"Per caput hoc juro, per quod pater ante solebat." _Virgil_, AEn. ix. 300. CHAPTER V. "He swore by the wound in Jesu's side."--_Coleridge, 'Christabel.'_ We may now turn our backs upon the luxuriant and fanciful swearing of the ancient world and pursue our researches into one other division of the subject that gives rise to more serious reflections. The diversions of the Roman and the Greek in the way of imprecation seem to have been mostly intended in good part, and to have been productive of little theological odium. But there is a body of swearing that has diffused itself through Christian countries which is the very reverse of sportive, and has undeniably provoked the strongest feelings of aversion. The abuse to which we allude consisted mainly in the indiscriminate use of popular oaths that selected the limbs and members of Christ as the paraphernalia of swearing. There does not appear at the present day any great irreverence in the exclamation, "S'light," or "S'lid," or "Bodikins," as, happily, the wave of impiety that brought them has long since broken and passed away. Indeed, as they now occur in the pages of sixteenth century writings, they only strike the modern reader in the light of so many interruptions from the text. But we shall find as we pursue the inquiry further, that there was a great deal of meaning wrapped up in these expletives, and that they played a by no means unimportant part in the workings of the mediaeval understanding. Whatever may have been the malignities laid to the charge of the later middle ages, it is certain that the Englishman was on the whole of a reverential type. The pious moralist who laboured in those times was so far assisted by an utter absence of captious criticism to honeycomb his teaching, and by the solid sense of appreciation that was wont to fill the minds of his listeners. He was practised, moreover, in the exercise of two potent influences that he was ever ready to exert. The one may be said to have had its root in his hearers' fund of ready sympathy, the other in their ghostly apprehension of horror and dread. It is not at all surprising that in later times we should find an opaqueness to have obscured the clear crystal of these subtle perceptions, for fear and pity have no longer the same ascendancy in a busy world. But at a period more piously illiterate, things of this shadowy nature were linked very closely to objects of a material kind. A long process of reasoning could then be saved by reference to some obscure picture of monkish fancy. And so, in the glooms and twilights of mediaeval life, the moralist might insure speedy victory by overwhelming men's intellects by an appeal to the formidable images of terror and compassion.