Russell Gole.
I only treat misquotation as an offence in the old sense of the word; and courteously, but most positively, I deny the right of any one who quotes to omit, or to alter emphasis, without stating what he has done. That A. E. B. did misunderstand me, I was justified in inferring from his implication (p. 198. col. 2) that I made the day begin "a minute after midnight."
Arthur Hopton, whom A. E. B. quotes against me (but the quotation is from chapter xiv., not xiii.), is wrong in his law. The lawyers, from Coke down to our own time, give both days, the natural and artificial, as legal days. See Coke Littleton (Index, Day), the current commentators on Blackstone, and the usual law dictionaries.
Nevertheless, this discussion will serve the purpose. No one denies that the day of majority now begins at midnight: no one pretends to prove, by evidence of decisions, or opinion of writers on law, that it began otherwise in 1600. How then did Ben Jonson make it begin, as clearly A. E. B. shows he does, at six o'clock (meaning probably a certain sunrise)? Hopton throws out the natural day altogether in a work on chronology, and lays down the artificial day as the only one known to lawyers: it is not wonderful that Jonson should have fallen into the same mistake.
A. De Morgan.
SIMILARITY OF IDEA IN ST. LUKE AND JUVENAL.
(Vol. viii., p. 195.)
I send, as a pendant to Mr. Weir's lines from Juvenal, the following extract from Cicero:
"Sed in eâ es urbe, in quâ hæc, vel plura, et ornatiora, parietes ipsi loqui posse videantur."—Cic. Epist., 1. vi. 3.: Torquato, Pearce's 12mo. edition.