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It has always seemed to us that vituperative swearing is too closely allied to the passion of animosity to be ever successfully treated apart from the human failing from which it takes its rise. Joy and hatred, terror and surprise must indeed be very old and steadfast emotions in the history of the world; and while we should prefer to find that joy is the more universal of these perceptions, hatred is, we fear, the more historic and the more enduring. Animosity is resolute even in its caprices; it has few facilities for disguise and but little capacity for assumption. The tones and gestures it employs are perfectly unequivocal, and not easily mistaken. For although the vocabulary of hatred has from time to time received handsome embellishment at the hands of ingenious and illustrious haters, its wonted expression must always remain fixed. The keynote is the oath which, in all ages and in all languages, passion seems to generate with but very little assistance.

Among a people who, perhaps unjustly, have been prided for the choiceness of their swearing, the favourite growth and very spoilt-child of animosity is the word of an exceedingly forcible kind. In endeavouring to chronicle the amenities of the British "damn," we believe we are dealing with a monosyllable possessing a remarkable fund of application. The term has fairly puzzled the ingenuity of continental neighbours to comprehend. Not only has it excited their ridicule, but we are not sure that it has not even stimulated their envy. It has been said by one of the sprightliest of Frenchmen, that a foreigner might conveniently travel through England with the assistance only of this one particle of speech.

The uses, or the misuses, of the word would seem to be twofold: first, as an accessory of abuse, and secondly, as an accessory of geniality. In some instances the two qualities are blended. Thus the knights of the road who stopped coaches and filched purses on the heath of Newmarket or Hounslow usually rode off "damning" their victims and advising them to sue the hundred for the injury. Whereat it was customary to remark, in the joking spirit of the age, that the villains showed themselves true men of the law by taking their fee before they gave their advice. Everyone who remembers the eleventh canto of Don Juan will recollect the pugilistic conflict that took place upon that hero's first arrival at the outskirts of London, a shower of blackguard oaths taking a conspicuous part in the encounter. Juan, weary with travel, has arrived at Shooter's Hill. He is meditating upon the vastness of the city stretched in panorama at his feet. Suddenly his studious occupation is interrupted by the onset of a gang of footpads. In the confusion that ensues, his ignorance of the language places him at a momentary disadvantage. The only English word he is acquainted with being, as he phrases it, "their shibboleth, 'Goddamn.'" Even this Juan innocently imagines to be a form of salutation, a sort of God-be-with-you, a misconception which the poet professes to think not unnatural--

"... for half English as I am never can I say I heard them wish 'God with you,' save that way."

No stanza of the poem is more replete than this with a vein of painfully sarcastic drollery. The insular failing is elsewhere frequently displayed by the poet in the trying light cast from a misanthrope genius.

But perhaps the severest hit, and not the less severe because tempered with banter and good humour, is that which has been directed from the pen of Beaumarchais. "Diable! c'est une belle langue que l'anglais; il en faut peu pour aller loin; avec Goddam en Angleterre on ne manque de rien ... les Anglais ? la v?rit?, ajoutent par-ci par-l?, quelques autres mots en conversant; mais il est bien ais? de voir que Goddam est le fond de la langue."

The countrymen, and in one remarkable instance, a countrywoman of Beaumarchais, have been particularly industrious in fastening this aspersion upon their English neighbours. So long ago as 1429, when the arms of Shrewsbury and Bedford had well-nigh wrested the last jewel from the diadem of France, and a peasant maiden of the Calvados had flung herself into Orleans to stem the tide of the English advance, there likewise came to the aid of the fainting cause a welcome supply of mirth and invective. The Maid of Orleans, inspiriting the beleaguered army by harangue, by entreaty, even by quips and jests, kept them constantly reminded of the insular nickname. Rising from sleep and putting on her armour to direct the memorable assault upon the Tournelles, a soldier of her command ventured to produce a repast of fish, and prayed her to break her fast. "Joan, let us eat this shad-fish before we set out." The Maid indignantly put aside the proffered gift, "In the name of God," said she, "it shall not be eaten till supper, by which time we will return by way of the bridge, and I will bring you back a Goddam to eat it with." How the redoubtable Tournelles was taken by steel and culverin, and how Joan succeeded in bringing back many hundred Goddams, has become matter of history. As to the conclusion of the Maid's career, there has been opened a wide field of controversy, but one incident in the closing chapter of her life is supported by reliable testimony. While undergoing close imprisonment pending the decision of her fate, two English noblemen, the Earls of Warwick and Stafford, came to visit her in gaol, and would seem to have held out hopes of ransom; Joan, irritated at the specious language of her visitors, retorted on them sharply: "I know you well," she cried, "you have neither the will nor the power to ransom me. You think when you have slain me, you will conquer France; but that you will never bring about. No! although there were one hundred thousand Goddams in this land more than there are!"

With the assumption of the soldier's tunic, it did not follow that she adopted the manners of the military fire-eater, or suited herself to the wild talk of camps. The epithet "Goddam" in the mouth of La Pucelle was expressive only of acrimony towards the oppressor, and even assuming it to have been irreverent and ungainly, was not the least in accord with the language that usually distinguished her. So far from condoning the irregularities of military life, Joan seems to have laid her strongest commands upon the soldiery to abstain from oath-taking, and in one instance would appear to have made a convert of an illustrious kind. Stories are told, which we need not here repeat, of the licence in expression of the celebrated La Hire, who may be likened to a Boanerges among swearers. With him the habit was perfectly indispensable. At last Joan came to a compromise. He was to retain to the full his privilege of swearing, provided he referred in his oaths to no other substantive than his marshal's baton, and thenceforward this sturdy soldier betook himself to this emasculated form of swearing.

It is singular to turn for a moment from the extravagant exuberance of a polished French court to find the same device existing in a very different era of the world's history. The educated Athenian vented his "Mon Dieus" like any Frenchman on the boulevard, and in like manner learned to soften his "" to a simple "" in deference to ears polite. Socrates himself, never altogether free from a predilection for jocose forms of swearing, also took the palace dog, so to speak, as his colloquial stalking-horse, and, like the courtiers of St. Louis, swore .

"Ils out charg? l'artillerye sus mer, Force bisquit et chascun ung bydon, Et par la mer jusqu'en Biscaye aller, Pour couronner leur petit roy godon."

We might search in vain for mention of the expression in English writings of the same period. In France however the epithet is repeated with equal malignancy in the angry verses which Guillaume Cr?tin was pleased to write upon the 'Battle of the Spurs':

"Cryant: Qui vive aux Godons d'Angleterre.

Seigneurs du sang, barons et chevaliers, Tous seculiers d'illustre parentage, Permettez vous ? ses Godons, galliers, Gros godaillers, houspalliers, poullalliers, Prendre palliers au fran?oys heritaige?"

The aspersion however did not always rest with Frenchmen. Lord Hailes, in a criticism written about the year 1770, incidentally gives it as his experience that in Holland the children when they espy any English people say, "There come the Goddams," and that the Portuguese, as soon as they acquire a smattering of the tongue, exclaim, "How do you do, Jack? damn you!"

We have attentively considered the tone of contemporary English writings to ascertain whether by a hazard the nickname was appropriately bestowed. In the result we have not been able to discover anything to lead to the supposition that this particular form of speech was, upon these shores at least, very generally indulged in. Either the tall soldiers who accompanied Henry of Monmouth to the wars were so stimulated by the unaccustomed juice of the grape as to then and there originate this vigorous epithet, unspoken at home, or else there was little or no justification for the taunting expression. We are inclined to think that the former surmise is approximately correct. The habit was not an Englishman's but a soldier's vice, and when the foreign troubles were at an end it may very well have been drafted back to this country with the rest of the fighting contingent.

Neither was amusement neglected to be created out of this new word-sally. In one of the comedies which throw so much light upon the manners of the time, a piece called 'Amends for Ladies,' from the pen of Nat Field, we are introduced among a so-called society of roarers. The experiment had been already tried by Thomas Middleton, who, in his 'Faire Quarrel,' had initiated his audience into the exercises of a pretended roaring-school. The notion was simply that the young idlers about town met together to acquire perfection in the arts of bombast and exaggeration. In the former production, a Lord Feesimple is supposed to be enjoying the coveted distinction of being drilled into becoming a roarer. As was usual in these performances, the characters pass from one insolence to another, until at last swords are drawn and general uproar prevails. But what upon the present occasion has given rise to the misunderstanding, is the unlucky assumption by Feesimple of one of the roysterers' private and particular oaths. In an ill-omened moment he has presumed to exclaim, "Damn me!" whereupon a certain Tearchaps who has been noticeable through the play as the improprietor of the term, very loudly objects--"Use your own words, damn me is mine; I am known by it all the town o'er. D'ye hear?"

Feesimple, although disposed to contest the other's title, is happily brought to order by the timely interference of one Welltried, whose knowledge of such matters enables him to bear out the truth of the assertion. This play, produced in 1618 and acted upon the stage of the Blackfriars, tallies in substance with Harrington's verses produced in the earlier year.

Allied to this expression is a phrase which may even be said to have a kind of literary merit. "Don't care a damn" is indicative of about the utmost possible amount of unconcern. It would be in vain to seek for any object more intrinsically inconsiderable with which to liken a condition of indifference. Anstey seizes upon it in his 'Bath Guide':--

"Absurd as I am, I don't care a damn Either for you or your valet-de-sham."

Since the days when City madams and Fleet Street apprentices flocked round the dusty scaffold of the Blackfriars play-house, and laughed and rallied one another, or possibly took passing umbrage at the satire that was being levelled at this newly-nurtured word, what a remarkable, what an astounding ascendancy has it not enjoyed? No mint has ever issued its metal more swiftly than has this exchequer of bad language, or given it a more unmistakable impression. And yet there is nothing healthful, nothing good in it. From the disorders which first environed it, it has never yet recovered. It lives only by disease and unhealthiness, and when it has rid itself of disease and unhealthiness it will die.

WHICH GIVES A DOG A BAD NAME.

We have already adverted to that foreign and slanderous tradition which lays all the grosser sins of vituperation at the Englishman's door. It has been seen how the "damns" and "goddams" of a marauding soldiery, though scattered upon the winds of many centuries ago, have continued to be held up in judgment against the English-speaking race. There remains to be noticed one other item of continental asperity that has enjoyed in its day a full measure of approbation owing to the delightful assumption that it savoured of perfidious Britain.

When, therefore, we find in the twelfth century an archbishop of Juvavia interdicting his countrymen from ratifying their treaties with an oath taken by the dog, we gain some insight into the portent of the canine oath of Thebes and Athens. The superstition and mysticism attaching to this animal are brought still closer home by a passage from De Joinville, which mentions the sacrificing of a living dog as a Byzantine method of confirming an obligation. Moreover, on the coins of Syracuse the dog as the emblem of constancy is represented in company with the goddess Diana. That a sacrificial ceremony, barbarous at once and ineffectual, should have received any countenance among a people of culture, is only in accordance with the view expressed at an earlier part of these pages, that the progress of true civilisation may be clearly traced by comparing the relative values of the veracity. The cities of Greece were full of straw-shoes, men who distinguished their calling by a straw at their feet, and who were ready at the bid of a suitor to give the lightest evidence for the heaviest fee. Confidence had little place among a nation far too volatile and specious to be able to rely upon any system of reciprocal good faith. From this circumstance it was that the Greeks earned for themselves the repute of being the least trustworthy of all the untruthful nations of antiquity. In such a community the fragile safeguard of an oath is, from sheer helplessness, the more rigorously demanded. The Hellenic people may be said to have been eminently a swearing people. The character had so persistently clung to them, and was descended from so remote an antiquity, that Juvenal, in the Sixth Satire, can only refer their immunity from swearing to the period when innocence was said to have prevailed upon earth and before Jupiter had begun to let his beard grow.

But while Greek and Roman riveted oath upon oath and laid ceremony upon ceremony, to accomplish that simple understanding which should be effected by the mere parole of right-thinking men, there is no evidence to show that swearing was carried to the precise point to which it has been brought among ourselves. That at the lightest stir of the emotions they were ready to apostrophise the ruling divinities as well as the shapes of field and flood, of earth and air, must pass as uncontradicted, but never do they appear, as in the modern world, to have forged their poetic oaths into weapons of malevolence and hurt. There would seem to have been no actual counterpart in these languages to the vituperative swearing of modern days. The difference in this respect is somewhat singular, but it may readily be accounted for. With the ancients, oaths were employed in guarding as efficiently as they could the public conscience and the public security. With the moderns they have been for the most part released from this unstable duty, and accordingly, with untrammelled energy and ungovernable vigour, they have entered upon a system of privateering upon their own account.

Not only had the ancient mythology to struggle against the constant infraction of the sanctity of the deliberative oath, but the minds of heathen votaries must have been strongly biassed by an acquaintance with instances of light swearing in the gods themselves. To render the practice the less capricious and incontinent, a notion of an individual property or trade-mark in oaths came to be perceptibly encouraged. The specific appropriation of some distinctive oath raised the presumption that it implied an unequivocal pledge of sincerity. In this way Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, swore continually "by the caper." Pythagoras, we are told, was accustomed to swear by the number four, . This numeral came to be regarded in consequence as symbolical of the divinity, and the Pythagorean school gravely inculcated it as a point of morals to abstain from intruding upon so illustrious an example.

Besides the oath of Socrates, "by the dog," he is reported to have sworn variously by the goose and by the plane-tree. Those who argue in favour of the piety of the philosopher, explain that the habit was assumed as a foil to the irreverent mention of the gods that was then so universal. Lucian attaches an intelligible meaning to these flippant expletives, and represents Socrates as justifying their use. "Are you not aware," he is presumed to reason, "that the dog is the Anubis of Egypt, the Sirius of the skies; and in hell is the keeper Cerberus?" and Plutarch is also found to comment on the oath, "those that worship the dog have a certain sacred meaning that must not be revealed; in the more remote and ancient times the dog had the highest honours paid to him in Egypt." In the copiousness of the ancient swearing the notion of an oath accommodated itself to all the varieties of monstrous gods. The divinities Isis and Osiris were invoked in witness of a sacred pledge no less than the garlic, the leek, and the onion, and indeed every other deity which, as was said by the Roman satirist, grew and flourished in the market-gardens of Alexandria.

The result, however, of the Socratic influence is intended to be shown by the circumstance of Strepsiades subsequently swearing "by the mist!" and reproaching his son for taking oaths in the name of a deity of the outside world. Presently, on being importuned by a creditor for the return of twelve minae lent for the purchase of a dapple-grey horse, he is ready to swear any number of oaths "by the gods" that he is innocent of the debt. His opinions have in the course of this short dialogue undergone alteration. He feels justified in ridding himself of his obligation to repay the loan by making use of declarations which the philosopher has argued are no longer of any consequence.

"And will you be willing to deny it upon oath of the gods?" screams the creditor.

"What gods?" asks Strepsiades.

"Jupiter, Mercury, and Neptune."

"Yes, by Jupiter!" rejoins Strepsiades, "and would pay down, too, a three-obol piece besides to swear by them."

It must have been a sorry spectacle to have beheld Socrates in the midst of an Athenian audience solemnly witnessing this masterpiece of buffoonery, and a still sadder one to those whose feeling was still enlisted upon the side of the moribund system of oath-taking.

One singular instance of whimsicality in the ancient practice of swearing must not be allowed to pass unnoticed. The Levantine merchants trading with the port of Rhodes had familiarized Athenian households with a most excellent description of cabbage. The herb was only to be found in its highest perfection upon the southern coasts of the Mediterranean. This Rhodian cabbage had a mellower flavour than that indigenous to the Troad, and was, moreover, prized by all Athenian topers as the surest antidote to the effects of drink. No supper-table would have been perfect without some preparation of this delicacy, and the gay revellers knew, or in any case imagined, that with this nostrum close at hand the choicest Chian or Lesbian vintages might safely be defied. Hence it was that the very name of so precious a vegetable came to be held in estimation, until it was customary to say that if it were permitted to blaspheme without offending the gods, it would be by mention of the Rhodian cabbage. The lover in a fragment of the lost poet Ananius invokes it solemnly in evidence of his attachment, and there is found a suggestion in the iambics of Hipponax of the vegetable having even entered into the mythology--

"He, falling down, worshipped the seven-leaved cabbage, To which, before she drank the poisoned draught, Pandora brought a cake at Thargelia."

An instance of oaths being subjected to the like whimsical conditions is noticeable in the domestic manners of Old Germany. We gather from the popular mediaeval satire, the 'Ship of Fools,' that a code of rules had been formulated regulating the propriety of swearing. Society in this case would seem to have formed its precedents of oath-taking, and to have withheld its sanction from any others than its own. There was a time in Germany it appears when a man adopted an oath as deliberately as he might take to a trade, it being only necessary, to bring it within the licensed pale, that it should be derived from the symbols of his own or his father's occupation. The particular merit of this system was that while it partook of all the abandonment and conferred all the enjoyment of swearing, it was practically no swearing at all. When, in an outburst of passion, the grazier called out upon his beeves, or the smith invoked his anvil or his sledge, all the advantages of swearing, whatever they may be held to be, had been accomplished, and that without prudery being ruffled or innocence shocked. In fact the needs of society had invented a kind of stalking-horse for blasphemy, and the Bob Acreses and Captain Absolutes of that day must have found themselves cruelly hoodwinked by the inanimate effigy of swearing.

We may now turn our backs upon the luxuriant and fanciful swearing of the ancient world and pursue our researches into one other division of the subject that gives rise to more serious reflections. The diversions of the Roman and the Greek in the way of imprecation seem to have been mostly intended in good part, and to have been productive of little theological odium. But there is a body of swearing that has diffused itself through Christian countries which is the very reverse of sportive, and has undeniably provoked the strongest feelings of aversion. The abuse to which we allude consisted mainly in the indiscriminate use of popular oaths that selected the limbs and members of Christ as the paraphernalia of swearing. There does not appear at the present day any great irreverence in the exclamation, "S'light," or "S'lid," or "Bodikins," as, happily, the wave of impiety that brought them has long since broken and passed away. Indeed, as they now occur in the pages of sixteenth century writings, they only strike the modern reader in the light of so many interruptions from the text. But we shall find as we pursue the inquiry further, that there was a great deal of meaning wrapped up in these expletives, and that they played a by no means unimportant part in the workings of the mediaeval understanding.

Whatever may have been the malignities laid to the charge of the later middle ages, it is certain that the Englishman was on the whole of a reverential type. The pious moralist who laboured in those times was so far assisted by an utter absence of captious criticism to honeycomb his teaching, and by the solid sense of appreciation that was wont to fill the minds of his listeners. He was practised, moreover, in the exercise of two potent influences that he was ever ready to exert. The one may be said to have had its root in his hearers' fund of ready sympathy, the other in their ghostly apprehension of horror and dread. It is not at all surprising that in later times we should find an opaqueness to have obscured the clear crystal of these subtle perceptions, for fear and pity have no longer the same ascendancy in a busy world. But at a period more piously illiterate, things of this shadowy nature were linked very closely to objects of a material kind. A long process of reasoning could then be saved by reference to some obscure picture of monkish fancy. And so, in the glooms and twilights of mediaeval life, the moralist might insure speedy victory by overwhelming men's intellects by an appeal to the formidable images of terror and compassion.

From this cause it arose, as there is now every reason to suspect, that the country was at one time inundated with a torrent of the most acrid and rasping blasphemy. It would not be difficult to trace the relative connection between the luxuriance of oath-taking and the various forms of religion under which oath-taking has successively flourished. It could be shown that the swearing of most Catholic states is of greater fertility, and displays a readier fund of invention than that of countries brought under the reformed faith. The more religion appeals to the senses, the more fecund has been the vocabulary of oaths. The more it has been made the subject of illustration and imagery, the more finished and ornate have been the comminations in use. A priest-ridden nation, such as the Spanish or Italian, has always been eminent for its proficiency in blasphemy; and as part of the argument it may not be out of place to mention the instance of the hedge-parson in the 'Fortunes of Nigel,' who, by reason of his superior knowledge of divinity, could swear with greater volubility than any of his associates.

Thus it was that, labouring under the ban of priestly exaction, and confronted on all sides by the ghostly emblems of wrath and condemnation, there descended upon England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a torrent of the hardest and direst of verbal abuse. Not mere words of intemperate anger came bubbling to the surface, but sullen and defiant blasphemies, execrations that proclaimed open warfare with authority and a lasting separation from everything that was tender in men's faith. Imprecations were contrived from every incident in the narrative of the Crucifixion. The limbs and members of the slain Christ were made the vehicle of revolting profanation. The didactic writers of the time, no less than epic poets and sprightly versifiers, give full testimony to the prevalency of the offence. The laureate, Stephen Hawes, Lydgate, Chaucer and the "moral Gower," all are alike loud in their expression of horror and renunciation. Among the later writers replete with instances of the scandal is the epigrammatist, Robert Crowley, who enumerates a lengthy catalogue of expletives current in his day. Although by the time Crowley appeared upon the scene the language of blasphemy had become a little softened by the admixture of rather more innocent particles, as "by cock and pye," or "by the cross of the mousefoot," the author still finds it necessary to record a set of hard, grating oaths pronounced by the "hands," the "feet," and the "flesh" of Christ.

"Do you forget who Christ is, that you thus blaspheme Him?"

"Bah!" replied the man, "I am not afraid of Him."

"Who, then, do you fear?"

"I'm afraid of the Madonna, and not of Him."

The state of feeling that still prevails in Italy should go far to explain the presence in pre-Reformation England of this widely-spread body of irreverent swearing. With the Reformation, however, the contagion was shortly to abate. The severer authors at the close of the sixteenth century do not have to complain so bitterly of these jarring elements of vituperation. In the literature of the stage there is a marked improvement: in none but the earlier of the Elizabethan comedies do the characters accentuate their meaning by reference to the grossest description of blasphemy. When expletives occur they are generally in the spirit of derision and lampoon. As the writings of the stage grew more robust, the custom altogether wore away. It may, indeed, be held that the subversion of the Catholic religion was mainly, if not entirely, accountable for the change. There is certainly a marked distinction between the oaths of the outgoing and incoming creeds. But if we have been finally spared from the ravages of the infection, we may attribute our deliverance to that reserve of reverence of which we have spoken as possessed by English laymen, and to the pious devices that were practised upon it by the inferior orders of preachers.

The position they chose to assume in combating this "fine old gentlemanly vice" is a singular feature in its history. Their method was to associate the practice of swearing with the notion of actual bodily pain being occasioned to the Saviour. They made it appear that Christ in person was put to extreme physical agony on every occasion of its committal. Not alone did they assert the wantonness and hardihood of so directly incurring the Divine displeasure, but they raised the most piteous appeal to the compassion of these benighted swearers. It was daily proclaimed from their pulpits that the profanity in this one respect of professedly Christian men had worked a sharper and more agonising martyrdom than that formerly designed by the Jews themselves. In countless broadsheets, no less than by pictorial illustration, the wounds of Christ were portrayed as hourly re-opened, and the sufferings of Golgotha renewed from day to day. The doctrine gained additional credit when transferred from the hands of monkish authors and embraced by popular and captivating pens. Stephen Hawes, own poet to carpet-knights and buckram soldiery, brought home conviction to a class of offenders that a whole consistory would not have succeeded in convincing. In a rhyming pamphlet, prefaced by a figure of the bleeding Christ, Hawes depicts with awful realism those sufferings which, as he believed, were being actually and bodily inflicted. The author of 'Bel Amour' describes the feet and hands of Christ as literally pierced anew, and every member torn and lacerated by reason of the imprecations of unheeding Christians.

At this time of day it might be difficult to ascertain with any certainty the origin of this forced view of the iniquity of swearing. So far as concerns printed literature, we discover it for the first time in the doggerel of the poet Hawes, but it is none the less traceable to that encyclopaedic work of the thirteenth century, the 'Miroir du Monde.' This takes us to the year 1279, and instances could be furnished showing its regular passage through the next three centuries, until the monkish notion is at last surrendered and delivered over to the cleansing fires of the Reformation. The last of the English authors who seems to have seriously advanced the theory is to be found in the rigid disciple of asceticism, Thomas Becon.

Becon was a man who, throughout a devout and severe life, had set himself sternly to the task of rebuking the immoderate lawlessness of the orders among which he lived. The rustic usage of collecting round the village tavern to celebrate the Sabbath in sport and holiday was one particularly repellant to the mind of Becon, and held by him to be the mainspring of all the evils that ravaged the country-side. The fore part of the day having been devoted to the services of the Church, it was usual for a time of high festival to succeed the morning's austerities. Noon discovered all the grown men of the village assembled round the vintner's door and partaking of the ale-house hospitalities. Here feats of rude strength were performed, wrestlers practised their throws, and sturdy fellows played bouts at quarter-staff. Foot-races were run upon the greensward for wholesome wagers of barley-cake, and games of hazard were conducted under the shelter of the ivy-bush at the publican's threshold. Bets were staked, dice were rattled, and yokels learned to place the dues of the harvest-field upon the fortunes of the winning or losing colour. When, therefore, after earnest and fruitless entreaty, the good Becon rushed into print and produced his learned 'Invective,' he did not omit to visit with uncompromising censure the chartered licence of this Sunday festival.

The riot and pastime that on every seventh day had been wont to disturb the quietude of rustic life appeared to our reformer as a direct encouragement to the practice of swearing, and in fact as constituting so many training-schools for the cultivation of this unwelcome accomplishment. In the hope of rendering the habit positively forbidding to the more impressionable among his readers, he reminds them how the body of the Saviour is actually torn and mangled by reason of the imprecations hurled at him in these country sports. Oaths, he deplores, were then used in every matter of chopping and changing, of bargaining and selling, and he groans to think how the "dicer" will swear rather than passively submit to the loss of a single cast, the "carder will tear God in pieces rather than lose the profit of an ace."

It is a feature that must be very palpable to the student of incipient literature, that when once an original and daring notion was fairly launched upon the world, it was not allowed to founder for want of repetition. The peculiar mode of thought which we have ventured to ascribe to the 'Miroir du Monde' in the thirteenth century, could boast a long line of exponents in the interval that closed with Thomas Becon. The writer to whose industry, rather than invention, English laymen were indebted for their acquaintance with this painful doctrine was a certain Dan Michael, described as a brother of the Cloister of Saint Austin. This person has produced a didactic treatise based upon the model of the famous 'Miroir,' an original from which no writer at that time felt himself justified in departing. With the subject of swearing he deals in a way that is highly painstaking. Not to mention the intricate distinctions which he treats under these several heads, we find that he has grouped the offences of the tongue into no less than eight cardinal divisions. It may be curious to record the titles as our author enumerates them, notwithstanding that it is scarcely to our purpose to follow him through the niceties he has created. The branches of the subject, according to his classification, would therefore seem to be: "ydelnesse," "yelpinge," "bloudynge," "todiazinge," "stryfinge," "grochynge," "wy?stondinge," and lastly "blasfemye." So far as we have mastered the system of Dan Michael we are driven to the conclusion that the practice of swearing, as understood in the Cloister of Saint Austin, was, save for the outward distinction of dress, much the same as prevails in the later world. "For there are some," says he of the cloister, "so evil taught that they are able to say nothing without swearing. Some swear as if smitten with sudden pain. Others swear by the sun, the moon, by the head, or by their father's soul."

Minute as is Dan Michael in his treatment of the subject of abuse, his elaborations are possibly surpassed by the next competitor for moralistic fame. Robert of Brunn?, who produced a similar work in the year 1303, availed himself largely of the other's labours, while he enriched his collections with recitals of wrong-doing from his own exclusive stores. From the "Handlyng Sinne," as the production is called, one may gather considerable insight into the state of prejudice existing at the time. The neighbours tell one another good stories in church time, and inquire during the sermon where they can get the best ale. The monks have become so luxurious that they refuse to shave their heads and have commenced to array themselves in fine clothes. The king's courts are crowded with supplicating suitors, craving for redress from the extortions of trustees and executors, and yielding themselves victims to the falsity of the men of law. Swearing, at that time, would seem to be no longer the prerogative of laymen, but even to have become the privilege of learned clerks.

To depict what, from this author's point of view, were the fruits and consequences of blasphemy, Brunn? enters into a narrative describing the Mother of God presenting the bleeding Jesus to the gaze of the rich man Dives. The latter inquires the reason for the Child being gashed with wounds. In reply the Virgin points out in terms of keen resentment the injuries inflicted upon the Infant by the swearing of Dives and his associates. The doctrine of the 'Miroir' is then introduced in full to demonstrate the infamy and inhumanity of the practice, the whole concluding with a promise of repentance on the part of the sinful man. This fable is only one among many others that were narrated with a view to curbing the propensities of blaspheming swearers. The work that contains it met with general circulation at the commencement of the fourteenth century, but that the spread of the iniquity was not sensibly abated we may infer from other sources of information we have mentioned. In 1544, the evil was set forth in the light of a national grievance, and was paraded in a broadsheet published in that year entitled a "Supplycacion to Kynge Henry the Eyght."

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