I cannot concur in opinion with SIR EMERSON TENNANT, who thinks he has a right to identify the sense of our low word _blagueur_ with that of your lower one, _blackguard_. I allow that there some slight similitude of pronunciation between the words, but I contend that their sense is perfectly distinct, or, rather, wholly different; as distant, in fact, as is the date of their naturalisation in our respective idioms. Your _blackguard_ had already won a "local habitation and a name" under the reigns of Pope and his immediate predecessor Dryden. Of all living unrespectable characters our own _blagueur_ is the youngest, the most innocent, and the shyest. He is entirely of modern growth. He has but lately emerged from the soldier's barracks, the suttler's shop, and the mess-room. As a prolific tale-teller he amused the leisure hours of superannuated sergeants and half-pay subalterns. Ten or twelve years ago he had not yet made his appearance in plain clothes; he is now creeping and winding his way with slow and sure steps from his old haunts into some first-rate coffee-houses and shabby-genteel drawing-rooms, which Carlyle calls _sham gentility_. He bears on his very brow the newest _flunky-stamp_. The poor young fellow, after all, is no villain; he has no kind of connexion with the horrid rascal SIR EMERSOM TENNENT alludes to--with the _blackguard_. That he is a boaster, a talker, an idiot, a nincompoop; that he scatters "words, words, words," as Polonius did of old; that he is bombastic, wordy, prosy, nonsensical, and a fool, no one will deny. But he is no rogue, though he utters rogueries and drolleries. No one is justified in slandering him. The _blackguard_ is a dirty fellow in every sense of the word--a _gredin_ (a cur), the true translation, by-the-bye, of the word _blackguard_. Voltaire, who dealt largely in Billingsgate, was very fond of the word _gredin_: "Je semble a trois gredins, dans leur petit cerveau, Que pour etre imprimes et relies en veau," &c.