He has furnished mankind with that adroit phrase of conversational escape from compromise, "Comparisons are odorous." Where common men would suspect a person, Dogberry says the person is auspicious. His brain seems to be web-footed, and tumbles over itself in trying to reach swimming water; as when he says, "Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves, and it will go near to be thought so shortly." This is the precipitancy of a child's reasoning. His own set do not discover by his malapropisms how futile he is, for their ears are accustomed to this misplacing of terms; which, indeed, is not uncommon among people of stronger native sense. Even the spelling-book and primer are not prophylactic against this failing, which seems to be owing to cerebral inability to keep words from gadding about with each other after they have once entered the mind: a laxness between notions and memory which results in verbal hybridity, as when a man, who was well informed enough, used to say, when the castors were passed, that he never took condignments with his food; and the Western lawyer said of a man that he could not tell a story without embezzlements. A suburban resident informed a friend that he lived in the vicissitude of General ----. We can only hope that Dr. Watts would have found it a "beautiful vicissitude." I have heard of a stout, cheerful, and polite Dogberry, who had arrived at the discretion of fifty years when his parents died. Then, in reply to a friend who was practising condolence upon him, he said, "Yes, I'm a poor orphanless man!" The same person remarked of his nephew, that he hadn't decided on his profession yet, but was preponderating; and arguing against non-resistance with somebody, he said, "Why, sir, if a man should draw a pistol on me, do you think I'd put my life in his jeopardy?" A venerable clergyman, finding an inebriated person in the gutter, said, "My friend, how did you get there?" The man, with a twinkle of jest yet alive in him, replied, "I'm here, _notwithstanding_." This amused the clergyman, who tried to impart it to his family. "And what do you think the man replied to me?" Nobody could guess. "Well, said he to me, Nevertheless!" And there was a worthy old deacon, who, repeating Watts's hymn line for line after his clergyman, said, "Return, ye rancid sinners!" a condition for which Dogberry would say they ought to be condemned into everlasting redemption. A very impracticable and contentious person was chosen to be a member of a committee. Somebody asked one of the other members, "Well, how did you find Mr. ----, when it came to business?" The reply was, "Oh, full of fight as ever,--a regular _horse de combat_."