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Although we have described this scene nearly in consecutive order, without the breaks and interruptions which took place whilst it proceeded, yet the reader should imagine to himself the outrage, the yelling, the clamor, the by-battles, and scurrilous contests in the lowest description of blackguardism with which it was garnished; thus causing it to occupy at least four times the period we have ascribed to it.
Matthew Bramble and Winifred Jenkins are among the best-drawn and most entertaining of fictitious personages. Smollett's humor is usually of the broadest and most elementary kind. It consists largely of hard blows, a-propos knockdowns, and practical jokes. More than any novelist, he illustrates the coarseness of his time. His pages are filled with cruelties and blackguardism.
There was, moreover, a very widespread impression that the North was carrying on the war chiefly by means of mercenaries, Germans, Irishmen, and "the offscourings of Europe," as the uncomplimentary phrase ran, who enlisted for the sake of the bounty, and were equally prompt at exhibiting their indifferentism to the grave issues at stake and their blackguardism in dealing with the hostile populations.
I do not suppose that this blackguardism of the Abolition press would have found anywhere a more sensitive subject than I am. It fills me with horror, as if I had been struck with a blow and beaten into the mire and dust in the very street. I must have some great faults, that is my conclusion, and such faults, perhaps, as unfit me for doing much good. I open my heart to you.
He had the greatest longing to be thought a poet, put execrable couplets together sometimes, and always talked as fine as he could; and his mixture of sentimentality, with a large stock of blackguardism, produced a strange jumble. "The people here thought it nate, sir," said Larry. "Oh, very well for the country!" said Goggins; "but 't wouldn't do for town."
Stranger the crowds that gathered there, and the leaders both popular and Royalist among the former, our fiery friend Danton, our cautious, snuffling Robespierre, and the boy of genius Camille Desmoulins, Danton's "slight-built comrade and craft-brother, he with the long curling locks, with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius!"
This sanitary service of humor in every form, as well as that of the honest wrath which shakes many a noble sentence of sinewy English as a mighty man-of-war is shaken by her own broadside, is something wholly apart from the billingsgate and blackguardism which are treated as if they were real forces.
Just's provocation the attacked party closed its ranks, the Commune, the ministers, the Cordeliers, Hébert, Hanriot. Proclamations were issued for a new insurrection. But Paris was getting weary of insurrections, wearier still of the obvious blackguardism and peculation of the Hébertists, weariest of the perpetual drip of blood from the guillotine. No insurrection could be organized.
Collectively I think, but am not certain, they are the worst men in the regiment so far as genial blackguardism goes. They told me this story, in the Umballa Refreshment Room while we were waiting for an up-train. I supplied the beer. The tale was cheap at a gallon and a half. All men know Lord Benira Trig. He Is a Duke, or an Earl, or something unofficial; also a Peer; also a Globe-trotter.
The Indian remains, usually in diminished numbers, with impaired character, with lowered physique, with the tag-ends of the white man's blackguardism as his chief acquirement in English but he remains.
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