Let cavillers know, that as the Lord John answered the Queen in that Italian Guazzo, an old, a grave discreet man is fittest to discourse of love-matters; because he hath likely more experience, observed more, hath a more staid judgement, can better discern, resolve, discuss, advise, give better cautions and more solid precepts, better inform his auditors in such a subject, and by reason of his riper years, sooner divert. BURTON. Slips of the tongue are sometimes found very inconvenient by those persons who, owing to some unlucky want of correspondence between their wits and their utterance, say one thing when they mean to say another, or bolt out something which the slightest degree of forethought would have kept unsaid. But more serious mischief arises from that misuse of words which occurs in all inaccurate writers. Many are the men, who merely for want of understanding what they say, have blundered into heresies and erroneous assertions of every kind, which they have afterwards passionately and pertinaciously defended, till they have established themselves in the profession, if not in the belief, of some pernicious doctrine or opinion, to their own great injury and that of their deluded followers, and of the commonwealth. There may be an opposite fault; for indeed upon the agathokakological globe there are opposite qualities always to be found in parallel degrees, north and south of the equator. A man may dwell upon words till he becomes at length a mere precisian in speech. He may think of their meaning till he loses sight of all meaning, and they appear as dark and mysterious to him as chaos and outer night. “Death! Grave!” exclaims Goethe's suicide, “I understand not the words!” and so he who looks for its quintessence might exclaim of every word in the dictionary. They who cannot swim should be contented with wading in the shallows: they who can may take to the deep water, no matter how deep so it be clear. But let no one dive in the mud. I said that Daniel fell in love with the Burgemeester's Daughter, and I made use of the usual expression because there it was the most appropriate: for the thing was accidental. He himself could not have been more surprized if, missing his way in a fog, and supposing himself to be in the Breedestraat of Leyden where there is no canal, he had fallen into the water;—nor would he have been more completely over head and ears at once. A man falls in love, just as he falls down stairs. It is an accident,—perhaps, and very probably a misfortune; something which he neither intended, nor foresaw, nor apprehended. But when he runs in love it is as when he runs in debt; it is done knowingly and intentionally; and very often rashly, and foolishly, even if not ridiculously, miserably and ruinously.