No More Learning

He made a warm and intensely
eloquent defence of Mr. Pennifeather, in which he alluded more than once
to his own sincere forgiveness of that wild young gentleman--"the heir
of the worthy Mr. Shuttleworthy,"--for the insult which he (the young
gentleman) had, no doubt in the heat of passion, thought proper to put
upon him (Mr. Goodfellow). "He forgave him for it," he said, "from the
very bottom of his heart; and for himself (Mr. Goodfellow), so far from
pushing the suspicious circumstances to extremity, which he was sorry
to say, really had arisen against Mr. Pennifeather, he (Mr. Goodfellow)
would make every exertion in his power, would employ all the little
eloquence in his possession to--to--to--soften down, as much as he could
conscientiously do so, the worst features of this really exceedingly
perplexing piece of business. "

Mr. Goodfellow went on for some half hour longer in this strain,
very much to the credit both of his head and of his heart; but your
warm-hearted people are seldom apposite in their observations--they run
into all sorts of blunders, contre-temps and mal apropos-isms, in the
hot-headedness of their zeal to serve a friend--thus, often with the
kindest intentions in the world, doing infinitely more to prejudice his
cause than to advance it.

So, in the present instance, it turned out with all the eloquence of
"Old Charley"; for, although he laboured earnestly in behalf of the
suspected, yet it so happened, somehow or other, that every syllable he
uttered of which the direct but unwitting tendency was not to exalt the
speaker in the good opinion of his audience, had the effect to deepen
the suspicion already attached to the individual whose cause he pleaded,
and to arouse against him the fury of the mob.

One of the most unaccountable errors committed by the orator was his
allusion to the suspected as "the heir of the worthy old gentleman Mr.
Shuttleworthy. " The people had really never thought of this before. They
had only remembered certain threats of disinheritance uttered a year
or two previously by the uncle (who had no living relative except the
nephew), and they had, therefore, always looked upon this disinheritance
as a matter that was settled--so single-minded a race of beings were the
Rattleburghers; but the remark of "Old Charley" brought them at once to
a consideration of this point, and thus gave them to see the possibility
of the threats having been nothing more than a threat.
And straightway
hereupon, arose the natural question of cui bono? --a question that
tended even more than the waistcoat to fasten the terrible crime upon
the young man. And here, lest I may be misunderstood, permit me to
digress for one moment merely to observe that the exceedingly brief and
simple Latin phrase which I have employed, is invariably mistranslated
and misconceived. "Cui bono? " in all the crack novels and elsewhere,--in
those of Mrs. Gore, for example, (the author of "Cecil,") a lady who
quotes all tongues from the Chaldaean to Chickasaw, and is helped to her
learning, "as needed," upon a systematic plan, by Mr. Beckford,--in all
the crack novels, I say, from those of Bulwer and Dickens to those of
Bulwer and Dickens to those of Turnapenny and Ainsworth, the two little
Latin words cui bono are rendered "to what purpose? " or, (as if quo
bono,) "to what good. " Their true meaning, nevertheless, is "for whose
advantage. " Cui, to whom; bono, is it for a benefit. It is a purely
legal phrase, and applicable precisely in cases such as we have now
under consideration, where the probability of the doer of a deed hinges
upon the probability of the benefit accruing to this individual or to
that from the deed's accomplishment. Now in the present instance, the
question cui bono? very pointedly implicated Mr. Pennifeather. His
uncle had threatened him, after making a will in his favour, with
disinheritance. But the threat had not been actually kept; the original
will, it appeared, had not been altered.