vast amount of wadding to the clothes of polite
people. " Certain I am," says Stubs, "there
was never any kind of apparel ever invented
that could more disproportion the body of man
than these doublets, stuffed with four, five, or
six pound of bombast at the least." The globular
buttons, now worn only by pages, were worn
also in those days as bullions by the exquisite,
"in his French doublet with his blistered
bullions." Bullion properly means, and used always
to mean, any gold metal baser than the standard
of the Mint.

                 Words, whilom flourishing,
      Pass now no more, but, banished from the court,
      Dwell with disgrace among the vulgar sort;
      And those which eld's strict doom did disallow
      And damn for bullion, go for current now.

In the word buxom we can trace the whole
course of the change of meaning from the
original sense of bendable (still the meaning of
the German form of it, biegsam), which implied
obedient or pliable. Being pliable was being
ready to accommodate one's self to others, and
to be obliging. But that is a feminine virtue
most especially, it makes a woman cheerful
company, and, ten to one, this cheerful and
companionable woman, who has taken the world
easily, and bent aside under its blows instead of
bearing them, who is not of the anxious sort, is
not of the lean sort. She is plump and has no
wrinkles in her face. Yet in the old days, with
the cares of a martyr on him, the lean man could
say, " I submit myself unto this holy Church of
Christ, to be ever buxom and obedient to the
ordinance of it."

Is it because we are more lazily disposed to be
carried than to carry, that the word carriage
means no longer what we ourselves bear, but
that which bears us. We have quite lost the
original sense of the text, " And David left his
carriage in the hand of the keeper of the
carriage." Certainly it must be because we are
all so much more ready to condemn than to
applaud our neighbour, that the word censure,
which means only an expression of opinion, now
means only blame. On the other hand such
words as delicacy, and luxury, which once meant
only offences of the self-indulgent, have become
terms by which animal pleasure is caressed.
The sins of the rich have come to honour by
the same process of language that has made
reproach of the poor man's privations and
necessities. " Thus much," says an old writer, " of
delicacy in general; now more particularly of
his first branch, gluttony." Chaucer declaims
against ' foule lust of luxurie' that taints the
minds of men.

There is an inference not flattering to the
condition of society to be drawn from the twist
of meaning undergone by many words.
Cunning used to mean simply knowing, having
knowledge, and it was not profane to ascribe to
the three persons of the Trinity " power,
cunning, and might." The perverse and selfish use
commonly made of superior knowledge,—- early
or exclusive intelligence, has at last led to an
habitual employment of this word in a bad sense.

When the battle of Waterloo was fought, the
King of France was in a Flemish town, where
he was in the habit of breakfasting with his
household at an open balcony, in presence of the
public. Speedy news of the fall of Napoleon
having reached this royal household, there was
mutual felicitation and embracing visible from
the street. An emissary of the house of
Rothschild was outside, instantly divined the truth,
and shot over to London. When the house he
represented had made use of the intelligence to
effect its own little arrangements upon 'Change,
government was informed of what it knew, and
the house turned a penny by its cunning.

Again, the word demure once honestly meant
what it now expresses only with a latent sneer.
We knew better than to trust one another as
"demure and innocent." Facetiousness was
once the mirth of the refined, but we must question
the fairness of the Dean's inference that,
because now the name is applied only to the
ruder sort of jesting, men have degenerated.
Facetiousness of the most courtly ladies, a few
centuries ago, would in some respects suit better
in these days the precincts of the Coal Hole
than those of the Court of St. James. The
word means what it did mean; but our sense of
refined jesting has improved. We are more
disposed to accept without inquiry the moral
drawn from the twist of meaning in a word
like garb. A man's garb used to be his whole
outside demeanour:

    First for your garb, it must be grave and serious,
    Very reserved and locked.

Now it means only so much of him as he may
find catalogued and priced at stated seasons by
his tailor. Or again, we may add a couple of
letters to that word, and find, in the way we
have dealt with the word garble, evidence against
the humanity of critics. Garble is derived from
a later Latin verb, meaning a sifting of corn,
which again was derived from garba, a
wheatsheaf. The word used to mean any picking or
sorting: garbled spices were picked spices. We
apply the word now only to a picking and
choosing of bits out of books, and always assume
that this picking of extracts is done dishonestly,
with an unfriendly purpose.

We take now some general suggestions of the
twist that certain words have undergone. Copy
is, almost unchanged, the Latin word for plenty.
An English historian could of old time seek
praise for " choice and copy of tongue." To
make a book or writing plentiful by transcribing
it again and again, was to copy. To transcribe
was to copy. Afterwards, to copy meant but
little more than to transcribe.

Defiance means a breaking of the bonds of
faith witli any one or any thing. To what we
defy we declare that no treaty or natural obligation
shall any longer bind us. Conflict necessarily
used to follow on defiance, and the old
sense of the word has been obscured. In the
present war, the Power that first set at naught
the Treaty of Vienna may be said, at any rate
among the etymologists, to have defied Europe
by that act.