‘Bombast’ was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big words without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were stuffed out, and has now quite forgone any other meaning. So too ‘to garble’ was once “to cleanse from dross and dirt, as grocers do their spices, to pick or cull out”{219}. It is never used now in this its primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while once ‘to garble’ was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it is now to sift with a view of picking out the worst{220}. ‘Polite’ is another word which in the figurative sense has quite extinguished the literal. We still speak of ‘polished’ surfaces; but not any more, with Cudworth, of “_polite_ bodies, as looking glasses”. Neither do we now ‘exonerate’ a ship (Burton); nor ‘stigmatize’, at least otherwise than figuratively, a ‘malefactor’ (the same); nor ‘corroborate’ our health (Sir Thomas Elyot). Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. The process of this it is often very curious to observe; capable as not seldom it is of being watched step by step in its advances to the final consummation. There may be said to be three leading phases which the word successively presents, three steps in its history. At first it grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with its own natural meaning. Presently the word allows another meaning, one superinduced on the former, and foreign to its etymology, to share with the other in the possession of it, on the ground that where the former exists, the latter commonly co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with dividing the possession of the word, has thrust out the original and rightful possessor altogether, and remains in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive stages may be represented by _a_, _ab_, _b_; in which series _b_, which was wanting altogether at the first stage, and was only admitted as secondary at the second, does at the third become primary and indeed alone. {Sidenote: _Gradual Change of Meaning_}