n _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
the origin of the word was lost sight of, and it was forgotten that it
properly implied a company, a rabble rout, and not a single person, one
would compliment another, not as belonging to, but as himself being, the
'blackguard'.

The examples which I have adduced are, I am persuaded, sufficient to
prove that it is not a useless and unprofitable study, nor yet one
altogether without entertainment, to which I invite you; that on the
contrary any one who desires to read with accuracy, and thus with
advantage and pleasure, our earlier classics, who would avoid continual
misapprehension in their perusal, and would not often fall short of, and
often go astray from, their meaning, must needs bestow some attention on
the altered significance of English words. And if this is so, we could
not more usefully employ what remains of this present lecture than in
seeking to indicate those changes which words most frequently undergo;
and to trace as far as we can the causes, mental and moral, at work in
the minds of men to bring these changes about, with the good and evil
out of which they have sprung, and to which they bear witness.

For indeed these changes to which words in the progress of time are
submitted are not changes at random, but for the most part are obedient
to certain laws, are capable of being distributed into certain classes,
being the outward transcripts and witnesses of mental and moral
processes inwardly going forward in those who bring them about. Many, it
is true, will escape any classification of ours, the changes which have
taken place in