But who can expect that human laws should correct that propensity in the wicked tongue! They who have “the poison of asps under their lips,” and “which have said with our tongues will we prevail; we are they that ought to speak: who is lord over us?”—they who “love to speak all words that may do hurt, and who cut with lies like a sharp razor”—what would they care for enactments which they would think either to evade by their subtlety, or to defy in the confidence of their numbers and their strength? Is it to be expected that those men should regard the laws of their country, who set at nought the denunciations of scripture, and will not “keep their tongues from evil, and their lips that they speak no guile,” though they have been told that it is “he who hath used no deceit in his tongue and hath not slandered his neighbour, who shall dwell in the tabernacle of the Lord, and rest upon his holy hill!” Leave we them to their reward, which is as certain as that men shall be judged according to their deeds. Our business is with the follies of the unruly member, not with its sins: with loquacious speakers and verbose writers, those whose “tongues are gentlemen-ushers to their wit, and still go before it,”[1] who never having studied the _exponibilia_, practice the art of battology by intuition; and in a discourse which might make the woeful hearer begin to fear that he had entered unawares upon eternity, bring forth, “as a man would say in a word of two syllables, nothing.”[1] The West Britons had in their own Cornish language this good proverbial rhyme, (the—graphy whereof, be it ortho or not is Mr. Polwhele's), _An lavor goth ewe lavar gwir, Ne vedn nevera doaz vas a tavaz re hir._ The old saying is a true saying, Never will come good from a tongue too long. Oh it is a grievous thing to listen, or seem to listen, as one is constrained to do, sometimes by the courtesy of society, and sometimes by “the law of sermon,” to an unmerciful manufacturer of speech, who before he ever arrives at the empty matter of his discourse, _no puede—dexar—de decir —antes,—siguiera quatro, o cinco mil palabras!_[2] [Footnote 1: BEN JONSON.] [Footnote 2: CALDERON.] Vossius mentions three authors, who, to use Bayle's language,—for in Bayle the extract is found, _enfermaient de grands riens dans une grande multitude de paroles_. Anaximenes the orator was one; when he was about to speak, Theocritus of Chios said, “here begins a river of words and a drop of sense,”—_Ἄρχεται λέξεων μὲν ποταμὸς, νοῦ δὲ σταλαγμός._ Longolius, an orator of the lower Empire was the second. The third was Faustus Andrelinus, Professor of Poetry at Paris, and _Poeta Laureatus_: of him Erasmus _dicitur dixisse_,—is said to have said, that there was but one thing wanting in all his poems and that thing was comprised in one word of one syllable, _Νοῦς_.