78 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 169. 



With that he roused his drooping heart, 

 And hastily cry'd out. What art? — 

 A wretch, quoth he, whom want of grace 

 Has broupfht to this unhappy place. 



I do believe thee, quoth the kniglit ; 

 Thus far I'm sure thou'rt in the right, 

 And know what 'tis that troubles thee, 

 Better than thou hast guess'd of me. 

 Thou art some paltry, blackguard sprite, 

 Condemn'd to drudg'ry in the night ; 

 Thou hast no work to do in th' house, 

 Nor half-penny to drop in shoes ; 

 Without the raising of which sum 

 You dare not be so troublesome ; 

 To pinch the slatterns black and blue. 

 For leaving you their work to do. 

 This is your business, ojood Pug Robin, 

 And your diversion, dull dry bobbing." 

 Hudihras, Part III. Canto 1. line 1385, &c. 



It will be seen that Butler, like Fuller, uses the 

 term in the simple sense as a guard of the Prince 

 of Darkness. But the concluding lines of Hudi- 

 bras's address to Ralpho explain the process by 

 which, at a late period, this term of the Black 

 Ouard came to be applied to the lowest class of 

 domestics in great establishments. 



The Black Guard of Satan was supposed to 

 perform the domestic drudgery of the kitchen and 

 servants' hall, in the infernal household. The 

 extract from Hobbes (Vol. ii., p. 134.) refers to 

 this : — 



" Since my Lady's decay, I am degraded from a 

 cook ; and I fear the Devil himself will entertain me 

 but for one of his black guard, and he shall be sure to 

 have his roast burnt." 



Hence came the popular superstition that these 

 goblin scullions, on their visits to the upper world, 

 confined themselves to the servants' apartments of 

 the houses which they favoured with their presence, 

 and which at night they swept and garnished ; 

 pinching those of the maids in their sleep who, by 

 by their laziness, had imposed such toil on their 

 elfin assistants ; but slipping money into the shoes 

 of the more tidy and industrious servants, whose 

 attention to their own duties before going to rest 

 had spared the goblins the task of performing their 

 share of the drudgery. Hudibras apostrophises 

 the ghost as — 



"... some paltry blackguard sprite 

 Condemn'd to drudgery in the night ; 

 Thou hast no work to do in th' house 

 Nor half-penny to drop in shoes ; " 



and therefore, as the knight concluded — "this 

 devil full of malice" had found sufficient leisure 

 to taunt and rally him in ihe dark upon his recent 

 disasters. 



This belief in the visits of domestic spirits, who 

 busy themselves at night in sweeping and arrang- 

 ing the lower apartments, has prevailed in the 

 North of Ireland and in Scotland from time im- 



memorial : and it is explained in Sir Walter 

 Scott's notes to the Lay of the Last Minstrel, as his 

 justification for introducing the goblin page Gilpin 

 Horner amongst the domestics of Branksome Hall. 

 Perhaps, from the association of these elves with 

 the lower household duties, but more probably 

 from a more obvious cause, came at a later period 

 the practice described by Gifford in his note on 

 Ben Jonson, as quoted by your correspondent 

 (Vol. ii., p. 170.), by which — 



" in all great houses, but particularly in the Royal 

 Residences, there were a number of mean dirty depen- 

 dents, whose office it was to attend the wool-yard, 

 sculleries, &c. Of these, the most forlorn wretches 

 seem to have been selected to carry coals to thy kitchens, 

 halls, &c. To this smutty regiment, who attended the 

 progresses, and rode in the carts with the pots and 

 kettles, the people, in derision, gave the name of the 

 black guards." 



This is no doubt correct ; and hence the expres- 

 sion of Beaumont and Fletcher, quoted from the 

 Elder Brother, that — 



" from the black guard 



To the grim Sir in office, there are few 

 Hold other tenets:" 



meaning from the lowest domestic to the highest 

 functionary of a household. This too explains the 

 force of the allusion, in Jardine's Criminal Trials, 

 to the apartments of Euston House being " far 

 unmeet for her Highness, but fitter for the Black 

 Guard" — that is, for the scullions and lowest ser- 

 vants of an establishment. Svvift employs the 

 word In this sense when he says, in the extract 

 quoted by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary in illus- 

 tration of the meaning of blackguard, — 



" Let a black-guard boy be always about the house 

 to send on your errands, and go to market for you on 

 rainy days." 



It will thus be seen, that of the six authors quoted 

 in " N. & Q." no one makes use of the term black 

 gvxird in an opprobrious sense such as attaches to 

 the more modern word "blackguard;" and that 

 they all wrote within the first fifty years of the 

 seventeenth century. It must therefore be subse- 

 quent not only to that date, but to the reign of 

 Queen Anne, that we are to look for its general ac- 

 ceptance in its present contumelious sense. And I 

 believe that Its Introduction may be traced to a 

 recent period, and to a much more simple deriva- 

 tion than that investigated by your correspondents. 



I apprehend that the present term, "a black- 

 guard," is of French origin ; and that its import- 

 ation Into our language was subsequent to the 

 Restoration of Charles II., a.d. 1660. There is a 

 corresponding term in French, bhgue, which, like 

 our English adaptation, Is not admissible In good 

 society. It is defined by Bescherelles, in his great 

 Dictionnaire National, to mean " fanfaronnade, 

 hablerie, mensonge ; Ijourde, gasconade : " and to 



