Francis Jacox

Cues from All Quarters, Or, the Literary Musings of a Clerical Recluse Francis Jacox

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871. Excerpt: ... JUST as Talleyrand--upon whom, probably, so many other people's good things have been fathered--is popularly credited with the cynical witticism about language being given us to conceal our thoughts,--a mot of considerably older standing than the prince-bishop; so to Sydney Smith appears to be popularly ascribed the favourite illustration of the square man getting "located," dislocated rather, in the round hole,--a saying that was greatly in vogue a few years back, when the pet cry of the day was, the Right Man in the Right Place. The illustration has been a well-worked one, however, in various hands; and to whose brain is due the first conception of this sort of squaring the circle may be still, possibly, a question for Notes and Queries. Baylehas something a good deal like it; Jeremy Taylor the thing itself. Mr. Fonblanque, in those political essays of his which made a stir when George the Fourth was king, introduced the illustration once and again. Thus, in opposing the assumption that the qualifications requisite for the Advocate and the Judge are the same, he concludes that, at any rate, it were desirable to define the faculties of mind proper to the Judge and the Advocate with some distinctness: "We should then perceive, as Bayle says, whether we are putting a square to the work of a circle." Elsewhere, and upon quite another subject, he quotes Bayle's saying on the conjunction of certain two things as being no less impossible than the conjunction of certain properties of a square and of a circle. But the full and correct version of our text is cited in a paper headed "Lyndhurst versus Peel," published in 1836, where we read how Jeremy Taylor once said that the world is a board with peg-holes, some square and some round, and that certain men, fitted...