be "un mot populaire et bas, dont les personnes bien élevées évitent de se servir." From blague comes the verb blaguer, which the same authority says means "dire des blagues; mentir pour le plaisir de mentir." And from blaguer comes the substantive blagueur, which is, I apprehend, the original of our English word blackguard. It is described by Bescherelles as a "diseur de sornettes et de faussetées; hâbleur, fanfaron. Un blagueur est un menteur, mais un menteur qui a moins pour but de tromper que de se faire valoir."
The English term has, it will be observed, a somewhat wider and more offensive import than the French: and the latter being rarely to be found amongst educated persons, or in dictionaries, it may have escaped the etymologists who were in search of a congener for its English derivative. Its pedigree is, however, to be sought in philological rather than archæological records. Within the last two centuries, a number of words of honest origin have passed into an opprobrious sense; for example, the oppressed tenants of Ireland are spoken of by Spenser and Sir John Davies as "villains." In our version of the Scriptures, "cunning" implies merely skill in music and in art. Shakspeare employs the word "vagabond" as often to express pity as reproach; and I think it will be found, that as a knave, prior to the reign of Elizabeth, meant merely a serving man, so a blackguard was the name for a pot-boy or scullion in the reign of Queen Anne. The transition into its more modern meaning took place at a later period, on the importation of a foreign word, to which, being already interchangeable in sound, it speedily became assimilated in sense.
J. Emerson Tennent.
PREDICTIONS OF THE FIRE AND PLAGUE OF LONDON, NO. I.
"It was a trim worke indeede, and a gay world no doubt for some idle cloister-man, mad merry friers, and lusty abbey-lubbers; when themselves were well whittled, and their paunches pretily stuffed, to fall a prophesieing of the woefull dearths, famines, plagues, wars, &c. of the dangerous days imminent."—Harvey's Discoursive Probleme, Lond. 1588.
Among the sly hits at our nation, which abound in the lively pages of the Sieur d'Argenton, is one to the effect that an Englishman always has an old prophecy in his possession. The worthy Sieur is describing the meeting of Louis X. and our Henry II. near Picquini, where the Chancellor of England commenced his harangue by alluding to an ancient prophecy which predicted that the Plain of Picquini should be the scene of a memorable and lasting peace between the two nations. "The Bishop," says Commines, "commença par une prophétie, dont," adds he, en parenthèse, "les Anglois ne sont jamais despourveus."[[1]] Even at this early period, we had thus acquired a reputation for prophecies, and it must be confessed that our chronicles abound in passages which illustrate the justice of the Sieur's sarcasm. From the days of York and Lancaster, when, according to Lord Northampton "bookes of beasts and babyes were exceeding ryfe, and current in every quarter and corner of the realme,"[[2]] up to the time of Napoleon's projected invasion, when the presses of the Seven Dials were unusually prolific in visions and predictions, pandering to the popular fears of the country—our national character for vaticination has been amply sustained by a goodly array of prophets, real or pretended, whose lucubrations have not even yet entirely lost their influence upon the popular mind. To this day, the ravings of Nixon are "household words" in Cheshire; and I am told that a bundle of "Dame Shipton's Sayings" still forms a very saleable addition to the pack of a Yorkshire pedlar. Recent discoveries in biological science have given to the subject of popular prophecies a philosophical importance beyond the mere curiosity or strangeness of the details. Whether or not the human mind, under certain conditions, becomes endowed with the prescient faculty, is a question I do not wish to discuss in your pages: I merely wish to direct attention to a neglected and not uninteresting chapter in the curiosities of literature.
In delving among what may be termed the popular religious literature of the latter years of the Commonwealth, and early part of the reign of Charles, we become aware of the existence of a kind of nightmare which the public of that age were evidently labouring under—a strong and vivid impression that some terrible calamity was impending over the metropolis. Puritanic tolerance was sorely tried by the licence of the new Court; and the pulpits were soon filled with enthusiasts of all sects, who railed in no measured terms against the monster city—the city Babylon—the bloody city! as they loved to term her: proclaiming with all the fervour of fanaticism that the measure of her iniquities was well nigh full, and the day of her extinction at hand. The press echoed the cry; and for some years before and after the Restoration, it teemed with "warnings" and "visions," in which the approaching destruction is often plainly predicted. One of the earliest of these prefigurations occurs in that Leviathan of Sermons, God's Plea for Nineveh, or London's Precedent for Mercy, by Thomas Reeve: London, 1657. Speaking of London, he says:
It was Troy-novant, it is Troy le grand, and it will be Troy l'extinct."—P. 217.