The uses, or the misuses, of the word would seem to be twofold: first, as an accessory of abuse, and secondly, as an accessory of geniality. In some instances the two qualities are blended. Thus the knights of the road who stopped coaches and filched purses on the heath of Newmarket or Hounslow usually rode off "damning" their victims and advising them to sue the hundred for the injury. Whereat it was customary to remark, in the joking spirit of the age, that the villains showed themselves true men of the law by taking their fee before they gave their advice. Everyone who remembers the eleventh canto of Don Juan will recollect the pugilistic conflict that took place upon that hero's first arrival at the outskirts of London, a shower of blackguard oaths taking a conspicuous part in the encounter. Juan, weary with travel, has arrived at Shooter's Hill. He is meditating upon the vastness of the city stretched in panorama at his feet. Suddenly his studious occupation is interrupted by the onset of a gang of footpads. In the confusion that ensues, his ignorance of the language places him at a momentary disadvantage. The only English word he is acquainted with being, as he phrases it, "their shibboleth, 'Goddamn.'" Even this Juan innocently imagines to be a form of salutation, a sort of God-be-with-you, a misconception which the poet professes to think not unnatural-- "... for half English as I am (To my misfortune) never can I say I heard them wish 'God with you,' save that way." No stanza of the poem is more replete than this with a vein of painfully sarcastic drollery. The insular failing is elsewhere frequently displayed by the poet in the trying light cast from a misanthrope genius. But perhaps the severest hit, and not the less severe because tempered with banter and good humour, is that which has been directed from the pen of Beaumarchais.[10] "Diable! c'est une belle langue que l'anglais; il en faut peu pour aller loin; avec Goddam en Angleterre on ne manque de rien ... les Anglais a la verite, ajoutent par-ci par-la, quelques autres mots en conversant; mais il est bien aise de voir que Goddam est le fond de la langue." The highest point of wit in this direction must be supposed to have been reached when Evariste Parny, a poet of no mean celebrity, produced his "Goddam! poeme en quatre chants, par un French-dog." This was in the year XII. or, as we now should prefer to call it, 1804.