374 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The words expressly are, a pound of flesh ; 



Then take thy bond ; take thou thy pound of flesh ; 



But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed 



One drop of Christian Mood, thy lands and goods 



Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate 



Unto the state of Venice. 



Shed thou no drop of blood, nor cut thou less nor more, 



But just a pound of flesh ; if thou tak'st more 



Or less than just a pound be it but so much 



As makes it light or heavy in the substance 



Or the division of the twentieth part 



Of one poor scruple nay, if the scale do turn 



But in the estimation of a hair 



Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate." 



This play upon words is so transparently illogical, that while the 

 righteousness of the end might in a romance he held to justify the ab- 

 surdity of the means, the modern mind, and particularly the legally 

 trained mind, intuitively shrinks from accepting it as the bona fide 

 judgment of any court ; a fact which, as we shall hereafter observe, is 

 the key to the later modifications of the story. And yet nothing could 

 be more suggestively true to nature and history than that a judge of 

 the remote age from which this story is inherited, in struggling to 

 assert against an old and harsh rule of law more recently developed 

 sentiments of humanity, should seek the accomplishment of his pur- 

 pose through a play upon words. 



There is a popular superstition that such exercises are still the de- 

 light of lawyers ; but the truth is that, in this age of highly developed 

 rational faculty, a quibble has neither friends nor function, and is an 

 object of universal contempt. There was a time when it was not so. 

 A volume might be and indeed ought to be written upon the astound- 

 ing and universal susceptibility to quibbles which characterized the 

 ancient mind until Aristotle in Greece and Seneca in Rome. All liter- 

 ature, legal, philosophic, and religious, was sadly disfigured by them. 

 The proneness of the really primitive mind to indulge in them is well 

 known : it is not so generally appreciated how late it was in the his- 

 tory of intellectual development before the infirmity was outgrown. 

 Even the imperial intellect of Plato, the life-long enemy of the profes- 

 sional sophist, staggered visibly and habitually under the influence of 

 this sort of sophistical taint. Among the laws governing the concur- 

 rent evolutions of thought and language, there is one not yet fully de- 

 finable, but unmistakably discernible in its effects, by which for ages 

 the human mind was irresistibly addicted to the drawing of irrational 

 verbal distinctions or analogies. Nor does the modern mind display 

 in any respect a more marked contrast with the ancient than in its 

 keenness to detect and swiftness to repudiate everything in the nature 

 of a quibble. No one, for instance, would now admit that, conceding 



