3. The Utilization of Pre-exerted Energies.

This suggestive use of words owes its power to the general law of style, the economy of mental power. It is an appropriation of previous mental acts. Instead of saying of the king, he did this and that, and there¬fore deserves your hatred, we may avail ourselves of the mind's previous operations by which it has come to - hate tyranny, and the name tyrant, on the slightest proof, works out sedition. When the implication is manifestly absurd, it passes for sport, and the deeper the implication the merrier the laugh. It is the depth of implication rather than the breadth of inclusion which cuts the school-girl so painfully, when, in a fit of anger her companion calls her a "mean thing." To be a thing is not simply to be divested of one's humanity and reduced to an inanimate object ; but it is implied that whatever is meanest and most detestable in the broad category of things, that is meant, although it is not specified. The force of implication is well illus¬trated by Aristotle.* Simonides, when the victor in a mule-race offered him a trifling present to compose a triumphal ode for the occasion, refused to write, as if feeling hurt at being asked to write on "half-asses." But when he received a satisfactory present he wrote :
"Hail! Daughters of the generous Horse, That skim like wind, along the course:"
without any allusion to the asinine side of their pedigree.