Now, if such harmony were at all desirable (whereas, on the contrary, we should thus be carrying ruin into the traditions and obliteration into the ethnological links of languages, industriously, in fact, throwing up insuperable obstacles in the path of historical researches), it would be far better, instead of adjusting the pronunciation to the imaginary value of the spelling, inversely to adjust the spelling to the known and established pronunciation, as a certain class of lunatics amongst ourselves, viz., the _phonetic gang_, have for some time been doing systematically.
Here, therefore, I hope is one fixed point. Here there is anchorage. The usage is the rule, at any rate; and the law of analogy takes effect only where _that_ cannot be decisively ascertained.
_The Latin Word 'Felix.'_--The Romans appear to me to have had no term for _happy_, which argues that they had not the idea. _Felix_ is tainted with the idea of success, and is thus palpably referred to life as a competition, which for Romans every distinguished life was. In fact, apart from his city the Roman was nothing. Too poor to have a villa or any mode of retirement, it is clear that the very idea of Roman life supposes for the vast majority a necessity of thick crowded intercourse, without the possibility of solitude. I, for my peculiar constitution of mind, to whom solitude has in all periods of life been more of a necessity almost than air, view with special horror the life of a Roman or Athenian. All the morning he had to attend a factious hustings or a court--assemblies deliberative or judicial. Here only he was somebody, and yet, however, somebody through others. Combining with one leader and many underlings like himself, he also became a power; but in himself and for himself, after all, he was consciously nothing. When Cicero speaks of his _nunquam minus Solus quam cum solus_, he is announcing what he feels to be, and knows will be, accepted as a very extraordinary fact. For even _in rure_ it is evident that friends made it a duty of friendship to seek out and relieve their rusticating friends.
_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?
