Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/87

 watch that salvation were a punishment too good for them, if they should have any allegiance in them. He has furnished mankind with that adroit phrase of conversational escape from compromise, "Comparisons are odorous." Where common men would suspect a person, Dogberry says the person is auspicious. His brain seems to be web-footed, and tumbles over itself in trying to reach swimming water; as when he says, "Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves, and it will go near to be thought so shortly." This is the precipitancy of a child's reasoning.

His own set do not discover by his malapropisms how futile he is, for their ears are accustomed to this misplacing of terms; which, indeed, is not uncommon among people of stronger native sense. Even the spelling-book and primer are not prophylactic against this failing, which seems to be owing to cerebral inability to keep words from gadding about with each other after they have once entered the mind: a laxness between notions and memory which results in verbal hybridity, as when a man, who was well informed enough, used to say, when the castors were passed, that he never took condignments with his food; and the Western lawyer said of a man that he could not tell a story without embezzlements. A suburban resident informed a friend that he lived in the vicissitude of General. We can only hope that Dr. Watts would have found it a "beautiful vicissitude." I have heard of a stout, cheerful, and polite Dogberry, who had arrived at the discretion of