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I have heard men who could misquote Scripture for their own ends, and talk a long while without saying anything; but he so far surpassed in these particulars the loftiest efforts within my former experience, that I could think of no comparison for him but Jack Bunsby taken to exhorting. Witness a sample: "Seven women shall take a hold o' one man! There!" "What d' ye think o' that? Shall!
That little adventure simply confirmed yours truly in his belief of the old maxim learned at Mammy's knee, that "'Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise! "I may misquote, but it will do. Old Sol has scarce seemed to illumine the Western heavens ere I seek my humble couch. And yet I do not pose as a saint. But stop!
I added that it was not a wonder that these poor people should misquote Scripture, as a few years ago many of them were not allowed to learn to read. At this three of that company testified to being punished severely for learning their letters of a little white boy. I told them it was a greater wonder that they had passed through such privations and retained as much intelligence as they possessed.
Instances all with initial m are as follows: mechanics, machine, maxim, mission, mode, monastic, marsh, magnify, malcontent, majority, manly, malleable, malignancy, maritime, manna, manslaughter, masterly, market-day-folks, maid-price, mealy, meekly, mercifully, merchant-like, memorial, mercenary, mention, memorandums, mercurial, metropolis, miserably, mindful, meridian, medal, metaphysics, ministration, mimic, misapply, misgovernment, misquote, misconstruction, monstrously, monster-like, monstrosity, mutable, moneyed, monopoly, mortise, mortised, muniments, to moderate, and mother-wit These words, and five thousand more equally excellent, which have remained part of the language of the English-speaking world for three centuries since Shakespeare, and will no doubt continue to belong to it for ever, we are apt to declare he should have worn in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon.
By the side of what dazzling shrewdness, what deep knowledge of those holes and corners in the human system of which Goethe must have spoken when he said somewhere, if I recollect right, and don't misquote him, which I'll not answer for "There is something in every man's heart which, if we could know, would make us hate him," by the side of all this, and of much more that showed prodigious boldness and energy of intellect, what strange exaggeration; what mock nobility of sentiment; what inconceivable perversion of reasoning; what damnable demoralization!
I shall not think it necessary here to examine, whether I am "worked into a pitch of confusion," or have "carried self-deception to perfection," or am "anxious to show my credulity," or am "in a morbid state of mind," or "hunger for nonsense as my food," or "indulge in subtle paradoxes" and "rhetorical exaggerations," or have "eccentricities" or teach in a style "utterly beyond" my accuser's "comprehension," or create in him "blank astonishment," or "exalt the magical powers of my Church," or have "unconsciously committed myself to a statement which strikes at the root of all morality," or "look down on the Protestant gentry as without hope of heaven," or "had better be sent to the furthest" Catholic "mission among the savages of the South seas," than "to teach in an Irish Catholic University," or have "gambled away my reason," or adopt "sophistries," or have published "sophisms piled upon sophisms," or have in my sermons "culminating wonders," or have a "seemingly sceptical method," or have "barristerial ability" and "almost boundless silliness," or "make great mistakes," or am "a subtle dialectician," or perhaps have "lost my temper," or "misquote Scripture," or am "antiscriptural," or "border very closely on the Pelagian heresy."
The conclusion which we are to draw from these "facts" is this: Such a corrupt person could not possibly be a proper instrument for the Holy Spirit to employ in so pious an undertaking as the translation of the Word of God. Catholics should be reminded that they misquote the book of matriculation in which the students at Erfurt signed their names on entering the university.
Still, I think there may be a few that will rather like this vein, possibly prefer it to a livelier one, serious young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis from years of age to inclusive. Another privilege of talking is to misquote. Of course it wasn't Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair, but Iris.
Nevertheless when he did not misread history or misquote precedents but wielded the broadsword of equity, he often caught the public conscience, and then he was not an opponent to be despised.
Some, pretending not to know him, would decry his writings, and praise those of his contemporaries; others would laud his verses to the skies, but purposely misquote and burlesque them; others would annoy him with parodies; while one young lady, whom he was teasing, as he supposed, with great success and infinite humor, silenced his rather boisterous laughter by quoting his own line about "the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind."
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