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Updated: June 16, 2025
It will not be amiss, however, to observe by way of caution, that the powers of ridicule are not to be employed too often, lest we sink into scurrility; nor in loose and indecent language, lest we degenerate into wantonness and buffoonery; nor with the least degree of petulance and abuse, lest we appear audacious and ill-bred; nor levelled against the unfortunate, lest we incur the censure of inhumanity; nor against atrocious crimes, lest we raise a laugh where we ought to excite abhorrence; nor, in the last place, should they be used unseasonably, or when the characters either of the Speaker, or the Hearer, and the circumstances of time and place forbid it; otherwise we should grossly fail in that decorum of which we have already said so much.
Our present is merely a bad imitation of what the Americans can do much better. Ignoring as mere scurrility this criticism of London's present, but touched by my appeal to his pride in its history, the average citizen will reply, reasonably enough, to this effect: 'By all means let us have architectural evidence of our epochs Caroline, Georgian, Victorian, what you will.
Some time after, one Duncan Shapley, who had belonged to the society, called to see Abigail, his sister, at Niskeuna, whom he had not seen for six or seven years; but he was not admitted: he waited some time, being loath to go away without seeing her. At last she was ordered to go to the window and address him in the language of abuse and scurrility.
If anything in this world be like Hell, as I have heard it described by our clergy, the truest picture of it must be in the back room of one of our alehouses at midnight, where a crew of robbers and their whores are met together after a booty, and are beginning to grow drunk, from that time until they are past their senses, in such a continued horrible noise of cursing, blasphemy, lewdness, scurrility, and brutish behaviour, such roaring and confusion, such a clatter of mugs and pots at each other's heads, that Bedlam in comparison is a sober and orderly place.
Before was an ugly rush of water and a leap beyond her strength; behind, three drunken men, their mouths full of endearment and scurrility. She looked despairingly to the level white road for the Perseus who should deliver her. And to her joy the deliverer was not wanting.
Furthermore, if any common strumpet should be found or any scurrility or profaneness represented at either of the theatres, the prelates for every such offence should be fined £20 by the said Council, and the poet, for every such offence on his part, should be whipped. This law relates to another, which was also enacted the same year upon this occasion.
In some of the society papers, paragraphs of a surprising scurrility appeared, attacking me as an impostor, and aspersing the motives of Eveleth in her former marriage, and treating her as a foolish crank or an audacious flirt.
No man detests and despises scurrility more than myself; nor hath any man more reason; for none hath ever been treated with more; and what is a very severe fate, I have had some of the abusive writings of those very men fathered upon me, who, in other of their works, have abused me themselves with the utmost virulence.
But at last the purser having, by the captain's order, stopped the allowance of a fellow who would not work, Cozens, though the man did not complain to him, intermeddled in the affair with great eagerness, and grossly insulting the purser, who was then delivering our provisions just by the captain's tent, and was himself sufficiently violent, the purser, enraged by his scurrility, and perhaps piqued by former quarrels, cried out "A mutiny!" adding "that the dog had pistols," and then himself fired a shot at Cozens, which, however, missed him.
At which moment enters the caustic, generous Witmore, belabouring the profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the stupidity of the age with one hand, the while he pays his friend's rent with the other; and who, incidentally, is requested by that irascible genius to kick a worthy publisher down the stairs, on the latter's refusal to give fifty shillings "no, nor fifty farthings" for his play.
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