Art and Science 



thing else. Yet he must have been thinking 

 without words, or he would have drawn too 

 much beer or too little, or have spilt it in the 

 bringing it up, and we may be sure that he did 

 none of these things. 



You will, of course, observe that if Mrs. 

 Bentley had sent the snuff-box to the buttery 

 of St. John's College instead of Trinity, it 

 would not have been language, for there 

 would have been no covenant between sayer 

 and sayee as to what the symbol should repre- 

 sent, there would have been no previously 

 established association of ideas in the mind of 

 the butler of St. John's between beer and 

 snuff-box ; the connection was artificial, arbi- 

 trary, and by no means one of those in respect 

 of which an impromptu bargain might be pro- 

 posed by the very symbol itself, and assented 

 to without previous formality by the person 

 to whom it was presented. More briefly, the 

 butler of St. John's would not have been able 

 to understand and read it aright. It would 

 have been a dead letter to him a snuff-box 

 and not a letter; whereas to the butler of 



Trinity it was a letter and not a snuff-box. 



203 



