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OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



stricted to the single case of fidelity 

 to the throne, I am not sufficiently 

 versed in the history of courtly lan- 

 guage to be able to pronounce. The 

 interval between a hyal chevalier and 

 a loyal subject is certainly great. I 

 can only suppose that the word was, 

 at some period, the favourite term at 

 court to express fidelity to the oath of 

 allegiance ; until at length those who 

 wished to speak of any other, and as 

 it was probably deemed, inferior sort 

 of fidelity, either did not venture to 

 use so dignified a term, or found it 

 convenient to employ some other in 

 order to avoid being misunderstood. 



§ 2. Cases are not unfrequent in 

 •which a circumstance, at first casu- 

 ally incorporated into the connotation 

 of a word which originally had no 

 reference to it, in time wholly super- 

 sedes the original meaning, and be- 

 comes not merely a part of the con- 

 notation, but the whole of it. This 

 is exemplified in the word pagan, 

 paganus — which originally, as its ety- 

 mology imports, was equivalent to 

 villager — the inhabitant of a pagus, or 

 village. At a particular era in the 

 extension of Christianity over the 

 Roman empire, the adherents of the 

 old religion, and the villagers or 

 country people, were nearly the same 

 body of individuals, the inhabitants 

 of the towns having been earliest con- 

 verted ; as in our own day, and at all 

 times, the greater activity of social 

 intercourse renders them the earliest 

 recipients of new opinions and modes, 

 while old habits and prejudices linger 

 longest among the country people ; 

 not to mention that the towns were 

 more immediately under the direct in- 

 fluence of the Government, which at 

 that time had embraced Christianity. 

 From this casual coincidence, the 

 word paganus carried with it, and 

 began more and more steadily to sug- 

 gest, the idea of a worshipper of the 

 ancient divinities ; until at length it 

 suggested that idea so forcibly, that 

 people who did not desire to suggest 

 the idetk avoided using the word, 



But when paganus had come to con- 

 note heathenism, the very unimpor- 

 tant circumstance, with reference to 

 that fact, of the place of residence, 

 was soon disregarded in the employ- 

 ment of the word. As there was 

 seldom any occasion for making sepa- 

 rate assertions respecting heathens 

 who lived in the country, there was 

 no need for a separate word to de- 

 note them ; and pagan came not only 

 to mean heathen, but to mean that 

 exclusively. 



A case still more familiar to most 

 readers is that of the word villain 

 or villein. This term, as everybody 

 knows, had in the Middle Ages a con- 

 notation as strictly defined as a word 

 could have, being the proper legal 

 designation for those persons who 

 were the subjects of the less onerous 

 forms of feudal bondage. The scorn 

 of the semi -barbarous military aristo- 

 cracy for these their abject dependants 

 rendered the act of likening any per- 

 son to this class of people a mark of 

 the greatest contumely ; the same 

 scorn led them to ascribe to the same 

 people all manner of hateful qualities, 

 which doubtless also, in the degrading 

 situation in which they were held, 

 were often not unjustly imputed to 

 them. These circumstances combined 

 to attach to the term villain ideas of 

 crime and guilt, in so forcible a man- 

 ner that the application of the epithet 

 even to those to whom it legally be- 

 longed became an affront, and was 

 abstained from whenever no affront 

 was intended. From that time guilt 

 was part of the connotation, and soon 

 became the whole of it, since man- 

 kind were not prompted by any urgent 

 motive to continue making a distinc- 

 tion in their language between bad 

 men of servile station and bad men 

 of any other rank in life. 



These and similar instances in which 

 the original signification of a term is 

 totally lost — another and an entirely 

 distinct meaning being first engrafted 

 upon the former, and finally substi- 

 tuted for it — ^afford examples of the 

 double jnovement which is always 



