Mar. 12. 1853.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



273 



hold with W. S. notwithstandhig, and so will all 

 who have had any dealings with the Bengalees : 

 the term nuggut pisa being with them a common 

 one for "hard cash;" and as the Hindostanee 

 language is largely indebted to the Persian, the 

 derivation of W. S. is no doubt correct. To ac- 

 count for its occurrence in Australia, it is only 

 necessary to say that that country has been for 

 some years past a sanatarium for the debilitated 

 Qui aye's, many of whom have settled there ; and 

 becoming interested in the " diggings," have given 

 the significant term of nuggut to what has in 

 reality turned out hard cash, both to them and to 

 certain lucky gentlemen in this city — holders of 

 the script of the " Great iVw^-^w^ Vein" of Australia. 



Blackguard (Vol. vii., p. 77.).— It may, in some 

 degi-ee, support the first portion of the argument 

 so interestingly stated by Sir J. Emerson Ten- 

 NENT respecting the derivation of this term, to 

 record that, in my youth, when at school at the 

 New Academy in Edinburgh, some five or six- 

 and-twenty years ago, I used frequently to be en- 

 gaged, with ray schoolfellows, in regular pitched 

 battles, technically called by us bickers, with the 

 town boys, consisting chiefly of butchers' and 

 bakers' boys, whom we were accustomed to desig- 

 nate as the blackguards, without, I am sure, ever 

 attaching to that word the more opprobrious mean- 

 ing which it now generally bears ; but only indi- 

 cating by it those of a lower rank in life than our- 

 selves, the gentlemen. 



May I venture to add, that whilst the former 

 portion of Sir J. E. Tennent's Note seems to me 

 to be fully satisfactory in proof that the term 

 blackguard is originally derived from the ancient 

 appellation of menials employed in the lowest and 

 most dirty offices of a great household, and that 

 it is thus purely English, — the last two para- 

 graphs, on the other hand, appear to advocate an 

 unnecessary and far-fetched derivation of the word 

 from the French, and which, I humbly conceive, 

 the true sense of the alleged roots, blague, blaguer, 

 blagueur, by no means justifies j it being impossible 

 to admit that these are, in any sort, " correspond- 

 ing terms " with blackguard. G. W. R. Gordon. 



Stockholm. 



NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 



Long and anxiously has the reading public been 

 looking for Mr. Layard's account of his further dis- 

 coveries in Nineveh and Babylon. That account has 

 at length appeared in one large octavo volume, under 

 the title of Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and 

 Babylon, with Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan, and the 

 Desert, being the result of a Second Expedition undertaken 



for the Trustees of the British Museum, by Austen H. 

 Layard, M.P., and is enriched with maps, plaJis, and 

 woodcut illustrations, to the extent of some hundreds. 

 And on examining it we find that the vast amount of 

 new light which Mr. Layard's discoveries in the wide 

 and hitherto untilled field of Assyrian antiquities had 

 already thrown on Sacred History, is increased to a 

 great extent by those further researches, of which the 

 details are now given to the public. With his ready 

 powers of observation, and his talent for graphic de- 

 scription, Mr. Layard's book, as a mere volume of 

 travels over a country of such interest, would well re- 

 pay perusal : but when we find in addition, as we do 

 in every page and line, fresh and startling illustration 

 of the truth of Holy Writ — when we have put before 

 us such pictures of what Nineveh and Babylon must 

 have been, and find, as we do, men distinguished in 

 every branch of learning lending their assistance to 

 turn Mr. Layard's discoveries to the best account, we 

 feel we cannot be too loud in our praises of Mr. 

 Layard's zeal, energy, and judgment, or too grateful 

 to Mr. Murray for giving us at once the results which 

 those qualities have enabled Mr. Layard to gain for 

 us, in so cheap, complete, yet fully embellished a form. 



The blockade of Mainz was not a bad day for the 

 already world-renowned story of Reynard the Fox, since 

 that led Gothe to dress the old fable up again in his 

 musical hexameters, and so give it new popularity. 

 From Gbthe's version a very able and spirited English 

 paraphrase is now in the course of publication. We 

 say paraphrase, because the author of Reynard the FoXy 

 after the German version of Gothe, with illustrations by 

 J. Wolf, takes as his motto the very significant but 

 appropriate description which Gothe gave of his own 

 work, " Zwischen Uebersetzung und Umarbeitung 

 schwebend." However, the version is a very pleasant 

 one, and the illustrations are characteristic and in good 

 taste. 



An Antiquarian Photographic Club, for the exchange 

 among its members of photographs of objects of anti- 

 quarian interest, on the principle of the Antiquarian 

 Etching Club, is in the course of formation. 



Books Received. — The Family Shakspeare, in which 

 nothing is added to the original Text, but those words and 

 expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be 

 read in a Family, by T. Bowdler, Vol. V., containing 

 Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, An- 

 tony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. — The new vo- 

 lume of Bohn's Standard Library contains the eighth 

 and concluding volume of the History of the Christian 

 Church, as published by Neander. The publisher 

 holds out a prospect of a translation of the posthumous 

 volume compiled from Neander's Papers by Dr. 

 Schneider, and with it of a general index to the whole 

 work. — The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord 

 Bacon, including his Dignity and Advancement ofLearn- 

 ing, in Nine Books, and his Novum Organum, or Precepts 

 for the Interpretation of Nature, by Joseph Devey, 

 M.A., forms the new volume of Bohn's Scientific Li- 

 brary. 



