I will explain the distinction.
1 ROBERT GREEN.
It is not like the difference between a Baptist and an Anabaptist, which Sir John Danvers said, is much the same as that between a Whiskey and a Tim-Whiskey, that is to say no difference at all. Nor is it like that between Dryads and Hamadryads, which Benserade once explained to the satisfaction of a learned lady by saying qu'il avait autant de difference qu'entre les Evêques et les Archevêques. Nor is it like the distinction taken by him who divided bread into white bread, brown bread, and French rolls.
A panegyrical poet said of the aforesaid Benserade that he possessed three talents which posterity would hardly be persuaded to believe;
De plaisanter les Grands il ne fit point scrupule,
Sans qu'ils le prissent de travers;
Il fut vieux et galant sans être ridicule,
Et s'enrichit à composer des vers.
He used to say, that he was descended and derived his name from the Abencerrages. Upon a similar presumption of etymological genealogy it has been said that Aulus Gellius was the progenitor of all the Gells. An Englishman may doubt this, a Welshman would disbelieve, and a Jew might despise it. So might a Mahommedan, because it is a special prerogative of his prophet to be perfectly acquainted with his whole pedigree; the Mussulmen hold that no other human being ever possessed the same knowledge, and that after the resurrection, when all other pedigrees will be utterly destroyed, this alone will be preserved in the archives of Eternity.
Leaving however Sir William Gell to genealogize, if he pleases, as elaborately as he has topographized, and to maintain the authenticity and dignity of his Roman descent against all who may impugn it, whether Turk, Jew, or Christian, I proceed with my promised explanation.
The Hebrews call chapters and sections and other essential or convenient divisions, the bones of a book. The Latins called them nodi, knots or links; and every philologist knows that articles, whether grammatical, conventional, or of faith, are so denominated as being the joints of language, covenants and creeds.
Now reader, the chapters of this book are the bones wherewith its body is compacted; the knots or links whereby its thread or chain of thoughts is connected; the articulations, without which it would be stiff, lame and disjointed. Every chapter has a natural dependence upon that which precedes, and in like manner a relation to that which follows it. Each grows out of the other. They follow in direct genealogy; and each could no more have been produced without relation to its predecessor, than Isaac could have begotten Jacob unless Abraham had begotten Isaac.
Sometimes indeed it must of necessity happen that a new chapter opens with a new part of the subject, but this is because we are arrived at that part in the natural prosecution of our argument. The disruption causes no discontinuance; it is, (to pursue the former illustration,) as when the direct line in a family is run out, and the succession is continued by a collateral branch; or as in the mineral world, in which one formation begins where another breaks off.