Leslie and Dr. Middleton (Vol. ix., p. 324.).—
"Middleton was one of the men who sought for twenty years some historical facts that might conform to Leslie's four conditions, and yet evade Leslie's logic."—Blackwood's Magazine, July, 1842, p. 5.
J. O. B.
Lord Brougham and Horne Tooke (Vol. ix., p. 398.).—I have not Lord Brougham's book before me, but I have no doubt but that Q. has missed the meaning of his lordship. The reference would probably be to Horne Tooke's anticipation of the strange immoral reveries of Emerson and others, that truth is entirely subjective; because the word bears etymological relation to "to trow," to think, or believe: and so truth has no objective existence, but is merely what a man troweth. If that be an argument, Lord Brougham would say then the law of libel would be unjust, merely because "libel" means primarily a little book; he might have added that, according to Horne Tooke and Mr. Emerson, if a man had been killed by falling against a post at Charing Cross, a jury might deny the fact of the violent death, because "post" means a place for depositing letters, and he had not been near St. Martin's-le-grand. The remark of Lord Brougham is not as to a fact, but is a reductio ad absurdum.
W. Denton.
It is suggested to Q. (Bloomsbury), that Lord Brougham meant not to say that Horne Tooke had ever held or maintained this strange doctrine, "that the law of libel was unjust and absurd, because libel means a little book," but that he would have done so, or might have done so consistently with his etymological theory, namely, that the present sense of words is to be sought in their primitive signification: e.g., in the Diversions of Purley, vol. ii. p. 403., Horne Tooke says,—
"True, as we now write it, or trew, as it was formerly written, means simply and merely that which is trowed; and, instead of its being a rare commodity upon earth, except only in words, there is nothing but truth in the world."
If we ought now to use the word truth only in this sense, then, pari ratione, we ought to mean only a little book when we use the word libel.
J. O. B.
Thorpe.