In this way it would seem that the ball was set rolling. How the game has continued to be played we are most of us aware. It calls for no particular skill on the part of the players, neither does the sport appear to decline for want of appreciation. That it was received at its first incoming with a kind of _eclat_ is not so surprising as is the strange attachment that for upwards of two centuries has been manifested by some ranks of society towards this discreditable word. Its first flush of approval may have been due to a certain element of whimsicality. This at least is a sensation frequently conveyed by the occurrence of any meaningless affectation. But, however this may be, it certainly was not at the first outset the mere grovelling and unmitigated blackguardism which it was very shortly to be. Dean Swift, full of wit and penury, writing from his London lodging to Stella in her comfortable Irish home, breaks into frequent outbursts at the scantiness of his comforts. One October, when removed to Windsor, he is particularly tried by the severity of the autumnal weather, but the terms in which, addressing a well-bred woman, he expresses his discomfort are striking, as showing the strange vicissitudes that language may undergo. "It grows bloody cold," he writes--and one may well imagine the chilled extremities of the reverend Dean--"it grows bloody cold, and I have no waistcoat." In support of the view that there is nothing in the inherent properties of the word, or even in the range and frequency of its use, to account for the degraded position it has occupied in modern times, we have only to inquire whether any similar treatment has been the fate of the equivalent word in the language of France. What do we find? The French _sanglant_ has even a wider sphere of application, and in its legitimate sense is even a greater favourite than our own adjective, but no such evil days have overtaken it. It can be used literally, as in the case of _viande sanglante_, or metaphorically, as in _un sanglant affront_ or the aphorism _la sanglante raillerie blesse et ne corrige pas_, but not at any time is it found to deviate from the paths of decency. Everything, we consider, favours the idea we have formed of our stately English word proceeding soberly and reputably upon its honest course only to become the victim of this species of subversive horse-play at the hands of professed word-corrupters. Appreciative of the objurgatory advantages of the German _blutig_, they were indifferent to any affront they might pass upon the English tongue. From that time forward the word was branded as infamous. The manly ring that of right belonged to it, as instanced in such widely different productions as 'Piers Ploughman,'[56] or the 'Philaster' of Beaumont and Fletcher,[57] was becoming no longer possible. In recent days people have sometimes tried to reconcile these opposite tendencies and to endow the word with some amount of literary grace.