approvingly to the activities of the Almighty Himself. As the language grows older, when all the principal tributaries have met at last in the main stream, it begins, unfortunately, to tell a less and less coherent tale of the people who speak it. The few large groups of new words and meanings which we have hitherto been tracing give way to a much greater number of small groups—or even of single words—for the vocabulary is now so capacious that important new movements of thought are likely to find the old terms adaptable to their use with very slight semantic alterations, or perhaps with the formal addition of an _-arian_, an _-ism_, or an _-ology_. These become accordingly harder to trace, and a book of these dimensions is obliged to select a word here and a word there in almost arbitrary fashion. It must be remembered, then, in this and the succeeding chapters that only a few of the tendencies and changes at work have been picked out for inspection, though it is probable that a study of words, which should be at the same time subtle and comprehensive enough, would throw some light on them all. CHAPTER IX PERSONALITY AND REASON _Prig._ _Pressure._ _Period._ _Consciousness._ _Character._ _Amusing._ _Sentimental._ _Arrange._ _Personify._ When Charles II returned from France to an England which had long been growing more and more sullen under the reproving glances of a middle-aged Puritanism, the suppressed thoughts and feelings of fashionable English society evidently lost no time in rising to the surface. The appearance in the seventeenth century of new expressions such as to _banter_, to _burlesque_, to _ridicule_, to _prim_, _travesty_, _badinage_, and, above all, _prig_, helps to fill in for the imagination the deep gulf between the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and the _Country Wife_. Even to those totally unacquainted with the literature of the period this little archipelago of words might betray with unmistakable solidity the moral geography of the submerged region. For it marks a cycle of events which has been repeated over and over again in the history of humanity, in its families, its societies, its nations. Certain moral qualities gain respect for themselves; the respect brings with it material benefits; weaker brethren affect the moral qualities in order to acquire the material benefits; hypocrisy is detected; all morality is treated as hypocrisy. The trite little cycle spins like a whirligig round and round the social history of the world, but this is a good place to lay a finger on it, for it is a process in which the question of the meanings of words takes a particularly active part. It is, in fact, one of the few occasions upon which ordinary men, neither scientists nor poets, will deliberately attempt to alter the meanings of the words they must use. “Morality”, said the late Sir Walter Raleigh, “colours all language and lends to it the most delicate of its powers