Many a reader before now has felt, as I cannot doubt, a moment’s perplexity at the now courtly poet’s assertion that “_vipers treacle yield_”--who yet has been too indolent, or who has not had the opportunity, to search out what his meaning might be. There is in fact allusion here to a curious piece of legendary lore. ‘Treacle’, or ‘triacle’, as Chaucer wrote it, was originally a Greek word, and wrapped up in itself the once popular belief (an anticipation, by the way, of homœopathy), that a confection of the viper’s flesh was the most potent antidote against the viper’s bite{206}. Waller goes back to this the word’s old meaning, familiar enough in his time, for Milton speaks of “the sovran _treacle_ of sound doctrine”{207}, while “Venice treacle”, or “viper wine”, as it sometimes was called, was a common name for a supposed antidote against all poisons; and he would imply that regicides themselves began to be loyal, vipers not now yielding hurt any more, but rather healing for the old hurts which they themselves had inflicted. To trace the word down to its present use, it may be observed that, designating first this antidote, it then came to designate any antidote, then any medicinal confection or sweet syrup; and lastly that particular syrup, namely, the sweet syrup of molasses, to which alone it is now restricted. {Sidenote: ‘_Blackguard_’} I will draw on the writings of Fuller for one more example. In his _Holy War_, having enumerated the rabble rout of fugitive debtors, runaway slaves, thieves, adulterers, murderers, of men laden for one cause or another with heaviest censures of the Church, who swelled the ranks, and helped to make up the army, of the Crusaders, he exclaimed, “A lamentable case that the devil’s _black guard_ should be God’s soldiers”! What does he mean, we may ask, by “the devil’s _black guard_”? Nor is this a solitary mention of the “black guard”. On the contrary, the phrase is of very frequent recurrence in the early dramatists and others down to the time of Dryden, who gives as one of his stage directions in _Don Sebastian_, “Enter the captain of the rabble, with the _Black guard_”. What is this “black guard”? Has it any connexion with a word of our homeliest vernacular? We feel that probably it has so; yet at first sight the connexion is not very apparent, nor indeed the exact force of the phrase. Let me trace its history. In old times, the palaces of our kings and seats of our nobles were not so well and completely furnished as at the present day: and thus it was customary, when a royal progress was made, or when the great nobility exchanged one residence for another, that at such a removal all kitchen utensils, pots and pans, and even coals, should be also carried with them where they went. Those who accompanied and escorted these, the lowest, meanest, and dirtiest of the retainers, were called ‘the black guard’{208}; then any troop or company of ragamuffins; and lastly, when