communications of your correspondents have not been satisfactory upon either point—they have not shown the period at which the word came to be accepted in its present sense; and their quotations all apply to its use in a much more simple meaning, and one totally different from that which we now attach to it.

One class of these quotations (Vol. ii., pp. 171. 285.), such as the passages from Butler and Fuller, refer obviously to a popular superstition, during an age when the belief in witchcraft and hobgoblins was universal; and when such creatures of fancy were assigned as Black Guards to his Satanic majesty. "Who can conceive," says Fuller in the paragraph extracted, "but that such a Prince-principal of Darkness must be proportionally attended by a Black Guard of monstrous opinions?" (Church History, b. ix. c. xvi.) And in the verses of Butler referred to, Hudibras, when deceived by Ralpho counterfeiting a ghost in the dark,—

and thereupon in his trepidation discourses with the Squire as follows:

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 Hudibras's address to Ralpho explain the process by which, at a late period, this term of the Black Guard 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 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—

and therefore, as the knight concluded—"this devil full of malice" had found sufficient leisure to taunt and rally him in the dark upon his recent disasters.

This belief in the visits of domestic spirits, who busy themselves at night in sweeping and arranging the lower apartments, has prevailed in the North of Ireland and in Scotland from time immemorial: 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 dependents, 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 the 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 expression of Beaumont and Fletcher, quoted from the Elder Brother, that—

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 servants of an establishment. Swift employs the word in this sense when he says, in the extract quoted by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary in illustration 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 guard 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 subsequent not only to that date, but to the reign of Queen Anne, that we are to look for its general acceptance in its present contumelious sense. And I believe that its introduction may be traced to a recent period, and to a much more simple derivation than that investigated by your correspondents.

I apprehend that the present term, "a blackguard," is of French origin; and that its importation into our language was subsequent to the Restoration of Charles II., A.D. 1660. There is a corresponding term in French, blague, which, like our English adaptation, is not admissible in good society. It is defined by Bescherelles, in his great Dictionnaire National, to