The notorious Orator Henley was known to the mob as ORATOR HUMBUG. The fact may be learned from an illustration in that exceedingly curious little collection of Caricatures, published in 1757, many of which were sketched by Lord Bolingbroke—Horace Walpole filling in the names and explanations. Halliwell describes HUMBUG as “a person who hums,” and cites Dean Milles’s MS., which was written about 1760. In the last century, the game now known as double-dummy was termed HUMBUG. Lookup, a notorious gambler, was struck down by apoplexy when playing at this game. On the circumstance being reported to Foote, the wit said—“Ah, I always thought he would be HUMBUGGED out of the world at last!” It has been stated that the word is a corruption of Hamburgh, from which town so many false bulletins and reports came during the war in the last century. “Oh, that is Hamburgh [or HUMBUG],” was the answer to any fresh piece of news which smacked of improbability. Grose mentions it in his Dictionary, 1785; and in a little printed squib, published in 1808, entitled Bath Characters, by T. Goosequill, HUMBUG is thus mentioned in a comical couplet on the title-page:—
“Wee Thre Bath Deities bee,
Humbug, Follie, and Varietee.”
Gradually from this time the word began to assume a place in periodical literature, and in novels written by not over-precise authors. In the preface to a flat, and most likely unprofitable poem, entitled, The Reign of HUMBUG, a Satire, 8vo, 1836, the author thus apologizes for the use of the word:—“I have used the term HUMBUG to designate this principle [wretched sophistry of life generally], considering that, it is now adopted into our language as much as the words dunce, jockey, cheat, swindler, &c., which were formerly only colloquial terms.” A correspondent, who in a number of Adversaria ingeniously traced bombast to the inflated Doctor Paracelsus Bombast, considers that HUMBUG may, in like manner, be derived from Homberg, the distinguished chemist of the court of the Duke of Orleans, who, according to the following passage from Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, was an ardent and successful seeker after the philosopher’s stone!
“§194.—Of this there cannot be a better proof than the experiment of Monsieur Homberg, who made gold of mercury by introducing light into its pores, but at such trouble and expense that, I suppose, nobody will try the experiment for profit. By this injunction of light and mercury, both bodies became fixed, and produced a third different to either, to wit, real gold. For the truth of which fact I refer to the memoirs of the French Academy of Sciences.”—Berkeley’s Works, vol ii. p. 366 (Wright’s edition).
Another derivation suggested is that of AMBAGE, a Latin word adopted into the English language temp. Charles I. (see May’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia), and meaning conduct the reverse of straightforward. Again, in the (burlesque) Loves of Hero and Leander (date 1642), we find “Mum-bug, quoth he, ’twas known of yore,” a cant expression, no doubt, commanding a person to “shut up,” or hold his tongue, and evidently derived from the game of mum-budget or silence, upon which Halliwell (Dict. Arch.) has descanted.
AMBAGE is also used in the sense of “circumlocution.” “Without any long studie or tedious AMBAGE.”—Puttenham, Art of Poesie.
“Umh! y’ are full of AMBAGE.”—Decker’s Whore of Babylon, 1607.
“Thus from her cell Cumæan Sibyl sings
Ambiguous AMBAGES, the cloyster rings
With the shrill sound thereof, in most dark strains.”
De Quincey thus discourses upon the word:—
“The word HUMBUG, for instance, rests upon a rich and comprehensive basis; it cannot be rendered adequately either by German or by Greek, the two richest of human languages; and without this expressive word we should all be disarmed for one great case, continually recurrent, of social enormity. A vast mass of villany, that cannot otherwise be reached by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn, would go at large with absolute impunity were it not through the stern Rhadamanthean aid of this virtuous and inexorable word.”—Article on “Language.”