It is not improbable that a great deal of the aversion that is associated with the practice of swearing is due to the custom of those novelists who are in the habit of screening their oaths behind the most transparent of disguises. To denote an expletive by its initial letter followed with a dash is really to attract undue attention to that which the writer acknowledges himself ashamed of printing. The contrivance serves no useful purpose, and, if we are not mistaken, the more robust of modern novelists have eschewed it altogether. Very different in this respect is the device adopted by Dickens in one of the most entertaining of his romances. Readers of 'Great Expectations' will remember the description of Mr. William Barley. This presents us with a picture of a water-logged old ship's captain, who, as he lay through the long hours of the day and night upon his uneasy mattress, never ceased to hold communion with himself in anything but a strain of piety--"Ahoy! bless your eyes, here's old Bill Barley! Here's old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord! Lying on the flat of his back, like a drifting old dead flounder; here's old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you!" Of course the point of this monologue lies in the fact that the supposed blessings are really substituted by the novelist for desires of a very opposite description. There are few pictures we would less willingly omit from the gallery of the author's creations. We have here the portraiture of one among that godless but soft-hearted race of veterans who have alternately bullied and blustered, or cried and whimpered, throughout many ages of fiction and melodrama. And in depicting this type of character writers have invariably felt it their bounden duty to give full prominence to this fateful gift of swearing. With much discretion the novelist has in the present instance invented a subterfuge, which, while it does not rob Mr. Barley of his idiosyncrasies of speech, leaves an amused and not an offensive impression behind it. We are, in fact, called in to assist at a very quiet piece of human contradiction. We are presented to the prone Barley in his state of helplessness and suffering, and at the same time are given to understand that the sufferer derives comfort and consolation from nothing so much as a downright plunge into the torrent of bad language.