RAMBLE SIXTH.

WORDS OF ABUSE.

Falstaff. Away, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you stock-fish,-O for breath to utter what is like thee! -you tailor's yard, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck:

Prince Henry. Well, breathe awhile, and then to it again; and when thou hast tired thyself in base comparisons, hear me speak but this.

First Part of Henry IV. ii. 4.

You remember that the disclosure which Prince Hal makes of the merry prank played on "lean Jack" and his companions effectually closed the crater of that volcano which could vomit forth naught save wit and braggardism: otherwise we might have had a perfect exhaustion of Billingsgate from that "trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swoln parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak bag of guts, that roasted Manning-tree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reve

rend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years!"

As it is, however, we will find no lack of material wherewith to supply the hiatus. For here, at least, language is full to overflowing. It is a current which frets and foams-rushing on dashing and impetuous; which o'erleaps the barriers of custom and convention, and sweeps into its resistless torrent history and metaphor and allusion and truth and falsehood and poetry and passion and prejudice and fact and fable.

Rousseau conceived language to be the natural product of the Passions. And really the thought receives no small degree of warranty when one marks the prodigious word-fecundity of Love and Hatredhow they have ransacked heaven and earth for symbols, exhausting nature and piling hyperbole on hyperbole. Take away from any speech what these have done for it, and how small a remnant will be left! As the skeleton forms the frame-work on which the splendid drapery of the human form is placed, so the most highly elaborated speech has its roots in homely and hearty idioms and instinctselemental utterances of human nature.

Among the most instructive of this class of words are the terms which the speech-forming faculties have loaded with burdens of abuse. A representative, that

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has grown familiar to us all, of this wide-spread family of words is the genus Billingsgate. Billingsgate pushes to enormous proportions a principle that is vital in speech. Billingsgate is the burlesque of word-building.

The metaphysics of the Abusive is exceedingly curious. The very anatomy of Passion is here exposed. Here, too, we may study elemental human naturemay read the primary thinkings and feelings of men in their first rude efforts towards expression. There are Words that remind me of the monster organisms of a primitive Geologic world. And there are workings of elemental fires visible in Language, as volcanic rocks come mounting and molten through the rib-walls of the planet.

What a subtle Analogist is Passion! It harries Nature for emblems and reads the types of humanity in bestial structures and instincts. Of the workings of this law in Words we have already met with traces. We have seen how that 'rascal' bears the primary meaning of a mean worthless deer-how 'fanatic' implies a temple-devotee, and how 'clown' has its genesis in a tiller of the ground.

And more of these Abusive symbols.

In merrie England when the sovereign made his 'progresses' throughout the kingdom, the train of

courtiers, nobles, etc., was generally followed by the attendants, and the rear brought up by the lowest class of menials-by the scullery-servants, the turnspits, the coal-carriers and others of that ilk-rather a black guard, we should say: and, in fact, they were jocularly designated by this very term—an appellation which, in the shape of our 'BLACKGUARD' remains even to the present day; though why those poor devils came to be the exclusive representatives of scurrility and meanness, it might be difficult to determine-unless, indeed, as we may well suppose, they were by no means ignorant, and as little sparing in their employment, of those peculiar elegancies of diction which are playfully ascribed to that classic region where they sell the best fish and speak the best English. Burton, by the way, speaking of the various ranks and gradations of devils, alludes to this "guard:"

Though some of them are inferior to those of their own ranke, as the Blacke guard in a prince's court."

Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 42.

From 'blackguard' we ascend to the formuling of a principle which we find exercising quite an important influence over the Abusive Element in speech, namely, that particular trades or professions or ranks

Wing

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in life which involve something effeminate, or mean or opprobrious—or which are supposed to do so-are taken as the types of these qualities. Thus that vile sarcasm on tailors which wickedly declares them to be but a vulgar fraction of a man is of quite dateless antiquity, while shoemakers are proverbially 'SNOBS.' However, we find some compensation and consolation in the fact that on this subject, too, the standards of judgment vary. In France, for instance, they do not typify this class by a shoemaker, but by a grocer —an 'épicier' being the very beau ideal of twopenny flash and beggarly magnificence. Another word that will conveniently come under this same category is 'FLUNKEY'—a term which, in these latter days of flunkey-ism, has become significant of so much, but which primarily imports merely a livery servant, a sense in which the Scotch still use it.

Of similar significance is the word 'KNAVE'-a term which has sadly lost caste-sinking down from an innocent boy or youth (as the German for boy is still knabe) to the very depth of rascality. The intermediate step, however, throws a ray of light on the terminus at which the word arrives. For this middle meaning is that of a servant-often enough, we know, apt to be knavish.* The course it has taken is, there

* 'Valet' and 'varlet' were, it is surmised, originally one word.