing and meant another! This appears to have

been the case with most of the divines of the sixteenth century; for

even Mosheim complains of "their want of precision and consistency in

expressing _their sentiments_, hence their real sentiments have been

misunderstood." There evidently prevailed a great "confusion of words"

among them! The _grace suffisante_ and the _grace efficace_ of the

Jansenists and the Jesuits show the shifts and stratagems by which

nonsense may be dignified. "Whether all men received from God

_sufficient grace_ for their conversion!" was an inquiry some unhappy

metaphysical theologist set afloat: the Jesuits, according to their

worldly system of making men's consciences easy, affirmed it; but the

Jansenists insisted, that this _sufficient grace_ would never be

_efficacious_, unless accompanied by _special grace_. "Then the

_sufficient grace_, which is not _efficacious_, is a contradiction in

terms, and worse, a heresy!" triumphantly cried the Jesuits, exulting

over their adversaries. This "confusion of words" thickened, till the

Jesuits introduced in this logomachy with the Jansenists papal bulls,

royal edicts, and a regiment of dragoons! The Jansenists, in despair,

appealed to miracles and prodigies, which they got up for public

representation; but, above all, to their Pascal, whose immortal satire

the Jesuits really felt was at once "sufficient and efficacious,"

though the dragoons, in settling a "confusion of words," did not boast

of inferior success to Pascal's. Former ages had, indeed, witnessed even

a more melancholy logomachy, in the _Homoousion_ and the _Homoiousion_!

An event which Boileau has immortalised by some fine verses, which, in

his famous satire on _L'Equivoque_, for reasons best known to the

Sorbonne, were struck out of the text.

D'une _syllabe_ impie un saint _mot_ augmente

Remplit tous les esprits d'aigreurs si meurtrieres--

Tu fis, dans une guerre et si triste et si longue,

Perir tant de Chretiens, _martyrs d'une diphthongue_!

Whether the Son was similar to the substance of the Father, or of the

same substance, depended on the diphthong _oi_, which was alternately

rejected and received. Had they earlier discovered, what at length they

agreed on, that the words denoted what was incomprehensible, it would

have saved thousands, as a witness describes, "from tearing one another

to pieces." The great controversy between Abelard and St. Bernard, when

the saint accused the scholastic of maintaining heretical notions of the

Trinity, long agitated the world; yet, now that these confusers of words

can no longer inflame our passions, we wonder how these parties could

themselves differ about words to which we can attach no meaning

whatever. There have been few councils or synods where the omission or

addition of a word or a phrase might not have terminated an interminable

logomachy! At the council of Basle, for the convenience of the

disputants, John de Secubia drew up a treatise of _undeclined words_,

chiefly to determine the signification of the particles _from_, _by_,

_but_, and _except_, which it seems were perpetually occasioning fresh

disputes among the Hussites and the Bohemians. Had Jerome of Prague

known, like our Shakspeare, the virtue of an IF, or agreed with Hobbes,

that he should not have been so positive in the use of the verb IS, he

might have been spared from the flames. The philosopher of Malmsbury has

declared that "Perhaps _Judgment_ was nothing else but the composition

or joining of _two names of things, or modes_, by the verb IS." In

modern times the popes have more skilfully freed the church from this

"confusion of words." His holiness, on one occasion, standing in equal

terror of the court of France, who protected the Jesuits, and of the

court of Spain, who maintained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived a

phrase, where a comma or a full stop, placed at the beginning or the

end, purported that his holiness tolerated the opinions which he

condemned; and when the rival parties despatched deputations to the

court of Rome to plead for the period, or advocate the comma, his

holiness, in this "confusion of words," flung an unpunctuated copy to

the parties; nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if

the rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that of the

other close by a full period!

In jurisprudence much confusion has occurred in the uses of the term

_rights_; yet the social union and human happiness are involved in the

precision of the expression. When Montesquieu laid down, as the active

principle of a republic, _virtue_, it seemed to infer that a republic

was the best of governments. In the defence of his great work he was

obliged to define the term; and it seems that by _virtue_ he only meant

_political virtue_, the love of the country.

In politics, what evils have resulted from abstract terms to which no

ideas are affixed,--such as, "The Equality of Man--the Sovereignty or

the Majesty of the People--Loyalty--Reform--even Liberty

herself!--Public Opinion--Public Interest;" and other abstract notions,

which have excited the hatred or the ridicule of the vulgar. Abstract

ideas, as _sounds_, have been used as watchwords. The combatants will

usually be found willing to fight for words to which, perhaps, not one

of them has attached any settled signification. This is admirably

touched on by Locke, in his chapter of "Abuse of Words." "Wisdom, Glory,

Grace, &c., are words frequent enough in every man's mouth; but if a

great many of those who use them should be asked what they mean by them,

they would be at a stand, and know not what to answer--a plain proof

that though they have learned those _sounds_, and have them ready at

their tongue's end, yet there are no determined _ideas_ laid up in their

minds which are to be expressed to others by them."

When the American exclaimed that he was not represented in the House of

Commons, because he was not an elector, he was told that a very small

part of the people of England were electors. As they could not call this

an _actual representation_, they invented a new name for it, and called

it a _virtual one_. It imposed on the English nation, who could not

object that others should be taxed rather than themselves; but with the

Americans it was a sophism! and this _virtual_ representation, instead

of an _actual_ one, terminated in our separation; "which," says Mr.

Flood, "at the time appeared to have swept away most of our glory and

our territory; forty thousand lives, and one hundred millions of

treasure!"

That fatal expression which Rousseau had introduced, _l'Egalite des

Hommes_, which finally involved the happiness of a whole people, had he

lived he had probably shown how ill his country had understood. He could

only have referred in his mind to _political equality_, but not an

equality of possessions, of property, of authority, destructive of

social order and of moral duties, which must exist among every people.

"Liberty," "Equality," and "Reform" (innocent words!) sadly ferment the

brains of those who cannot affix any definite notions to them; they are

like those chimerical fictions in law, which declare the "sovereign

immortal, proclaim his ubiquity in various places," and irritate the

feelings of the populace, by assuming that "the king can never do

wrong!" In the time of James the Second "it is curious," says Lord

Russell, "to read the conference between the Houses on the meaning of

the words 'deserted' and 'abdicated,' and the debates in the Lords

whether or no there is an original contract between king and people."

The people would necessarily decide that "kings derived their power from

them;" but kings were once maintained by a "right divine," a "confusion

of words," derived from two opposite theories, and both only relatively

true. When we listen so frequently to such abstract terms as "the

majesty of the people," "the sovereignty of the people," whence the

inference that "all power is derived from the people," we can form no

definite notions: it is "a confusion of words," contradicting all the

political experience which our studies or our observations furnish; for

sovereignty is established to rule, to conduct, and to settle the

vacillations and quick passions of the multitude. _Public opinion_

expresses too often the ideas of one party in place; and _public

interest_ those of another party out! Political axioms, from the

circumstance of having the notions attached to them unsettled, are

applied to the most opposite ends! "In the time of the French

Directory," observes an Italian philosopher of profound views, "in the

revolution of Naples, the democratic faction pronounced that 'Every act

of a tyrannical government is in its origin illegal;' a proposition

which at first sight seems self-evident, but which went to render all

existing laws impracticable." The doctrine of the illegality of the acts

of a tyrant was proclaimed by Brutus and Cicero, in the name of the

senate, _against the populace_, who had favoured Caesar's perpetual

dictatorship; and the populace of Paris availed themselves of it,

_against the National Assembly_.

This "confusion of words," in time-serving politics, has too often

confounded right and wrong; and artful men, driven into a corner, and

intent only on its possession, have found no difficulty in solving

doubts, and reconciling contradictions. Our own history in revolutionary

times abounds with dangerous examples from all parties; of specious

hypotheses for compliance with the government of the day or the passions

of parliament. Here is an instance in which the subtle confuser of words

pretended to substitute two consciences, by utterly depriving a man of

any! When the unhappy Charles the First pleaded that to pass the bill of

attainder against the Earl of Strafford was against his conscience, that

remarkable character of "boldness and impiety," as Clarendon

characterizes Williams, Archbishop of York, on this argument of

_conscience_ (a simple word enough), demonstrated "that there were _two

sorts of conscience_, public and private; that his public conscience as

a king might dispense with his private conscience as a man!" Such was

the ignominious argument which decided the fate of that great victim of

State! It was an impudent "confusion of words" when Prynne (in order to

quiet the consciences of those who were uneasy at warring with the king)

observed that the statute of twenty-fifth Edward the Third ran in the

singular number--"If a man shall levy war against _the king_, and

therefore could not be extended to _the houses_, who are many and public

_persons_." Later, we find Sherlock blest with the spirit of Williams,

the Archbishop of York, whom we have just left. When some did not know

how to charge and to discharge themselves of the oaths to James the

Second and to William the Third, this confounder of words discovered

that there were _two rights_, as the other had that there were _two

consciences_; one was a providential right, and the other a legal right;

one person might very righteously claim and take a thing, and another as

righteously hold and keep it; but that _whoever got the better_ had the

_providential_ right by possession; and since all authority comes from

God, the people were obliged to transfer their allegiance to him as a

king of God's making; so that he who had the providential right

necessarily had the legal one! a very simple discovery, which must,

however, have cost him some pains; for this confounder of words was

himself confounded by twelve answers by non-jurors! A French politician

of this stamp recently was suspended from his lectureship for asserting

that _the possession of the soil_ was a right; by which principle, _any

king_ reigning over a country, whether by treachery, crime, and

usurpation, was a _legitimate sovereign_. For this convenient principle

the lecturer was tried, and declared not guilty--by persons who have

lately found their advantage in a confusion of words. In treaties

between nations, a "confusion of words" has been more particularly

studied; and that negotiator has conceived himself most dexterous who,

by this abuse of words, has retained an _arriere-pensee_ which may

fasten or loosen the ambiguous expression he had so cautiously and so

finely inlaid in his mosaic of treachery. A scene of this nature I draw

out of "Mesnager's Negociation with the Court of England." When that

secret agent of Louis the Fourteenth was negotiating a peace, an

insuperable difficulty arose respecting the acknowledgment of the

Hanoverian succession. It was absolutely necessary, on this delicate

point, to quiet the anxiety of the English public and our allies; but

though the French king was willing to recognise Anne's title to the

throne, yet the settlement in the house of Hanover was incompatible with

French interests and French honour. Mesnager told Lord Bolingbroke that

"the king, his master, would consent to any such article, _looking the

other way, as might disengage him from the obligation of that

agreement_, as the occasion should present." This ambiguous language was

probably understood by Lord Bolingbroke: at the next conference his

lordship informed the secret agent "that the queen could not admit of

any _explanations, whatever her intentions might be_; that the

_succession_ was settled by act of parliament; that as to the private

sentiments of the queen, or of any about her, he could say nothing."

"All this was said with such an air, as to let me understand that he

gave a _secret assent_ to what I had proposed, &c.; but he desired me to

drop the discourse." Thus two great negotiators, both equally urgent to

conclude the treaty, found an insuperable obstacle occur, which neither

could control. Two honest men would have parted; but the "skilful

confounder of words," the French diplomatist, hit on an expedient; he

wrote the words which afterwards appeared in the preliminaries, "That

Louis the Fourteenth will acknowledge the Queen of Great Britain in that

quality, as also _the succession of the crown according to the_ PRESENT

SETTLEMENT." "The English agent," adds the Frenchman, "would have had me

add--_on the house of Hanover_, but this I entreated him not to desire

of me." The term PRESENT SETTLEMENT, then, was that article which was

LOOKING THE OTHER WAY, _to disengage his master from the obligation of

that agreement_, as occasion should present! that is, that Louis the

Fourteenth chose to understand by the PRESENT SETTLEMENT the _old one_,

by which the British crown was to be restored to the Pretender! Anne and

the English nation were to understand it in their own sense--as the _new

one_, which transferred it to the house of Hanover!

When politicians cannot rely upon each other's interpretation of _one of

the commonest words_ in our language, how can they possibly act

together? The Bishop of Winchester has proved this observation, by the

remarkable anecdote of the Duke of Portland and Mr. Pitt, who, with a

view to unite parties, were to hold a conference _on_ FAIR _and_ EQUAL

_terms_. His grace did not object to the word FAIR, but the word EQUAL

was more specific and limited; and for a necessary preliminary, he

requested Mr. Pitt to inform him what he _understood_ by the word EQUAL?

Whether Pitt was puzzled by the question, or would not deliver up an

_arriere-pensee_, he put off the explanation to the conference. But the

duke would not meet Mr. Pitt till the _word_ was explained; and this

important negotiation was broken off by not explaining a simple word

which appeared to require no explanation.

There is nothing more fatal in language than to wander from the popular

acceptation of words; and yet this popular sense cannot always accord

with precision of ideas, for it is itself subject to great changes.

Another source, therefore, of the abuse of words, is that mutability to

which, in the course of time, the verbal edifice, as well as more

substantial ones, is doomed. A familiar instance presents itself in the

titles of _tyrant_, _parasite_, and _sophist_, originally honourable

distinctions. The abuses of dominion made the appropriate title of kings

odious; the title of a magistrate, who had the care of the public

granaries of corn, at length was applied to a wretched flatterer for a

dinner; and absurd philosophers occasioned a mere denomination to become

a by-name. To employ such terms in their primitive sense would now

confuse all ideas; yet there is an affectation of erudition which has

frequently revived terms sanctioned by antiquity. Bishop Watson entitled

his vindication of the Bible "an _apology_:" this word, in its primitive

sense, had long been lost for the multitude, whom he particularly

addressed in this work, and who could only understand it in the sense

they are accustomed to. Unquestionably, many of its readers have

imagined that the bishop was offering an _excuse_ for a belief in the

Bible, instead of a _vindication_ of its truth. The word _impertinent_,

by the ancient jurisconsults, or law-counsellors, who gave their opinion

on cases, was used merely in opposition to _pertinent_--_ratio

pertinens_ is a pertinent reason, that is, a reason _pertaining_ to the

cause in question, and a _ratio impertinens_, an impertinent reason, is

an argument _not pertaining_ to the subject.[44] _Impertinent_ then

originally meant neither absurdity nor rude intrusion, as it does in our

present popular sense. The learned Arnauld having characterised a reply

of one of his adversaries by the epithet _impertinent_, when blamed for

the freedom of his language, explained his meaning by giving this

history of the word, which applies to our own language. Thus also with

us the word _indifferent_ has entirely changed: an historian, whose work

was _indifferently_ written, would formerly have claimed our attention.

In the Liturgy it is prayed that "magistrates may _indifferently_

minister justice." _Indifferently_ originally meant _impartially_. The

word _extravagant_, in its primitive signification, only signified to

digress from the subject. The Decretals, or those letters from the popes

deciding on points of ecclesiastical discipline, were at length

incorporated with the canon law, and were called _extravagant_ by

_wandering out_ of the body of the canon law, being confusedly dispersed

through that collection. When Luther had the Decretals publicly burnt at

Wittemberg, the insult was designed for the pope, rather than as a

condemnation of the canon law itself. Suppose, in the present case, two

persons of opposite opinions. The catholic, who had said that the

decretals were _extravagant_, might not have intended to depreciate

them, or make any concession to the Lutheran. What confusion of words

has the _common sense_ of the Scotch metaphysicians introduced into

philosophy! There are no words, perhaps, in the language which may be so

differently interpreted; and Professor Dugald Stewart has collected, in

a curious note in the second volume of his "Philosophy of the Human

Mind," a singular variety of its opposite significations. The Latin

phrase, _sensus communis_, may, in various passages of Cicero, be

translated by our phrase _common sense_; but, on other occasions, it

means something different; the _sensus communis_ of the schoolmen is

quite another thing, and is synonymous with _conception_, and referred

to the seat of intellect; with Sir John Davies, in his curious

metaphysical poem, _common sense_ is used as _imagination_. It created a

controversy with Beattie and Reid; and Reid, who introduced this vague

ambiguous phrase in philosophical language, often understood the term in

its ordinary acceptation. This change of the meaning of words, which is

constantly recurring in metaphysical disputes, has made that curious but

obscure science liable to this objection of Hobbes, "with many words

making nothing understood!"

Controversies have been keenly agitated about the principles of morals,

which resolve entirely into _verbal disputes_, or at most into questions

of arrangement and classification, of little comparative moment to the

points at issue. This observation of Mr. Dugald Stewart's might be

illustrated by the fate of the numerous inventors of systems of thinking

or morals, who have only employed very different and even opposite terms

in appearance to express the same thing. Some, by their mode of

philosophising, have strangely unsettled the words _self-interest_ and

_self-love_; and their misconceptions have sadly misled the votaries of

these systems of morals; as others also by such vague terms as "utility,

fitness," &c.

When Epicurus asserted that the sovereign good consisted in _pleasure_,

opposing the unfeeling austerity of the Stoics by the softness of

pleasurable emotions, his principle was soon disregarded; while his

_word_, perhaps chosen in the spirit of paradox, was warmly adopted by

the sensualist. Epicurus, of whom Seneca has drawn so beautiful a

domestic scene, in whose garden a loaf, a Cytheridean cheese, and a

draught which did not inflame thirst,[45] was the sole banquet, would

have started indignantly at

The fattest hog in Epicurus' sty!

Such are the facts which illustrate that principle in "the abuse of

words," which Locke calls "an affected obscurity arising from applying

_old words to new, or unusual significations_."

It was the same "confusion of words" which gave rise to the famous sect

of the Sadducees. The master of its founder Sadoc, in his moral purity,

was desirous of a disinterested worship of the Deity; he would not have

men like slaves, obedient from the hope of reward or the fear of

punishment. Sadoc drew a quite contrary inference from the intention of

his master, concluding that there were neither rewards nor punishments

in a future state. The result is a parallel to the fate of Epicurus. The

morality of the master of Sadoc was of the most pure and elevated kind,

but in the "confusion of words," the libertines adopted them for their

own purposes--and having once assumed that neither rewards nor

punishments existed in the after-state, they proceeded to the erroneous

consequence that man perished with his own dust!

The plainest words, by accidental associations, may suggest the most

erroneous conceptions, and have been productive of the grossest errors.

In the famous Bangorian controversy, one of the writers excites a smile

by a complaint, arising from his views of the signification of a plain

word, whose meaning he thinks had been changed by the contending

parties. He says, "the word _country_, like a great many others, such as

_church_ and kingdom, is, by the Bishop of Bangor's leave, become to

signify a _collection of ideas_ very different from its _original

meaning_; with some it implies _party_, with others _private opinion_,

and with most _interest_, and perhaps, in time, may signify _some other

country_. When this good innocent word has been tossed backwards and

forwards a little longer, some new reformer of language may arise to

reduce it to its primitive signification--_the real interest of Great

Britain!_" The antagonist of this controversialist probably retorted on

him his own term of _the real interest_, which might be a very opposite

one, according to their notions! It has been said, with what truth I

know not, that it was by a mere confusion of words that Burke was

enabled to alarm the great Whig families, by showing them their fate in

that of the French _noblesse_; they were misled by the _similitude of

names_. The French _noblesse_ had as little resemblance to our nobility

as they have to the Mandarins of China. However it may be in this case,

certain it is that the same terms misapplied have often raised those

delusive notions termed false analogies. It was long imagined in this

country, that the _parliaments_ of France were somewhat akin to our own;

but these assemblies were very differently constituted, consisting only

of lawyers in courts of law. A misnomer confuses all argument. There is

a trick which consists in bestowing good names on bad things. Vices,

thus veiled, are introduced to us as virtues, according to an old poet,

As drunkenness, good-fellowship we call?