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as Thackeray, who has detested her from a child, has here represented; but the looks, the manners, the wiles, the larmes, and all that sort of thing' are a perfect likeness. The blame, however, is chiefly on those who placed her in a position so false that it required extraordinary virtue not to become false along with it. She was the only legitimate child of

a beautiful young' improper female,' who was for a number of years -'s mistress (she had had a husband, a swindler). His mother took the freak of patronizing this mistress, saw the child, and, behold! it was very pretty and clever. Poor Mrs. had tired of parties, of politics, of most things in heaven and earth; a sudden thought struck her,' she would adopt this child, give herself the excite. ment of making a scandal and braving public opinion, and of educating a flesh-and-blood girl into the heroine of a three-volume novel, which she had for years been trying to write, but wanted perseverance to elaborate. The child was made the idol of the whole house; her showy education was fitting her more for her own mother's profession than for any honest one; and when she was seventeen and the novel was just rising into the interest of love affairs, a rich young man having been refused or rather jilted by her, Mrs. died -her husband and son being already deadand poor

was left without any earthly stay, and with only £250 a year to support her in the extravagantly luxurious habits she had been brought up in. She has a splendid voice, and wished to get trained for the opera.

Mrs. -'s fine lady friends screamed at the idea, but offered her nothing instead, not even their countenance. Her two male guardians, to wash their hands of her, resolved to send her to India, and to India she had to go, vowing that if their object was to marry her off she would disappoint them and return to prosecute the artist life.' She produced the most extraordinary furore at Calcutta; had offers every week; refused them point blank; by her extravagance; tor

terrified Sir

mented Lady by her caprices; fell into consumption' for the nonce; was ordered by the doctors back to England, and, to the dismay of her two cowardly guardians, arrived here six months ago with her health perfectly

restored."

It will be interesting to decide who was the person referred to on pages 122 and 123 of Thackeray's "Letters," and there described as a friend of twenty years before, now a degenerate clergyman. The description ends thus :

"I used to worship him for about six months, and now he points a moral and adorns a tale, such as it is in Pendennis.' He lives at the Duke of -'s Park at and wanted me to come and go to the Abbey

, poor old Harry ! And this battered, vulgar man was my idol of youth! My dear old Fitzgerald is always right about men, and said from the first that this was a bad one, and a sham."

Of the other characters of "Pendennis" Thackeray himself acknowledged that Helen was drawn after his mother,

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though she was a thousand times better than the portrait." Wagg the novelist, whose name is great in the land where Captain Shandy, with ten times his brains, is unknown and unhonored, is presumably Theodore Hook. The noble men on the Pall Mall Gazette are Lords William and Henry Lennox, and a brother of the Duke of St. Albans, of whom Jack Sheehan used to say, His name of Beauclerc is a misnomer, for he is always in a fog, and never clear about anything.'

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An attempt has been made to prove that the village of Clavering, in which the scenes of "Pendennis" are laid, is the village of that name in West Essex, six and a half miles southwest from Saffron Walden. But Clavering is certainly not the original of the town described under that name in "Pendennis," although Thackeray may have borrowed the name. Certainly he seems to have been acquainted with the place. It is not unlikely that the Claverings of Clavering Park was so called by him after the family of Clavering, which actually held the village during

the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Welbores of the Barrow also may owe the casual introduction of their very uncommon name to the Welbores who resided at an old house called "Pondes" in Clavering in the sixteenth century. But the Clavering of the novel is undoubtedly Ottery-St.-Mary in Devonshire. Here Thackeray used to spend part of his vacations in his Charterhouse days (1825-28), at Larkbear on the confines of the parish, then occupied by his stepfather, Major Carmichael Smyth. There is a pamphlet

entitled "Short Notes on the Church and Parish of Ottery-St.-Mary," compiled by the Vicar of the Parish, Rev. Sidney W. Cornish, D.D., who says:

"No person in these parts can read 'Pendennis' without being struck with the impression which the scenery of this neighborhood must have made upon his mind to be reproduced, . . . after a lapse of more than twenty years. The local descriptions clearly identify Clavering-St.-Mary, Chatteris, and Baymouth, with Ottery-St.-Mary, Exeter, and Sidmouth; and in the first edition, which was ornamented with vignettes in the margin, a sketch of the cock-tower of the church is introduced."

Dr. Cornish, it may be mentioned, was

the probable original of Dr. Portman. He did not indeed become vicar until 1841, but Thackeray knew him when he was master of the king's school and a resident of the parish. We are told that in the woodcut which represents the meeting of Dr. Portman and his curate, Smirke, the side face of Dr. Portman strongly resembles that of Dr. Cornish, especially in the peculiar expression of the eye.

Major Carmichael Smyth was the orig. inal of Colonel Newcome. He is buried at Ayr, Scotland. Mrs. Ritchie has erected to his memory a memorial brass with the word "Adsum" on it. In a recently published letter she says, "The 'Adsum' and the rest of the quotation from the Newcomes was put upon the brass because I knew that Major Carmichael Smyth had suggested the character of Colonel Newcome to my father. There is no foundation, however, for the story that the death-bed scene in the novel was taken from the circumstances of the Major's death.” Indeed, in this scene there appears to have been some unconscious reminiscence of the death of Leather-stocking in Fenimore Cooper's "Prairie.' In one of his essays Thackeray has acknowledged a profound admiration for this wonderful old hero; and his simplicity, kindliness, and childlike trust made him nearly akin to the Colonel. Here is the concluding passage of Thackeray's description :

"At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands, outside the bed, feebly beat a tune. And just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, 'Adsum,' and fell back. It was the word we used at school

when the names were called; and lo, he whose heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood in the pres

ence of the Master."

So wrote Thackeray. Now compare with this the death of Cooper's aged trap per, the hero of his five Indian tales, as he gives it in the last chapter of his "Prairie" :

"The old man had remained nearly motionless for an hour. His eyes alone had occawhile musing on the remarkable position in sionally opened and shut. . . . Suddenly, which he was placed, Middleton felt the hand which he held grasp his own with incredible power, and the old man, supported on either For a moment he looked around him, as if to side by his friends, rose upright to his feet. invite all in presence to listen (the lingering remnant of human frailty); and then, with a military elevation of the head, and with a voice that might be heard in every part of that numerous assembly, he pronounced the word, 'Here.'

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Surely, the "Adsum" and the Here" in these two death scenes have some relaThe other characters tion to each other. in "The Newcomes" are less easy to identify. The elocutionist Bellew, father of the Kyrle Bellew of the modern stage, is said to have suggested Charles Honeyman, but beyond the fact that Bellew in his younger days was a fashionable clergyman, was adored by the women, and looked upon with a certain good-natured contempt by the men of his congregation, the likeness is a very remote one. William Boland, whom Edmund Yates describes as "A big, heavy, handsome man of much peculiar humor," was the original of Fred Bayham in "The Newcomes. (Yates, by the way, adds, "I have ventured to reproduce him as Boker in Land at Last.".") Boland was a man of much ability who might have achieved great things, but, owing to indolence and Bohemian tastes, his name never became known to the world. He had a robust confidence in his own abilities. He deplored the fact that he was wasting them, and he had a trick of speaking of himself as William in the same way that Fred Bayham always speaks of himself in the third person as F. B." As to the Becky Sharps, the Barnes, Newcomes, the Marquis of Steynes, and other delightfully wicked characters of that ilk, it is sufficient to quote Thackeray's own words to a friend: "I don't know where I got so many wicked people. I have never met them in real life."-Temple Bar.

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BY ARTHUR GAYE.

"FOR it comes to pass oft," cries Sir Toby Belch, in a burst of vinous confidence, that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent sharply twanged off, gives manhood more approbation than ever truth itself would have earned him." This is a doctrine which has never lacked supporters. Professors of Strong Language, if they have been more plentiful in one age than another, have not as yet been seriously threatened with extinction. No symptoms have hitherto been developed from which we could fairly foretell the approaching end of the long reign of imprecation. Fom time to time, it is true, there appears to be a lull in the disease; its virulence, at all events, becomes less patent on the surface, and its exacerbations seem to occur at longer intervals and with a somewhat milder intensity. But none the less is it there. Swearing, like tailoring, is a matter of fashion, and never goes out of fashion altogether. The form is apt to change; particular phrases become unpopular, then rare, then obsolete; yet the matter and fundamental idea remain the same, and the satisfaction of what Hotspur calls "a good mouth-filling oath" seems to descend, with volume unabated, from generation to generation. Non-jurors, of course, have always existed among us in greater or less plenty, even as teetotalers and vegetarians; but imprecations are no more extinct than alcohol or butcher's meat. So ancient and popular a custom is surely worthy of some little attention. Why do we swear, and what? Whence arises the apparently inordinate feeling of contentment which follows the delivery of a specially pungent execration? Why do the oaths of one age sound ridiculous, and lose all their point and aroma, in the mouth of another? These and kindred reflections seem to suggest themselves at the outset.

Etymology does not help us much here, indeed is rather embarrassing than otherwise. We are referred to the Aryan root swar, signifying "to hum" or "buzz." To swear meant originally, we are told, nothing more opprobrious than "to declare" or 66 affirm." Hence the word answer, of which the strict etymological

equivalent is " to swear in opposition to." Alas! there be those to this day whose answers are thus only too radically correct. "Oath," a monosyllable which may be traced in the German Eid, and in sundry other Teutonic dialects, affords no clew to the origin of the sentiment which it embodies. "Blasphemy," again, or "speaking injuriously," is a mere descriptive term, easy enough to derive, but conveying, when resolved into its factors, no intimation of the special sense which the word has for centuries carried with it. Finally, to "curse" is connected, according to some of our most modern rootgrubbers, with the Swedish korsa, and may thus possibly signify the act of making the sign of the cross-an explanation too flimsy and far-fetched to be ranked above the level of conjecture. Beyond these poor shreds of philological guesswork we are in no wise helped on our way by the laborious tribe of lexicographers.

Roughly speaking, we may divide the practice of Swearing into three main vari

eties.

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It is either asseverative, denunciatory, or interjectional. These varieties, again, admit, especially the last, of certain subdivisions. It is to the first class that those judicial affirmations belong, under stress of which we bind ourselves to set forth the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth;" sacramenta, or oaths of allegiance, fall under the same head. The " so help me God" of our own law-courts finds a worthy forerunner in the " God do so to me and more also," or the frequent "as thy soul liveth," of Biblical authority; and with these may be compared the common vǹ 4ía and μà Aia of the Greek classics. Strong asseverations, however, of this nature are more usually conveyed, for colloquial purposes, through the medium of hypothesis. speaker invites the most fearful catastrophe conceivable by religious minds, if what he asserts be not the fact. Briefly, he pits his veracity against perdition.

The

Of denunciation, there is no better specimen extant than the Commination Service appointed by the Church of Eng land for use on Ash Wednesday. Ernulphus' "Digest of Curses," whose bitter

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ness so offended Uncle Toby, can scarcely be considered more exhaustive, or the ban under whose influence the Jackdaw of Rheims so miserably moulted. But in private life we are accustomed to employ a delicately graduated scale of commination. Starting from some such generality as occupet extremum scabies, the devil take the hindmost," we may rise to the highest flights of withering blasphemy, and fulminate a varied assortment of the choicest anathemas against those who may have provoked our indignation. But it is in the third variety, that which we may call the interjectional or complementary, that our fancy permits us the greatest play. We may indulge in it under the form of either ejaculation or epithet, and there is a copious glossary of both kinds to choose from. It is, and for many generations has been, the most popular of all varieties of the Oath, and, humanly speaking, the most harmless. Often, indeed, it appears as a mere exclamation, inoffensive, meaningless, and boasting neither rhyme nor

reason.

Our older writers abound in imprecations of all shades of intensity. They sometimes afford, to those who have that taste, agreeable etymological nuces, being, for the most part, curious examples of crasis or contraction. Quite a long list might be made of such ejaculations as "Odds pittikins," "By my halidom,' "I'fegs, "" 'Slight," "By God's lig

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" and the like. gens, What strikes us most forcibly here is the extreme familiarity with which most sacred names and attributes are freely handled. And with this familiarity is joined an evident disinclination to call things and persons by their accustomed names; hence the frequent corruptions. It is as though the swearers of that day argued that under the cloak of a more or less grotesque travesty their profanity would be condoned. By God's sonties," for instance; which is variously explained by the commentators as a vulgarism for saints'' or sanctities." So, too, "lakin" for "lady," "Zounds" and 66 Gog's wouns, for "God's Wounds," "Gis" for " Jesus." Shyness in ordinary social intercourse is sometimes said to disguise itself in excessive brusquerie, and the Elizabethan imprecatory code seems to have been based on somewhat the same principle. How otherwise are we to account for the ridicu

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lous diminutives and parodies which we so frequently find doing duty as expletives? Another curious reflection is this-that in our own day the complementary profanities of the Shakespearian and subsequent eras are apt to be regarded in the light of nothing more than a very mediocre pleasantry. A man may ejaculate "Zounds !" Egad!" "Ods zooks!" "Ods bodikins!" or "Ecod !" if so minded, in almost any company, without exciting any particular resentment or disgust; possibly his hearers will be tickled and set him down for a wag. At any rate it is extremely doubtful whether at an ordinary clerical gathering, or indeed at anything short of a Lambeth Conference, he would be promptly called to order. Clever people have tried to explain to us that the God of one age becomes the Devil of another. Without going into this rather intricate question we may at least admit that the profane language of one period of English history becomes uncommonly like a joke in the next. Exceptions, of course, there are. Some few of Shakespeare's oaths, though like their fellows they have long ceased to be popular, could not be uttered even now without awakening a certain sense of solemnity, let alone the question of appropriateness and taste. Modern blasphemy is a product of our own; but our profanity proper, or improper, has this redeeming feature about it, that it is much more restricted than its predecessors. It is altogether devoid of impressiveness, and, as a rule, rings the changes on a few ugly words, in their context absolutely without meaning, which in some circles pass current enough, but in any mixed company can hardly fail to provoke an aversion, none the less profound or sincere in that it is so seldom openly expressed.

Anathemas of the comminatory order were not wholly wanting in our forefathers' speech, but they do not seem at any time to have been very plentiful. The much-abused but favorite monosyllable of this complexion, which is said to repose at the bottom of even the best man's vocabulary, where it may lie dormant a whole lifetime, or rise, perhaps, some once or twice under intolerable provocation to the surface, occurs not more than six or eight times in the entire range of Shakespeare's Plays. In his day it was evidently not the fashionable idiom for con

signing one's friends to perdition. Dromio of Syracuse, however, makes use of it, and Gratiano may possibly be pardoned for applying it to the inexorable Shylock; we find it, too, in the mouth of Macbeth. Alternative formula of denunciation, among ourselves unhappily too familiar, are conspicuous by their absence. And, generally, if we would be honest, we must admit that the swearing of the nineteenth century, if not so universally prevalent, is nevertheless, where it does flourish, at once fouler, uglier, and more hopelessly devoid of sense than any of the earlier codes. We seem to have reached the nadir of a silly profanity which can show not one poor vestige of poetry or the picturesque. If we are to continue the practice, at least let us hasten to remodel the glossary. It is bad enough to swear elegantly; to be clumsily, vulgarly, ungrammatically, profane is surely itself Anathema Maranatha.

can

The commonest (and ugliest) of all vul gar expletives, suggestive of blood if not of thunder, has crept into our vocabulary, no man knows precisely whence, almost within the memory of the present generation. Middle aged pilgrims on the imperfectly macadamized pathway of life can easily call to mind a time when it did not exist, at any rate in the rank luxuriance of these latter days. Those who would fain regard it as a corruption of the mediæval and comparatively innocuous "By 'r Lady" have no sure ground to stand on. The Elizabethan adjuration scarcely have degenerated into a mere epithet. A word or phrase may change its meaning, it is true, but very rarely becomes another part of speech altogether. And it is as an epithet, or even as nothing more than a particle indicative of special emphasis, that the term in question is mainly employed. It may be objected also that By 'r Lady" has a distinctly Romanist flavor; whereas its disagreeable substitute, descendant, or corruption, be it which it may, is used impartially by all denominations of Christian men whose mother tongue is Anglo-Saxon. We must be content to leave its origin in obscurity, and regret only that the vagueness of its source in no way affects its popularity. It is essentially the expletive of low life. Here it plays an important, not to say indispensable, part in colloquial Queen's English. Sometimes it is combined with another ominous word, a substantive this,

and monosyllabically expressive of those regions which Virgil and Dante have described in such graphic detail; and then, perhaps, it may be dignified with the title of imprecation. But for the most part, in the society which specially affects this remarkable idiom, it is manifestly intended to convey nothing worse than the speaker's anxiety to infuse a little extra strength into his language. Even this modest characteristic is losing ground, and any one who has ears to hear may, by diverging into the nearest alley, abundantly satisfy himself that as often as not it not only means nothing at all, but is meant to mean nothing. It becomes a mere prefix, to be inserted at will before all nouns and many adverbs. The Frenchman who in his English-French Dictionary rendered it baldly by très may well be excused; when it means anything it does mean très, or something like it.

There are a good many expressions which may be called unconscious oaths, and are considered to be the mildest form of imprecation that the lips of man or woman are competent to utter. They would appear to have been adopted in order to meet the views of those who would fain realize the comfort, whatever it may be, of swearing, and yet be held guiltless of outrages on religious decorum. We may liken them to the temperance beverages which contain just enough of alcohol to gratify the sense of tippling. There is even a legend of a certain

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Whaup," who only after ignominious suspension over a bridge at the hands of his elder brother could be induced to

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swear a waur swear" than "dash it." Such hyper-squeamishness occurs but rarely among the Whaup's compatriots, or, indeed, in any manly society on either side the Border. Other similar subterfuges are "what the mischief," "what the deuce," "drat it," and the like. Carlyle is said to have been tickled by the retort of the Irish corporal engaged in flogging his countryman : "Oh the devil burn it! there's no plasin' of ye, strike where one will." His biographer suggests that he may have felt how well the cap fitted, for he did not himself invariably deal in soft answers or the spirit of

contentment.

When we come to examine these milkand-water expletives a little more curiously, we find that, although they may

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