organ, accompanied by a flourish of trumpets, and looking out, we saw the actors and their wives (a selection of the latter) perambulating the streets in their last night's dresses, while every now and then the stage-manager stopped to announce (which he did just like the town-crier) that there would be a second theatrical performance tonight, the Creation of the World, with Adam and Eve, which was also to include the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, and Susanna and the Elders, -to close with a grand "pantomimic effect." No difficulties were apparently too great for these actors, just as no subject appalled the painters of old.

Although much exhausted by the heat of the tent on the previous evening, we felt that we really must go and see this Creation. Presently we noticed some men of the party singled out and sent on an expedition with a donkey-cart, which St. John harnessed, looking most beautiful and dirty, with his auburn curly mop of hair falling over his big black eyes. They returned laden with horse-chestnut branches, of which we were anon to discover the use. The women nursed their children and gossiped while doing odds and ends of mending. Angela and Virginia compared their children. Virginia (also a Roman centurion) looked about twenty, a well-grown happy-looking girl with a picturesque yellow handkerchief round her head. Her baby, Olympia, ten months old, had un poco di febbre, and indeed it wailed plaintively and its black eyes gazed mournfully at us. Poor baby! Theatres apparently did not agree with it; but Virginia did not seem to worry much about it. Virginia was Mrs. Grudden's own daughter, so she was probably well cared for in the matter of food and lodging: the others, she told us, were not relations of hers, only friends. "The play will be even more beautiful than last night," Angela told us that evening, as she found us the best seats and indeed it was, if possible, more surprising. We recognized the chestnut branches in the tree of

us.

good and evil. The Almighty (the same actor as he who did the High Priest and Judas) appeared in long pontifical robes and a white beard. He created Adam and Eve by the simple process of pulling them up from behind a board which had been placed for that purpose on one side of the stage. Angela was not acting to-night; shorn of her former glory, and in a very old frock, she was busy attending to Eve's two troublesome children and rocking a third, the youngest, to sleep beside Eve herself, meanwhile, looking very young and pretty in pink tights, gazed as though she cared for nothing earthly,-least of all for her three dirty little children among the audience. Her eldest boy, with his face still unwashed (he had been naughty and crying all day) and his ragged, muddy little trousers appearing under his wings and robes, presently enacted the archangel sent to bid Adam depart from Eden; "it was a very small angel, almost a doll-angel," as Mr. Ruskin says of the heavenly visitant to St. Ursula in Carpaccio's picture. With a tiny piping voice and no stops did he deliver himself of his long address, to the great delight of the audience and especially of the children, who cheered him to the echo. Then followed the interlude of Cain and Abel, and of Eve (who had been the Madonna in the last piece) reproaching Cain; she looked as young as ever, and wore the identical tights in which she had been created. St. Sebastian's martyrdom came next, and here again the chestnut branches did duty. This scene was rather long drawn out, the chief point in it being the fact that the arrows the girl-soldiers shot at St. Sebastian refused to go off or to hit him, having all been made that afternoon of flimsy little twigs. But he fell beautifully, notwithstanding, surrounded by soldiers. The scene between Susanna and the Elders proved a fine piece of comedy, which quite brought down the house. There was a good deal of joking from the Elders (who were dressed exactly like harlequins in a pantomime)

mostly in patois Italian which we found it hard to follow; but in the midst of all the laughter the heat finally overcame us, and we returned home to bed, leaving the company to the Bengal lights and the "wonderful pantomime effects" promised in the programme. The lake shone in the moonlight as we neared the inn, the moon making a pathway of light across to ghostly Pella; the sky was studded with "patines of bright gold"; and in the distance came faintly the barrel-organ's everlasting eight bars revolving slowly. All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.

We were quite sorry to part from Adam and Eve, from Virginia and Angela, even from little Olympia and the dusty brown babies. As we left Orta next morning the women were standing about in the sun Eve was rather virulently scolding the little dirty faced archangel; Angela was crooning to her brat; while Adam and St. John led up the horses to harness them to the

vans.

Sic transit gloria mundi! The grandmother was putting up the cooking-stove; the tent was down, and the gipsies were moving on. And as we followed them in imagination, we seemed to enter, as we had never entered before, into the child-like faith and naïve sentiment that may be seen, painted large, in every old picture in Italy. Mrs. Browning warns critics. against the technical bias which makes them,

Because of some stiff draperies and loose joints,

Gaze scorn down from the heights of Raffaelhood.

But there is another bias which also warps the appreciation of old pictures -the bias which our scepticism, or our learning, necessarily gives us against the ideas of a simpler and a less exacting age. The way to avoid that bias is to put ourselves at the old child-like point of view, as we saw it on the boards and in the audience of the Passion Play among the Italian lakes.

E. C. C.

No. 355. --VOL. LX.

E

BY

"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. From 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 teetotallers 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

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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 "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. "Qath", a monosyllable which may be traced in the German Eid, and in sundry other Teutonic dialects, affords no clue 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 root-grubbers, 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 varieties. 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 no

thing 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 νή Δία and μά Δία of the Greek classics. Strong asseverations, however, of this nature are more usually conveyed, for colloquial purposes, through the medium of hypothesis. The 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.

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

vate 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 liggens", and the like. 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. 66 '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 " '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 ridiculous 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 Shakespearean 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 favourite 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 consigning 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 happily 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 preva

un.

lent, 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.

The commonest (and ugliest) of all vulgar 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 can 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 flavour; 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