* * * * *

“A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

“Parson W——­ is not quite so continent as Diana, yet prettily dissembleth his frailty.  Is Parson W——­ therefore a hypocrite? I think not.  Where the concealment of a vice is less pernicious than the barefaced publication of it would be, no additional delinquency is incurred in the secrecy.

“Parson W——­ is simply an immoral clergyman.  But if Parson W——­ were to be forever haranguing on the opposite virtue,—­choosing for his perpetual text, in preference to all other pulpit-topics, the remarkable resistance recorded in the 89th of Exodus [Genesis?],—­dwelling, moreover, and dilating upon it,—­then Parson W——­ might be reasonably suspected of hypocrisy.  But Parson W——­ rarely diverteth into such line of argument, or toucheth it briefly.  His ordinary topics are fetched from ’obedience to the powers that are,’—­’submission to the civil magistrate in all commands that are not absolutely unlawful’; on which he can delight to expatiate with equal fervor and sincerity.

“Again.  To despise a person is properly to look down upon him with none or the least possible emotion.  But when Clementina, who has lately lost her lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole frame in agitation, pronounces with a peculiar emphasis that she ’despises the fellow,’ depend upon it that he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as she would have us imagine.

“One more instance.  If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it.  Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.  For example:  A good name helps a man on in the world.  This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed.  It has a distinct subject and predicate.  But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism; as to say, A good name is a proof of a man’s estimation in the world.  We seem to be saying something, when we say nothing.  I was describing to F——­ some knavish tricks of a mutual friend of ours.  ‘If he did so and so,’ was the reply, ’he cannot be an honest man.’  Here was a genuine truism, truth upon truth, inference and proposition identical,—­or rather, a dictionary definition usurping the place of an inference.”

* * * * *

“We are ashamed at sight of a monkey,—­somehow as we are shy of poor relations.”

* * * * *

“C——­ imagined a Caledonian compartment in Hades, where there should be fire without sulphur.”

* * * * *

“Absurd images are sometimes irresistible.  I will mention two.  An elephant in a coach-office gravely coming to have his trunk booked;—­a mermaid over a fish-kettle cooking her own tail.”