Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 | Page 2

of its priesthood, the married clergy, who braved its censures and contemned its authority, became known as Nicolaites; which name, grave writers assure us, was given them in consequence of the active share Pope Nicholas II. had taken in punishing their contumacy and effecting their suppression. The notion that any sect or class of religionists should have borrowed its name from that of its most zealous opponent and indefatigable persecutor, is worthy only of those critics, so severely reprehended by Quintilian, who professed to discover the etymon of the Latin word lucus, a grove, in the substantive lux, light; and vindicated the derivation on the ground, that in groves darkness usually prevailed. The familiar expression of lucus �� non lucendo, owes its birth to this striking manifestation of critical sagacity.
Again: a certain portion of the eastern and southern coast of England was, in early times, denominated 'the Saxon Shore'--Littus Saxonicum--and was, during the days of Roman supremacy, under the government of a military court enjoying the appellative of Comes Littoris Saxonici. Acute historical critics inform us, that this tract was so denominated in consequence of its being open to the aggressions of the Saxons; that, in short, it received its name from its occasional invaders, and not from its permanent inhabitants. The absurdity of this explanation is the greater, inasmuch as, on the other side of the Channel, there was a large district bearing precisely the same name, and settled entirely by adventurers, Saxon in birth or by descent. This, one would have thought, would have suggested to our English antiquaries a more probable explanation of the name than that they adopted. The people of Genoa have, or had, in speaking, a peculiar way of clipping or cutting short their syllables. Their Italian has never been considered pure. You must not go to maritime towns for purity of language, especially to such as have been long and extensively engaged in commercial pursuits. Labat, however, gives a special and peculiar reason for the fashion of mutilated speech in which, he declares, the Genoese indulge, telling us they call their superb city Gena, and not Genoa. He refers their 'chopping' pronunciation to their habitual economy--an economy distinctly traceable to their mercantile habits. 'Telle est leur ��conomie,' he says, 'ils rognent tout jusqu'aux paroles.'
The old English law-writer, Bracton, desiring to account for the ancient doctrine of English law, that inheritances shall lineally descend, and never lineally ascend, finds a reason in the fact, that a bowl being trundled, runs down a hill and never up a hill; and Littleton, the first great writer on English real property-law, traces the origin of the phrase 'hotchpot'--a familiar legal term--to the archaic denomination of a pudding, in our English tongue. 'It seemeth,'he says, 'that this word, hotchpot, is in English a pudding; for in this pudding is not commonly put one thing alone, and therefore it behoveth, in this case, to put the lands given in frank-marriage,' &c. Erasmus used to say of lawyers, that of ignorant people, they were the most learned. Questionless they are not always sound logicians. When the clown in Hamlet disserts so learnedly on 'crowner's quest-law,' he is only parodying, and that closely, a scarcely less ludicrous judgment which had actually been pronounced, not long before, in the Court of Queen's Bench. Dr Clarke, the traveller, tells an amusing story to the purpose. According to him, the Turkish lawyers recognise as an offence what they style 'homicide by an intermediate cause'--an instance of which offence our traveller details in these words: 'A young man, desperately in love with a girl of Stanchio--the ancient Cos, the birthplace of Hippocrates and Apelles, the lovely isle renowned for its lettuces and turpentine--eagerly sought to marry her. But his proposals were rejected. In consequence, he destroyed himself by poison. The Turkish police arrested the father of the obdurate fairy, and tried him for culpable homicide. "If the accused," they argued, with becoming gravity, "had not had a daughter, the deceased would not have fallen in love; consequently, he would not have been disappointed; consequently, he would not have died: but he (the accused) had a daughter, and the deceased had fallen in love," &c. &c. Upon all these counts he was called upon to pay the price of the young man's life; and this, being eighty piastres, was accordingly exacted.' When the amiable and gentle John Evelyn was in the Netherlands, a woman was pointed out to him who had had twenty-five husbands, and was then a widow; 'yet it could not be proved,' he says, that 'she had made any of her husbands away, though the suspicion had brought her several times to trouble.' However, the Dutch logicians made no difficulty of the matter; and arguing, from the number of the woman's husbands, that