Our author hit upon his parent-discovery in the course of a law-suit, while he was examining, with jealous watchfulness, the meaning of words to prevent being entrapped by them; or rather, this circumstance might itself be traced to the habit of satisfying his own mind as to the precise sense in which he himself made use of words.  Mr. Tooke, though he had no objection to puzzle others, was mightily averse to being puzzled or mystified himself.  All was, to his determined mind, either complete light or complete darkness.  There was no hazy, doubtful chiaro-scuro in his understanding.  He wanted something “palpable to feeling as to sight.”  “What,” he would say to himself, “do I mean when I use the conjunction that? Is it an anomaly, a class by itself, a word sealed against all inquisitive attempts?  Is it enough to call it a copula, a bridge, a link, a word connecting sentences?  That is undoubtedly its use, but what is its origin?” Mr. Tooke thought he had answered this question satisfactorily, and loosened the Gordian knot of grammarians, “familiar as his garter,” when he said, “It is the common pronoun, adjective, or participle, that, with the noun, thing or proposition, implied, and the particular example following it.”  So he thought, and so every reader has thought since, with the exception of teachers and writers upon grammar.  Mr. Windham, indeed, who was a sophist, but not a logician, charged him with having found “a mare’s-nest;” but it is not to be doubted that Mr. Tooke’s etymologies will stand the test, and last longer than Mr. Windham’s ingenious derivation of the practice of bull-baiting from the principles of humanity!

Having thus laid the corner-stone, he proceeded to apply the same method of reasoning to other undecyphered and impracticable terms.  Thus the word, And, he explained clearly enough to be the verb add, or a corruption of the old Saxon, anandad.  “Two and two make four,” that is, “two add two make four.”  Mr. Tooke, in fact, treated words as the chemists do substances; he separated those which are compounded of others from those which are not decompoundable.  He did not explain the obscure by the more obscure, but the difficult by the plain, the complex by the simple.  This alone is proceeding upon the true principles of science:  the rest is pedantry and petit-maitreship. Our philosophical writer distinguished all words into names of things, and directions added for joining them together, or originally into nouns and verbs.  It is a pity that he has left this matter short, by omitting to define the Verb.  After enumerating sixteen different definitions (all of which he dismisses with scorn and contumely) at the end of two quarto volumes, he refers the reader for the true solution to a third volume, which he did not live to finish.  This extraordinary man was in the habit of tantalizing his guests on a Sunday