which so many
learned definitions were thrown away, as if it was its peculiar province
and inborn virtue to announce oracles and formal propositions, and
nothing else, like a Doctor of Laws, is here at once accounted for,
inasmuch as it is clearly nothing but another part of speech, the
pronoun, _that_, with a third part of speech, the noun, _thing_,
understood. This is getting at a solution of words into their component
parts, not glossing over one difficulty by bringing another to parallel
it, nor like saying with Mr. Harris, when it is asked, "what a
Conjunction is?" that there are conjunctions copulative, conjunctions
disjunctive, and as many other frivolous varieties of the species as any
one chooses to hunt out "with laborious foolery." Our author hit
upon his parent-discovery in the course of a law-suit, while he was
examining, with jealous watchfulness, the meaning of words to prevent
being entrapped by them; or rather, this circumstance might itself be
traced to the habit of satisfying his own mind as to the precise sense
in which he himself made use of words. Mr. Tooke, though he had no
objection to puzzle others, was mightily averse to being puzzled or
_mystified_ himself. All was, to his determined mind, either complete
light or complete darkness. There was no hazy, doubtful _chiaro-scuro_
in his understanding. He wanted something "palpable to feeling as to
sight." "What," he would say to himself, "do I mean when I use the
conjunction _that?_ Is it an anomaly, a class by itself, a word sealed
against all inquisitive attempts? Is it enough to call it a _copula_,
a bridge, a link, a word connecting sentences? That is undoubtedly its
use, but what is its origin?" Mr. Tooke thought he had answered this
question satisfactorily, and loosened the Gordian knot of grammarians,
"familiar as his garter," when he said, "It is the common pronoun,
adjective, or participle, _that_, with the noun, _thing or proposition_,
implied, and the particular example following it." So he thought, and
so every reader has thought since, with the exception of teachers and
writers upon grammar. Mr. Windham, indeed, who was a sophist, but not a
logician, charged him with having found "a mare's-nest;" but it is not
to be doubted that Mr. Tooke's etymologies will stand the test, and
last longer than Mr. Windham's ingenious derivation of the practice of
bull-baiting from the principles of humanity!

Having thus laid the corner-stone, he proc