Then take thy bond; take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, 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—
This play upon words is so transparently illogical, that while the righteousness of the end might in a romance he held to justify the absurdity 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 purpose through a play upon words.
There is a popular superstition that such exercises are still the delight 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 astounding and universal susceptibility to quibbles which characterized the ancient mind until Aristotle in Greece and Seneca in Rome. All literature, 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 history of intellectual development before the infirmity was outgrown. Even the imperial intellect of Plato, the life-long enemy of the professional sophist, staggered visibly and habitually under the influence of this sort of sophistical taint. Among the laws governing the concurrent evolutions of thought and language, there is one not yet fully definable, 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
