There can be little doubt that the practice of gentlemen "damning themselves as black as butter-milk" was intended to overawe, and on the whole it has answered the intention. It is however but a cheap substitute for authority, and belongs of right to a rampant jingoism of a past age. We are here reminded of a kind of oath which, having conferred a nick-name upon a political party, seems likely to pass into the language in some altered form. The "Jingos," as will be remembered, were the faction in the country who favoured an aggressive policy during the recent Russian war. The name came to be given them from a circumstance of quite an insignificant kind. At a certain London singing-room a patriotic song happened to be nightly delivered, in which the vocalist emphasised his warlike utterances with a constant recurrence of this oath. The Radicals seized the moment, and in a short space of time the term "by Jingo" was pinned to the backs of the Tory party like a tin kettle tied to a dog's tail. Men soon began to ask themselves where first they could have met with this undignified expression? The 'Ingoldsby Legends' seemed the most likely ground, only that readers of Goldsmith referred to the example of the town-bred lady who, when introduced into the Vicar's family, swore "by the living Jingo!" Moreover, the term is to be observed in the earliest translation of Don Quixote (iii. vi.): "by the living jingo, I did but jest," and in Rabelais (v. xxviii.): "by jingo, I believe he would make three bites of a cherry." To seek for the origin of the oath, we should have to turn to a somewhat singular source. We should find it as far away as the slopes of the Pyrenees, where Basque peasants have long sworn by _Jincoa_, that in fact being the Basque name for God. We have made mention of Swift in a way that might favour the presumption that his ridicule was not at any time directed against the subject of oath-taking. That such is hardly the case will be seen from his prospectus of the Bank of Swearing, where this overgrown distempered plant is singled out as a fair butt for his sallies. The nature of the business proposed to be transacted at this fanciful banking-house may be more aptly considered in another chapter. CHAPTER VII. "_Viola._ Swear as if you came but new from the knighting. _Fust._ Nay; I'll swear after L400 a year." _Decker's Honest W._