The blackguard is a dirty fellow in every sense of the word—a gredin (a cur), the true translation, by-the-bye, of the word blackguard. Voltaire, who dealt largely in Billingsgate, was very fond of the word gredin:
"Je semble à trois gredins, dans leur petit cerveau,
Que pour être imprimés et reliés en veau," &c.
The word blagueur implies nothing so contemptuous or offensive as the word blackguard does. The emptiness of the person to whom it applies is very harmless. Its etymon blague (bladder, tobacco-bag), the pouch, which smoking voluptuaries use to deposit their tobacco, is perfectly symbolic of the inane, bombastic, windy, and long-winded speeches and sayings of the blagueur. Every French commercial traveller, buss-tooter, and Parisian jarvy is one. When he deports himself with modesty, and shows a gentlemanly tact in his peculiar avocation, we call him a craqueur (a cracker). "Ancient Pistol" was the king of blagueurs; Falstaff, of craqueurs. I like our Baron de Crac, a native of the land of white-liars and honey-tongued gentlemen (Gascony). The genus craqueur is common here: as it shoots out into a thousand branches, shades, varieties, and modifications, judicial, political, poetical, and so on, it would be quite out of my province to pursue farther the description of blagueur-land or blarney-land.
P.S.—Excuse my French-English.
Philarète Chasles, Mazarinæus.
Paris, Palais de l'Institut.
HARMONY OF THE FOUR GOSPELS.
(Vol. viii., p. 316.)
In answer to Z. I may state that the first attempt of this kind is attributed to Tatian. Eusebius, in his Ecc. Hist. (quoted in Lardner's Works, vol. ii. p. 137. ed. 1788), says, he "composed I know not what—harmony and collection of the gospels, which he called δια τεσσων." Eusebius himself composed a celebrated harmony, of which, as of some others in the sixteenth and two following centuries, there is a short account in Michaelis's Introduction to the New Test., translated by Bishop Marsh, vol. iii. part I. p. 32. The few works of the same kind written in the early and middle ages are noticed in Horne's Introduct., vol. ii. p. 274. About the year 330, Juvencus, a Spaniard, wrote the evangelical history in heroic verse. Of far greater merit were the four books of Augustine, De Consensu Quatuor Evangeliorum. After a long interval, Ludolphus the Saxon, a Carthusian monk, published a work which passed through thirty editions in Germany, besides being translated into French and Italian. Some years ago I made out the following list of Harmonies, Diatessarons, and Synoptical tables, published since the Reformation, which may in some measure meet the wish of your correspondent. It is probably incomplete. The dates are those of the first editions.