better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterances of virtuous indignation against evil from the platform, or in the drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant; so much indignation as is expressed, has found vent; it is wasted; is taken away from the work of coping with evil; the man has so much less left. And hence he who restrains that love of talk, lays up a fund of spiritual strength."

It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle ages, being unable to read, came to some one to be taught a psalm. Having learned the simple verse, "I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue,” he went away, saying that was enough if it was practically acquired. When asked six months, and again many years after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he answered that he had never been able truly to master this. A man may have a heart overflowing with love and sympathy, even though he is not in the habit of exhibiting on his cards J. Good Soul, Philanthropist," and was never known to unfold his cambric handkerchief with the words, Let us weep." On the other hand, nothing is easier than to use a set phraseology without attaching to it any clear and definite meaning,—to cheat one's self with the semblance of thought or feeling, when no thought or feeling exists. It has been truly said that when good men who have no deep religious fervor use fervent language, which they have caught from others, or which was the natural expression of what they felt in other and better years,above all, when they employ on mean and trivial occasions expressions which have been forged in the fires of affliction and hammered out in the shock of conflict,- they cannot easily imagine what a disastrous impression they produce

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*Sermon by Rev. F. W. Robertson.

on keen and discriminating minds. The cheat is at once detected, and the hasty inference is drawn that all expressions of religious earnestness are affected and artificial. The honest and irrepressible utterance of strong conviction and deep emotion commands, respect; but intense words should never be used when the religious life is not intense. "Costing little, words are given prodigally, and sacrificial acts must toil for years to cover the space which a single fervid promise has stretched itself over. No wonder that the slow acts are superseded by the available words, the weighty bullion by the current paper-money. If I have conveyed all I feel by language, I am tempted to fancy, by the relief experienced, that feeling has attained its end and realized itself. Farewell, then, to the toil of the 'daily sacrifice!' Devotion has found for itself a vent in

words."

Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its cant, which is as offensive as any of its other forms. When Rossini was asked why he had ceased attending the opera in Paris, he replied, "I am embarrassed at listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or Germany, I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side of me is a man, shabbily dressed, but who feels the music as I do; in Paris I have on each side of me a fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves, who explains to me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says is very clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the gloss off my own impression,- if I have any."

"Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson."

CHAPTER VI.

SOME ABUSES OF WORDS.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.- PROVERBS XVII. 27.

Learn the value of a man's words and expressions, and you know him. He who has a superlative for everything, wants a measure for the great or small.-LAVATER.

Words are women; deeds are men.- GEORGE HERBERT.

He that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth, like the cuttle-fish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.-— RAY.

HE old Roman poet Ennius was so proud of knowing

three languages that he used to declare that he had three hearts. The Emperor Charles V. expressed himself still more strongly, and declared that in proportion to the number of languages a man knows, is he more of a man. According to this theory, Cardinal Mezzofanti, who understood one hundred and fourteen languages, and spoke thirty with rare excellence, must have been many men condensed into one. Of all the human polyglots in ancient or modern times, he had perhaps the greatest knowledge of words. Yet, with all his marvellous linguistic knowledge, he was a mere prodigy or freak of nature, and, it has been well observed, scarcely deserves a higher place in the Pantheon of intellect than a blindfold chess-player or a calculating boy. Talking foreign languages with a fluency and accuracy which caused strangers to mistake him for a compatriot, he attempted no work of utility,-left no trace of his colossal powers; and therefore, in contemplating them, we can but wonder at his gifts, as we wonder

at the Belgian giant or a five-legged lamb. In allusion to his hyperbolical acquisitions, De Quincey suggests that the following would be an appropriate epitaph for his eminence: "Here lies a man who, in the act of dying, committed a robbery,-absconding from his fellow-creatures with a valuable polyglot dictionary." Enormous, however, as were the linguistic acquisitions of Mezzofanti, no man was ever less vain of his acquirements,― priding himself, as he did, less upon his attainments than most persons upon a smattering of a single tongue. "What am I," said he to a visitor, "but an ill-bound dictionary?" The saying of Catherine de Medicis is too often suggested by such prodigies of linguistic acquisition. When told that Scaliger understood twenty different languages-"That's twenty words for one idea," said she; "I had rather have twenty ideas for one word." In this reply she foreshadowed the great error of modern scholarship, which is too often made the be-all and the end-all of life, when its only relation to it should be that of a graceful handmaid. The story of the scholar who, dying, regretted at the end of his career that he had not concentrated all his energies upon the dative case, only burlesques an actual fact. The educated man is too often one who knows more of language than of idea,

more of the husk than of the kernel, more of the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He has got together a heap of symbols,― of mere counters,— with which he feels himself to be an intellectual Rothschild; but of the substance of these shadows, the sterling gold of intellect, coin current throughout the realm, he has not an eagle. All his wealth is in paper,― paper like bad scrip, marked with a high nominal amount, but useless in exchange and repudiated in real traffic. The great

scholar is often an intellectual miser, who expends the spiritual energy that might make him a hero, upon the detection of a wrong dot, a false syllable, or an inaccurate word.

In this country, where fluency of speech is vouchsafed in so large a measure to the people, and every third man is an orator, it is easier to find persons with the twenty words for one idea, than persons with twenty ideas for one word. Of all the peoples on the globe, except perhaps the Irish, Americans are the most spendthrift of language. Not only in our court-houses and representative halls, but everywhere, we are literally deluged with words, words,words. Everybody seems born to make long speeches, as the sparks to fly upward. The Aristotelian theory that Nature abhors a vacuum appears to be a universal belief, and all are laboring to fill up the realms of space with "mouthfuls of spoken wind." The quantity of breath that is wasted at our public meetings, religious, political, philanthropic, and literary,—is incalculable. Hardly a railroad or a canal is opened, but the occasion is seized on as a chance for speeches of "learned length and thundering sound"; and even a new hotel cannot throw open its doors without an amount of breath being expended, sufficient, if economically used, to waft a boat across a small lake.

One is struck, in reading the "thrilling" addresses on various occasions, which are said to have "chained as with hooks of steel the attention of thousands," and which confer on their authors "immortal reputations" that die within a year, to see what tasteless word-piling passes with many for eloquence. The advice given in Racine's "Plaideurs," by an ear-tortured judge to a long-winded. lawyer, "to skip to the deluge," might wisely be repeated