On the Distinction between 'Rhetorica utens' and 'Rhetorica docens'.—It was a perplexity, familiar to the experience of the Schoolmen, that oftentimes one does not know whether to understand by the term logic the act and process of reasoning involved and latent in any series of connected propositions, or this same act and process formally abstracting itself as an art and system of reasoning. For instance, if you should happen to say, 'Dr. Isaac Watts, the English Nonconformist, was a good man, and a clever man; but alas! for his logic, what can his best friend say for it? The most charitable opinion must pronounce it at the best so, so'—in such a case, what is it that you would be understood to speak of? Would it be the general quality of the Doctor's reasoning, the style and character of his philosophical method, or would it be the particular little book known as 'The Doctor: his Logic,' price 5s., bound in calf, and which you might be very shy of touching with a pair of tongs, for fear of dimming their steel polish, so long as your wife's eye was upon your motions? The same ambiguity affects many other cases. For instance, if you heard a man say, 'The rhetoric of Cicero is not fitted to challenge much interest,' you might naturally understand it of the particular style and rhetorical colouring—which was taxed with being florid; nay, Rhodian; nay, even Asiatic—that characterizes that great orator's compositions; or, again, the context might so restrain the word as to force it into meaning the particular system or theory of rhetoric addressed to Herennius, a system which (being traditionally ascribed to Cicero) is usually printed amongst his works. Here, and in scores of similar cases, lies often a trap for the understanding; but the Schoolmen evaded this trap by distinguishing between 'Rhetorica utens,' and 'Rhetorica docens,' between the rhetoric that laid down or delivered didactically the elements of oratorical persuasion as an art to be learned, and rhetoric, on the other hand, as a creative energy that wielded these elements by the mouth of Pericles in the year 440 b. c., or by the mouth of Demosthenes, 340 b. c.; between rhetoric the scholastic art and rhetoric the heaven-born power; between the rhetoric of Aristotle that illuminated the solitary student, and the rhetoric of Demosthenes that ran along in rolling thunders to the footstool of Artaxerxes' throne. Oh, these dear spindle-shanked Schoolmen! they were people, respected reader, not to be sneezed at. What signifies having spindle-shanks?
Synonyms.—A representative and a delegate, according to Burke, are identical; but there is the same difference as between a person who on his own results of judgment manages the interests of X, and a person merely reporting the voice of X. Probably there never was a case which so sharply illustrated the liability of goodish practical understanding to miss, to fail in seeing, an object lying right before the eyes; and that is more wonderful in cases where the object is not one of multitude, but exists almost in a state of insulation. At the coroner's inquest on a young woman who died from tight-lacing, acting, it was said, in combination with a very full meal of animal food, to throw the heart out of position, Mr. Wakely pronounced English or British people all distorted in the spine, whereas Continental people were all right. Continental! How unlimited an idea! Why, it meant nothing; it defines nothing, limits nothing, excludes nothing. Who or what is Continental? Apparently it means anyone out of 240 millions not being one of the 27 millions in the Britannides. Every man escapes an insane folly who happens to breathe an air E. (N. E., S. E., N. N. E., S. S. E., etc.) of the Britannides. Vanity, the inevitable wish to improve, or rather to avail, one's self of a natural means offered for deepening and marking out the natural outline of the shape, i.e., of the sexual characteristics, has no effect, dies out, the instant that a family is one of those who have the privilege of basking anywhere 2,000 miles E. or 2,000 miles N. and S.!
A whistling to a horse: Poppysme (vide Whistling, Lat. Dict.); but poppysme is a patting, a clapping, on the back, neck, or, doubtless, wherever the animal is sensible of praise.
'Takest away.' This beautiful expression, though exquisitely treated by position—
'That all evil thoughts and aims
Takest away,'
is yet originally borrowed by Mr. W. from the Litany: 'O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world.'
In style to explain the true character of note-writing—how compressed and unrambling and direct it ought to be, and illustrate by the villainous twaddle of many Shakespearian notes.
Syllogism.—In the Edin. Advertiser for Friday, January 25, 1856, a passage occurs taken from Le Nord (or Journal du Nord), or some paper whose accurate title I do not know, understood to be Russian in its leanings, which makes a most absurd and ignorant use of this word. The Allies are represented as addressing an argument to Russia, amounting, I think, to this, viz.: that, in order to test her sincerity, would it not be well for Russia at once to cede such insulated points of territory as were valuable to Russia or suspicious to the Allies simply as furnishing means for invasion of Turkey? And this argument is called a syllogism.
'Laid in wait for him.'—This false phrase occurs in some article (a Crimea article, I suppose) in the same Advertiser of January 25. And I much doubt whether any ordinary ear would reconcile itself to lay in wait (as a past tense) even when instructed in its propriety.
Those Scotticisms are worst which are nonsensical, as e.g.: