LANGUAGE.

to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial ; if anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on.Johnson.

If the way in which men express their thoughts is slipshod and mean, it will be very difficult for their thoughts themselves to escape being the same. If it is high flown and bombastic, a character for national simplicity and truthfulness cannot long be maintained.-Alford.

The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language, but few are the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously from the lips of the great mother.-Bulwer.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.-Voltaire.

Charles V. used to say that "the more languages a man knew, he was so many more times a man." Each new form of human speech introduces one into a new world of thought and life. So in some degree is it in traversing other continents and mingling with other races.

As a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one tongue.-Roger Ascham.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is ignorant of his own.-Goethe.

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.-Johnson.

Language is like amber in its efficacy to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but which, in the course of ages, have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination.-Sala.

To acquire a few tongues is the task of a few years; to be eloquent in one is the labor of a life.

A countryman is as warm in fustian as a

king in velvet, and a truth is as comfortable in homely language as in fine speech. As to the way of dishing up the meat, hungry men leave that to the cook, only let the meat be sweet and substantial.—Spurgeon.

The language denotes the man; a coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology. -Bovee.

In the commerce of speech use only coin of gold and silver.—Joubert.

Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions-a fact compatible enough with the acknowledgment of Dryden, that a rhyme had often helped him to an idea.Clulow.

Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.-E. P. Whipple.

Thinking cannot be clear till it has had expression. We must write, or speak, or act our thoughts, or they will remain in a half torpid form.-Our feelings must have expression, or they will be as clouds, which, till they descend in rain, will never bring up fruit or flower.-So it is with all the inward feelings; expression gives them development. Thought is the blossom; language the opening bud; action the fruit behind it.-H. W. Beecher.

In the intercourse of the world people should not take words as so much genuine coin of standard metal, but merely as counters that people play with.—Jerrold.

Language is a solemn thing: it grows out of life-out of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.-Every language is a temple in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.-Q. W. Holmes.

There is no tracing the connection of ancient nations but by language; therefore I am always sorry when any language is lost, for languages are the pedigree of nations.-Johnson.

There was speech in their dumbness; language in their very gesture.-Shakespeare.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.-Johnson.

Language was given us that we might say pleasant things to each other.-Bovee.

Languages, like our bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of recruits to supply those words which are continually falling into disuse.-Felton.

Words are the leaves of the tree of lan

LAUGHTER

guage, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.—French.

LAUGHTER.-(See "CHEERFULNESS.")

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.-Lamb.

It is a good thing to laugh, at any rate; and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness. Beasts can weep when they suffer, but they cannot laugh. Dryden.

Even this vein of laughing, as I could produce out of grave authors, hath oftentimes a strong and sinewy force in teaching and comforting.-Milton.

Laughter is a most healthful exertion; it is one of the greatest helps to digestion with which I am acquainted; and the custom prevalent among our forefathers, of exciting it at table by jesters and buffoons, was founded on true medical principles.Hufeland.

I like the laughter that opens the lips and the heart, that shows at the same time pearls and the soul.- Victor Hugo.

One good, hearty laugh is a bombshell exploding in the right place, while spleen and discontent are a gun that kicks over the man who shoots it off.-De Witt Talmage.

Man is the only creature endowed with the power laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at ?— Greville.

Conversation never sits easier than when we now and then discharge ourselves in a symphony of laughter; which may not improperly be called the chorus of conversation.-Steele.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether and irreclaimably depraved.-Carlyle.

Next to a good soul-stirring prayer is a good laugh, when it is promoted by what is pure in itself and in its grotesque application. Mutchmore.

O, glorious laughter! thou man-loving spirit, that for a time doth take the burden from the weary back, that doth lay salve to the weary feet, bruised and cut by flints and shards.—Jerrold.

Laugh if you are wise.-Martial.

I am persuaded that every time a man smiles, but much more when he laughs, it adds something to this fragment of life. Sterne.

God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe

freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness.—Leigh Hunt. Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child.-Lavater.

If we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from laughter, and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.Addison.

The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.-De Quincey.

The most utterly lost of all days, is that in which you have not once laughed.Chamfort.

Laughing cheerfulness throws the light of day on all the paths of life; the evil fog of gloom hovers in the distance; sorrow is more confusing and distracting than socalled giddiness.-Richter.

Though laughter is looked upon by philosophers as the property of reason, the excess of it has always been considered the mark of folly.—Addison.

Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food, but God has given us wit, and flavor, and brightness, and laughter to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to charm his pained steps o'er the burning marle.-Sydney Smith.

The loud laugh, that speaks the vacant mind.-Goldsmith.

That laughter costs too much which is purchased by the sacrifice of decency.Quintilian.

How much lies in laughter the cipher key, wherewith we decipher the whole man! -Carlyle.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable. -Goethe.

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness there can be no true joy.-Carlyle.

The horse-laugh indicates coarseness or brutality of character.-Lavater.

Alas for the worn and heavy soul, if, whether in youth or in age, it has outlived its privilege of spring time and sprightliness.-Hawthorne.

The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.-Carlyle.

Wrinkle not thy face with too much

LAW.

laughter, lest thou become ridiculous ; neither wanton thy heart with too much mirth, lest thou become vain; the suburbs of folly is vain mirth, and profuseness of laughter is the city of fools.-Quarles.

Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things, and which they call being merry.-In my mind there is nothing so ill-bred as audible laughter.—Chesterfield.

immoderate

How inevitably does an laughter end in a sigh!-South.

Laughing, if loud, ends in a deep sigh; and all pleasures have a sting in the tail, though they carry beauty on the face.Jeremy Taylor.

No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much.-Richter.

The life that has grown up and developed without laughter, and without the sunny brightness which youth justly claims as its right, lacks bouyancy and elasticity, and becomes heavy and unsympathetic, if not harsh and morose.—Mrs. G. S. Reany.

Frequent and loud laughing is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners.-True wit never made a man laugh.—Chesterfield. A good laugh is sunshine in a house.Thackeray.

LAW.-Going to law is losing a cow for the sake of a cat.-Chinese Proverb.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.-Dilwyn.

The Jews ruin themselves at their passover; the Moors, at their marriages; and the Christians, in their lawsuits.-Spanish Proverb.

The plaintiff and defendant in an action at law, are like two men ducking their heads in a bucket, and daring each other to remain longest under water.-Johnson.

These written laws are just like spiders' webs the small and feeble may be caught and entangled in them, but the rich and mighty force through and despise them.Anacharsis.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.-Franklin.

Law is a bottomless pit; it is a cormorant, a harpy that devours everything.Arbuthnot.

In law nothing is certain but the expense. -S. Butler.

No people were ever better than their laws, though many have been worse.Priestly.

The law is past depth to those who, without heed, do plunge into it.-Shakespeare.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it.—Macklin.

A mouse-trap: easy to enter but not easy to get out of.-Balfour.

Use law and physic only in cases of necessity; they that use them otherwise, abuse themselves into weak bodies and light purses: they are good remedies, bad recreations, but ruinous habits.—Quarles.

A natural law is a process, not a power; it is a method of operation, not an operator. A natural law, without God behind it, is no more than a glove without a hand in it.Joseph Cook.

To go to law is for two persons to kindle a fire, at their own cost, to warm others and singe themselves to cinders; and because they cannot agree as to what is truth and equity, they will both agree to unplume themselves that others may be decorated with their feathers.-Feltham.

A law overcharged with severity, like a blunderbuss overcharged with powder, will each of them grow rusty by disuse, and neither will be resorted to, from the shock and recoil that must inevitably follow their explosion.— Colton.

It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.-Bolingbroke.

Law is never wise but when merciful, but mercy has conditions; and that which is mercy to the myriads, may seem hard to the one; and that which seems hard to the one, may be mercy when viewed by the eye that looks on through eternity.—Bulwer.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.-Swift.

Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through the great break through, and the middle size are alone entangled in.-Shenstone.

Chancery, and certain other law courts, seem nothing; yet, in fact, they are, the worst of them, something: chimneys for the deviltry and contention of men to escape by.-Carlyle.

The English laws punish vice; the Chi

LAW.

nese laws do more, they reward virtue.Goldsmith.

A fish that hangs in the net, like a poor man's right in the law, will hardly come out of it.—Shakespeare.

The laws keep up their credit, not because they are all just, but because they are laws. This is the mystical foundation of their authority.-Montaigne.

A knowledge of the laws of our country is an highly useful, and I had almost said essential, part of liberal and polite education.

As the laws are above magistrates, so are the magistrates above the people and it may truly be said, that the magistrate is a speaking law, and the law a silent magistrate. Cicero.

We have no right to say that the universe is governed by natural laws, but only that it is governed according to natural laws.— Carpenter.

Laws are commanded to hold their tongues among arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold.—Burke.

The law is the standard and guardian of our liberty; it circumscribes and defends it; but to imagine liberty without a law, is to imagine every man with his sword in his hand to destroy him, who is weaker than himself; and that would be no pleasant prospect to those who cry out most for liberty.-Clarendon.

Whoever goes to law, goes into a glass house, where he understands little or nothing of what he is doing; where he sees a small matter blown up into fifty times the size of its intrinsic contents, and through which, if he can perceive any other objects, he perceives them all discolored and distorted.-Skelton.

Law is the embodiment of the moral sentiment of the people.—Blackstone.

True law is right reason conformably to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil.Cicero.

In all governments, there must of necessity be both the law and the sword; laws without arms would give us not liberty, but licentiousness; and arms without laws would produce not subjection, but slavery. The law, therefore, should be unto the sword what the handle is to the hatchet it should direct the stroke and temper the force.-Colton.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.-Gladstone.

LAW.

The severity of laws often prevents their execution.-When the penalty is excessive, one is often obliged to prefer impunity.Montesquieu.

There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.-De Tocqueville.

Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage; the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempt from her power. Both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in a different sort and name, yet all, with one uniform consent, admire her as the mother of their peace and joy.-R. Hooker.

Laws are not invented; they grow out of circumstances.—Azarias.

The science of jurisprudence-the pride of the human intellect, with all its defects, redundancies, and errors, is the collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns.-Burke.

Aristotle himself has said, speaking of the laws of his own country, that jurisprudence, or the knowledge of those laws, is the principal and most perfect branch of ethics.-Blackstone.

The sparks of all the sciences in the world are taken up in the ashes of the law.Finch.

Law kept, is only law; law broken is both law and execution.-Menander.

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.-De Tocqueville.

In effect, to follow, not to force, the public inclination, to give a direction, a form, a techical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislation.—Burke.

Law is a science, which employs in its theory the noblest faculties of the soul, and exerts in its practice the cardinal virtues of the heart; a science which is universal in its use and extent, accommodated to each individual, yet comprehending the whole community.-Blackstone.

When laws, customs, or institutions cease to be beneficial to man, or are contrary to the will of God, they cease to be obligatory on us.-Lyman Beecher.

God is a law to men of sense; but pleasure is a law to the fool.-Plato.

LAW.

Law that shocks equity is reason's murder.-A. Hill.

The science of legislation is like that of medicine in one respect, viz.: that it is far more easy to point out what will do harm, than what will do good.-Colton.

Laws are silent in the midst of arms.Cicero.

Equity judges with lenity; laws with extremity. In all moral cases the reason of the law is the law. Walter Scott.

So great is the force of laws, and of particular forms of government, and so little dependence have they on the humors and tempers of men, that consequences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced from them, as any which the mathematical sciences afford us.-Hume.

A prince who falleth out with laws, breaketh with his best friends.—Saville.

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.-Sydney Smith.

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.-Lincoln.

The forms of law have always been the graves of buried liberties.-Tourgee.

Pity is the virtue of the law, and none but tyrants use it cruelly.-Shakespeare. The people's safety is the law of God.James Otis.

Law and equity are two things that God hath joined together, but which man has put asunder.—Colton.

A law is valuable not because it is law, but because there is right in it.-H. W. Beecher.

When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied.—Tacitus.

Law should be like death, which spares no one.-Montesquieu.

They are the best laws, by which the king has the greatest prerogative, and the people the best liberty.—Bacon.

Laws are the silent assessors of God.R. W. Alger.

We should never create by law what can be accomplished by morality. — Montesquieu.

A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady.— Voltaire.

The greatest of all injustice is that which goes under the name of law; and of all sorts of tyranny, the forcing the letter of the law against the equity is the most insupportable.—L'Estrange.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. Goldsmith.

The universal and absolute law is that natural justice which cannot be written down, but which appeals to the hearts of all. Written laws are formulas in which we endeavor to express as concisely as possible that which, under such or such determined circumstances, natural justice demands.Victor Cousin.

Consider the reason of the case, for nothing is law that is not reason.-J. Powell.

In civil jurisprudence it too often happens that there is so much law, that there is no room for justice, and that the claimant expires of wrong in the midst of right, as mariners die of thirst in the midst of water. -Colton.

To make an empire durable, the magistrates must obey the laws, and the people the magistrates.—Solon.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.— Louis XIV.

Alas! how many causes that can plead well for themselves in the courts of Westminster, and yet in the general court of the universe, and free soul of man, have no word to utter !-Carlyle.

Laws which are in advance of public sentiment are generally but a dead letter. -Tryon Edwards.

Reason is the life of law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason. -Coke.

Let but the public mind once become thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty, or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off canker-worms.-Horace Mann.

With us, law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion. Let that die or grow indifferent, and statutes are waste paper, lacking all executive force.-Wendell Phillips.

The good need fear no law; it is his safety, and the bad man's awe.-Massinger.

Multitudes of laws are signs, either of much tyranny in the prince, or much rebellious disobedience in the subject. Marston.

Law is often spoken of as uncertain; but the uncertainty is not so much in the law as in the evidence.-Tryon Edwards.

To embarrass justice by a multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, are the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between