formers of that song in which the germs of Greek tragedy lay, or because the first actors were dressed like satyrs in goatskins, is a question which will now remain unsettled to the end.* You know what leonine verses are; or, if you do not, it is very easy to explain. They are Latin hexameters into which an internal rhyme has forced its way. The following, for example, are 'leonine':

Qui pingit florem non pingit floris odorem:

Si quis det mannos, ne quære in dentibus annos.

The word has plainly to do with 'leo' in some shape or other; but are these verses so called from one Leo or Leolinus, who first composed them? or because, as the lion is king of beasts, so this, in monkish estimation, was the king of metres? or from some other cause which none have so much as guessed at?+ It is a mystery which none has solved. That frightful system of fagging which made in the seventeenth century the German Universities a sort of hell upon earth, and which was known by the name of pennalism,' we can scarcely disconnect from penna'; while yet this does not help us to any effectual scattering of the mystery which rests upon the term. The connexion of 'dictator' with 'dicere,' 'dictare,' is obvious; not so

* See Bentley, Works, vol. i. p. 337.

† See my Sacred Latin Poetry, 3rd edit. p. 32.

See my Gustavus Adolphus in Germany, p. 131.

V.

Sycophant, Superstition.

245

the reason why the dictator obtained his name. Sycophant' and 'superstition' are words, one Greek and one Latin, of the same character. No one doubts of what elements they are composed; and yet their secret has been so lost, that, except as a more or less plausible guess, it can never now be recovered.*

But I must conclude. I may seem in this present lecture a little to have outrun your needs, and to have sometimes moved in a sphere too remote from that in which your future work will lie. And yet it is in truth very difficult to affirm of any words, that they do not touch us, do not in some way bear upon our studies, on what we shall hereafter have to teach, or shall desire to learn; that there are any conquests which language makes that concern only a select few, and may be regarded indifferently by all others. For it is here as with many inventions in the arts and luxuries of life; which, being at the first the exclusive privilege and possession of the wealthy and refined, gradually descend into lower strata of society, until at length what were once the elegancies and luxuries of a few, have become the decencies, wellnigh the necessities, of all. Not otherwise there are words, once only on the lips of philosophers

* For a good recapitulation of what best has been written on superstitio,' see Pott, Etym. Forschungen, vol. ii. p. 921.

or theologians, of the deeper thinkers of their time, or of those directly interested in their speculations, which step by step have come down, not debasing themselves in this act of becoming popular, but training and elevating an ever-increasing number of persons to enter into their meaning, till at length they have become truly a part of the nation's common stock, 'household words,' used easily and intelligently by nearly all.

I cannot better conclude this lecture than by quoting a passage, one among many, which expresses with a rare eloquence all I have been labouring to utter; for this truth, which many have noticed, hardly any has set forth with the same fulness of illustration, or the same sense of its importance, as the author of The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Language,' he observes, 'is often called an instrument of thought, but it is also the nutriment of thought; or rather, it is the atmosphere in which thought lives; a medium essential to the activity of our speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its operation; and an element modifying, by its qualities and changes, the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds. In this way the influence of preceding discoveries upon subsequent ones, of the past upon the present, is most penetrating and universal, although most subtle and difficult to trace. The most familiar words and phrases are

V.

Whewell quoted.

247

connected by imperceptible ties with the reasonings and discoveries of former men and distant times. Their knowledge is an inseparable part of ours: the present generation inherits and uses the scientific wealth of all the past. And this is the fortune, not only of the great and rich in the intellectual world, of those who have the key to the ancient storehouses, and who have accumulated treasures of their own, but the humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into words, benefits by the labours of the greatest. When he counts his little wealth, he finds he has in his hands coins which bear the image and superscription of ancient and modern intellectual dynasties, and that in virtue of this possession acquisitions are in his power, solid knowledge within his reach, which none could ever have attained to, if it were not that the gold of truth once dug out of the mine circulates more and more widely among mankind.'

LECTURE VI.

ON THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS.

YNONYMS, and the study of synonyms, with the advantages to be derived from a careful noting of the distinction between them, constitute the subject with which in my present lecture I shall deal. But what, you may ask, is meant when, comparing certain words with one another, we affirm of them that they are synonyms? We imply that, with great and essential resemblances of meaning, they have at the same time small, subordinate, and partial differences these differences being such as either originally, and on the strength of their etymology, were born with them; or differences which they have by usage acquired; or such as, though nearly or altogether latent now, they are capable of receiving at the hands of wise and discreet masters of language. Synonyms are. thus words of like significance in the main; with a large extent of ground which they occupy in common, but also with something of