This verb, often now very loosely used, had once a very definite meaning of its own. ‘To prevaricate’ is to betray the cause which one affects to sustain, the prevaricator is the feint pleader, as he used to be called, and, so far as I know, the words are always so used by our early writers. We have inherited the word from the Latin law-courts, which borrowed it from the life. The ‘prævaricator’ being one who halted on two unequal legs, the name was transferred to him who, affecting to prosecute a charge, was in secret collusion with the opposite party, and so managed the cause as to ensure his escape. Observe in the two following passages the accuracy of use which so habitually distinguishes our writers of the seventeenth century as compared with too many of the nineteenth.
I proceed now to do the same service for the divines of England; whom you question first in point of learning and sufficiency, and then in point of conscience and honesty, as prevaricating in the religion which they profess, and inclining to Popery.—Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, Preface, p. 11.
If we be not all enemies to God in this kind [in a direct opposition], yet in adhering to the enemy we are enemies; in our prevarications, and easy betrayings and surrendering of ourselves to the enemy of his kingdom, Satan, we are his enemies.—Donne, On the Nativity. Sermon 7.
| Prevent, | } |
| Prevention. |
One may reach a point before another to help or to hinder him there; may anticipate his arrival either with the purpose of keeping it for him, or keeping it against him. ‘To prevent’ has slipped by very gradual degrees, which it would not be difficult to trace, from the sense of keeping for to that of keeping against, from the sense of arriving first with the intention of helping, to that of arriving first with the intention of hindering, and then generally from helping to hindering.
So it is, that if Titus had not prevented the whole multitude of people which came to see him, and if he had not got him away betimes, before the games were ended, he had hardly escaped from being stifled amongst them.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 321.
Gentlemen that were brought low, not by their vices, but by misfortune, poveri vergognosi as the Tuscan calls them, bashful, and could not crave though they perished, he prevented their modesty, and would heartily thank those that discovered their commiserable condition to him.—Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, part i. p. 201.
That poor man had waited thirty and eight years [at the pool of Bethesda], and still was prevented by some other.—Bishop Taylor, Life of Christ, part iii. § 13.
There he beheld how humbly diligent
New Adulation was to be at hand;