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In short, during the whole paroxism, my father was all abuse and foul language, approaching rather towards malediction only he did not do it with as much method as Ernulphus he was too impetuous; nor with Ernulphus's policy for tho' my father, with the most intolerant spirit, would curse both this and that, and every thing under heaven, which was either aiding or abetting to his love yet never concluded his chapter of curses upon it, without cursing himself in at the bargain, as one of the most egregious fools and cox-combs, he would say, that ever was let loose in the world.
It was the performance of a born orator and poet, and one who, like Timothy, had known the Scriptures from a child a long, involved litany of seething malediction, delivered, moreover, with a measured and effortless eloquence and a grammatical exactitude which left St. Ernulphus a bad second.
There is an orientality in his, we cannot rise up to: besides, he is more copious in his invention possess'd more of the excellencies of a swearer had such a thorough knowledge of the human frame, its membranes, nerves, ligaments, knittings of the joints, and articulations, that when Ernulphus cursed no part escaped him.
He damned Phineas to all eternity, in terms compared with which the curse of Saint Ernulphus enunciated by the late Mr. Shandy was a fantastic benediction. "If I had a dog," quoth my Uncle Toby, "I would not curse him so." But if Uncle Toby had heard Doggie of the Twentieth Century Armies who also swore terribly in Flanders, for dog he would have substituted rattlesnake or German officer.
Ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ... whining sorrow ... but grim defiance. Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing: I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce, upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago....
He considered rather Ernulphus's anathema, as an institute of swearing, in which, as he suspected, upon the decline of swearing in some milder pontificate, Ernulphus, by order of the succeeding pope, had with great learning and diligence collected together all the laws of it; for the same reason that Justinian, in the decline of the empire, had ordered his chancellor Tribonian to collect the Roman or civil laws all together into one code or digest lest, through the rust of time and the fatality of all things committed to oral tradition they should be lost to the world for ever.
Paul's thumb God's flesh and God's fish, which were oaths monarchical, and, considering who made them, not much amiss; and as kings oaths, 'tis not much matter whether they were fish or flesh; else I say, there is not an oath, or at least a curse amongst them, which has not been copied over and over again out of Ernulphus a thousand times: but, like all other copies, how infinitely short of the force and spirit of the original! it is thought to be no bad oath and by itself passes very well 'G-d damn you. Set it beside Ernulphus's 'God almighty the Father damn you God the Son damn you God the Holy Ghost damn you' you see 'tis nothing.
When a hook breaks just as the salmon was losing strength, was ceasing to struggle, and beginning to sway with the mere force of the stream, and to show his shining sides when a hook breaks at such a moment, it is very hard to bear. The oath of Ernulphus seems all too weak to express the feelings of the sportsman and his wrath against the wretched tackle-maker.
I suppose that I ought to pull a long face over it, but for the life of me I can't help laughing. I have you almost up to date in my history now, for what I am going to tell you happened only last week. I must mention no names here even to you; for the curse of Ernulphus, which includes eight and forty minor imprecations, be upon the head of the man who kisses and tells.
I doubt not that there are truths as plainly obvious, and as generally denied, as those contained in Man's Place in Nature, now awaiting enunciation. If there is a young man of the present generation who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself that they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus.
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