persecutor, who expects a recantation from him, is described as “in the wrong box”. And in the sermons of Barrow, who certainly intended to write an elevated style, and did not seek familiar, still less vulgar, expressions, we constantly meet such terms as ‘to rate’, ‘to snub’, ‘to gull’, ‘to pudder’, ‘dumpish’, and the like; which we may confidently affirm were not vulgar when he used them. Then too the advance of refinement causes words to be forgone, which are felt to speak too plainly. It is not here merely that one age has more delicate ears than another; and that matters are freely spoken of at one time which at another are withdrawn from conversation. This is something; but besides this, and even if this delicacy were at a standstill, there would still be a continual process going on, by which the words, which for a certain while have been employed to designate coarse or disagreeable facts or things, would be disallowed, or at all events relinquished to the lower class of society, and others adopted in their place. The former by long use being felt to have come into too direct and close relation with that which they designate, to summon it up too distinctly before the mind’s eye, they are thereupon exchanged for others, which, at first at least, indicate more lightly and allusively the offensive thing, rather hint and suggest than paint and describe it: although by and by these new will also in their turn be discarded, and for exactly the same reasons which brought about the dismissal of those which they themselves superseded. It lies in the necessity of things that I must leave this part of my subject, very curious as it is, without illustration{165}. But no one, even moderately acquainted with the early literature of the Reformation, can be ignorant of words freely used in it, which now are not merely coarse and as such under ban, but which no one would employ who did not mean to speak impurely and vilely. * * * * * {Sidenote: _Lost Powers of a Language_}