Can any of your readers favour me with the text in Bellarmin, which contains this "monstrous paradox?" HENRY H. BREEN. St. Lucia, May, 1851. [The passage will be found in _Disputationum Roberti Bellarmini, de Controversiis Christianæ Fidei: De Summo Pontifice_, lib. iv. cap. v. sect. 8.: Pragæ, 1721, fol., vol. i. p. 456.: "8. Secundò, quia tunc necessariò erraret, etiam circa fidem. Nam fides Catholica docet, omnem virtutem esse bonam, omne vitium esse malum: si autem Papa erraret præcipiendo vitia, vel prohibendo virtutes, teneretur Ecclesia credere, vitia esse bona, et virtutes malas, nisi vellet contra conscientiam peccare. Tenetur enim in rebus dubiis Ecclesia acquiescere judicio summi Pontificis, et facere quod ille præcipit; non facere, quod ille prohibet; ac nè fortè contra conscientiam agat, tenetur credere bonum esse, quod ille præcipit: malum, quod ille prohibet."] Replies. SHAKSPEARE'S USE OF "CAPTIOUS" AND "INTENIBLE." SHAKSPEARE'S "SMALL LATIN." (Vol. ii., p. 354.; Vol. iii., p. 65.) This is another discussion in which Shakspeare's love of antithesis has not been sufficiently recognised. The contrast in this case is in the ideas--ever receiving, never retaining: an allusion to the hopeless punishment of the Danaïdes, so beautifully appropriate, so unmistakeably apparent, and so well supported in the context, that I should think it unnecessary to offer a comment upon it had the question been raised by a critic less distinguished than Mr. Singer; or if I did not fancy that I perceive the origin of what I believe to be his mistake, in the misreading of another line, the last in his quotation. The hopelessness of Helena's love is cheerfully endured; she glories in it: "I know I love in vain--strive against hope-- Yet still outpour the waters of my love, And lack not to lose still." This last line Mr. Singer reads, "and fail not to lose still;" but surely _that_ is not Helena's meaning? She means that her spring of love is inexhaustible; that, notwithstanding the constant, hopeless waste, there lacks not (a supply) "to lose still!" Johnson was one of those commentators enumerated by Mr. Singer, of whom he observes, as a matter of surprise, "that none of them should have remarked that the sense of the Latin 'captiosus,' and of its congeners in Italian and French, is deceitful, fallacious;" "and," he adds, "Bacon uses the word for 'insidious,' 'ensnaring.'" But surely Johnson the commentator was no other than Johnson the lexicographer; and yet, for these precise definitions of "captious," which J. S. W. thinks "_too refined and recondite_" for Shakspeare's "small Latin," we need apply to no higher source than to that familiar household companion--_Johnson's Dictionary_, wherein is anticipated the citation of Bacon, and even of the French word "captieux."