[1] Among the most shocking of the unscholarlike barbarisms, now
prevalent, I must notice the use of the word '_nice_' in an objective
instead of a subjective sense: '_nice_' does not and cannot express a
quality of the object, but merely a quality of the subject: yet we hear
daily of 'a very nice letter'--'a nice young lady,' &c., meaning a letter
or a young lady that it is pleasant to contemplate: but 'a nice young
lady'--means a fastidious young lady; and 'a nice letter' ought to mean a
letter that is very delicate in its rating and in the choice of its
company.
[2] Thus Milton, who (in common with his contemporaries) always uses the
word accurately, speaks of Ezekiel 'swallowing his implicit roll of
knowledge'--_i.e._ coming to the knowledge of many truths not separately
and in detail, but by the act of arriving at some one master truth which
involved all the rest.--So again, if any man or government were to
suppress a book, that man or government might justly be reproached as the
implicit destroyer of all the wisdom and virtue that might have been the
remote products of that book.