"Damn them beyond what mortal tongue can tell;
Confound, sink, plunge them all, to deepest, blackest hell."
After this, it will hardly be a climax to add, that Peter Pindar said of this Keeper of the King's Conscience, with great felicity, that he "swore his prayers."
We have been thus particular on the subject of Lord Thurlow's swearing, partly because it is the main point of his lordship's character with posterity, but chiefly that we might show what has already been intimated; namely, what a nothing such talk has become, and what high time it is to treat it as it deserves, and give it no longer in typography those implied awful significances, those under-breaths and intensifications of initials and hyphens, which make it pretend to have a meaning, and are the main cause why it survives. The word damned in Lord Thurlow's mouth, for all its emphasis and effect, had as little meaning as the word blest, or the word conscience. It has equally little meaning in any body's. It no more signifies what it was originally intended to signify, than the word "cursed" means anathematized, or the word "pontificate" means bridge-making. This is the natural death of oaths in any tremendous sense of the words, or in any sense at all. They become things of "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Who that utters the word "zounds," imagines that he is speaking of such awful and inconceivable things as "God's wounds," though literally he is doing so? Or what honest farmer, who ejaculates "Please the pigs" (such extraordinary things do reform and vicissitude bring together!) supposes that his Protestant soul is propitiating the Pyx, or Holy Sacrament box, of the Roman Catholic Church? Yet time was, when the innocent word "zounds" was written with the same culpatory dashes and hyphens as the "damns that have had their day;" and "pigs," we suppose, were exenterated in like manner: suggested only by their heads and tails,—the first letter and the last. We happen to be no swearers ourselves, so that we are speaking a good word for no custom of our own; though, we confess, that when we come to an oath as a trait of character, in biography or in fiction, we are no more in the habit of balking it, than we are of ignoring any other harmless ejaculation; and therefore, by reason of its very nonsense and nothingness, we like to see it written plainly out as if it were nothing, instead of being mystified into a more nonsensical importance. We have known better men than ourselves who have sworn; and we have known worse; but with none of them had the word any meaning, nor has it any, ever, except in the pulpit; where it is a pity (as many an excellent clergyman has thought) that it is heard at all. Treat it lightly elsewhere, as an expletive and a mere way of speaking, and it will come to nothing as it deserves, and follow the obsolete "plagues" and "murrains" of our ancestors.
The only persons who profess to swear to any purpose, are the Roman Catholics; and they, indeed, may well be said to swear "terribly"—or rather they would do so, if any poor set of human creatures, fallible by the necessity of their natures, could of a surety know what is infallible, and be commissioned by a writing on the sun or moon to let us hear it. Lord Thurlow, with all his damns, and his big voice, and his power of imprisonment to boot, was a babe of grace compared with the Roman Catholic Bishop of Rochester who thundered forth the famous excommunication which the Protestant chapter-clerk of that city gave to the author of Tristram Shandy to put in his book; to the immortal honor of said Protestant, and disgrace of the unalterable and infallible Roman Catholic Churchmen; who, when delivered from their bonds, and complimented on partaking of the progress and civilization common to the rest of the world, take the first opportunity for showing us we are mistaken, and crying damnation to their deliverers.
We shall not repeat the document alluded to, lest we should be thought to give the light matter of which we have been treating, a tone of too much importance. Suffice it to say, that when all the powers, and angels, and very virgins of heaven are called upon by the excommunication to "curse" and "damn" the object of it limb by limb (literally so), his eyes, his brains, and his heart (how unlike fair human readers, who doubt whether the very word "damn" should be uttered), good Uncle Toby interposes one of those world-famous pleasantries which have shaken the old Vatican beyond recovery.
"'Our armies swore terribly in Flanders,' cried my Uncle Toby; 'but nothing to this. For my own part, I could not have the heart to curse my dog so.'"
FOOTNOTES:
[P] Thurlow politely calls Kenyon Taffy, because the latter was a Welshman. Scott is Lord Eldon himself.
[Q] Lives of the Chancellors. Second Series. Vol. v. pp. 644, 664.