Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise of all things common else.
Milton, Paradise Lost, iv. 751.
A propriety is nothing else but jus ad rem, when a man doth claim such a thing as his own, and has a power to use it and dispose of it in a lawful way for his own benefit and advantage.—Strong, Of the Two Covenants, b. iii. c. 1.
| Prose, | } |
| Proser. |
‘To prose’ is now to talk or to write heavily, tediously, without spirit and without animation; but ‘to prose’ was once the antithesis of to versify, and a ‘proser’ of a writer in metre. In the tacit assumption that vigour, animation, rapid movement, with all the precipitation of the spirit, belong to verse rather than to prose, lies the explanation of the changed uses of the words.
It was found that whether ought was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own choice in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live.—Milton, Reason of Church Government, b. ii.
And surely Nash, though he a proser were,
A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear.