Shakespeare, Henry VIII. act i. sc. 1.
Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name; then shall the righteous come about me when Thou art beneficial unto me.—Ps. cxlii. 7. Geneva.
Blackguard. The scullions and other meaner retainers in a great household, who, when progress was made from one residence to another, accompanied and protected the pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils, riding among them and being smutted by them, were contemptuously styled the ‘black guard.’ It is easy to trace the subsequent history of the word. With a slight forgetfulness of its origin, he is now called a ‘blackguard,’ who would have been once said to belong to the ‘black guard.’
Close unto the front of the chariot marcheth all the sort of weavers and embroderers; next unto whom goeth the black guard and kitchenry.—Holland, Ammianus, p. 12.
A lousy slave, that within this twenty years rode with the black guard in the Duke’s carriage, ’mongst spits and dripping-pans!—Webster, The White Devil.
Thieves and murderers took upon them the cross to escape the gallows; adulterers did penance in their armour. A lamentable case that the devil’s black guard should be God’s soldiers!—Fuller, Holy War, b. i. c. 12.
Where the apologist meets with this black guard, these factors for error and sin, these agitators for the Prince of darkness, God forbid he should give place to them, or not charge them home, and resist them to the face.—Gauden, Hieraspistes, To the Reader.
Dukes, earls, and lords, great commanders in war, common soldiers and kitchen boys were glad to trudge it on foot in the mire hand in hand, a duke or earl not disdaining to support or help up one of the black guard ready to fall, lest he himself might fall into the mire, and have none to help him.—Jackson, A Treatise of the Divine Essence and Attributes, b. vi. c. 28.
We have neither school nor hospital for the distressed children, called the black guard.—Nelson, Address to Persons of Quality, p. 214.
Bleak. This, a northern form, the equivalent of O.E. blāc (cp. O.N. bleikr, Mod. German bleich, pale, colourless), comes out clearly in its original relationship with ‘bleach’ in the following quotations.