knowledge of the human frame, its membranes, nerves, ligaments, knittings of the joints, and articulations,—that when Ernulphus cursed—no part escaped him.—’Tis true there is something of a hardness in his manner—and, as in Michael Angelo, a want of grace—but then there is such a greatness of gusto!

My father, who generally look’d upon every thing in a light very different from all mankind, would, after all, never allow this to be an original.—He considered rather Ernulphus’s anathema, as an institute of swearing, in which, as he suspected, upon the decline of swearing in some milder pontificate, Ernulphus, by order of the succeeding pope, had with great learning and diligence collected together all the laws of it;—for the same reason that Justinian, in the decline of the empire, had ordered his chancellor Tribonian to collect the Roman or civil laws all together into one code or digest—lest, through the rust of time—and the fatality of all things committed to oral tradition—they should be lost to the world for ever.

For this reason my father would oft-times affirm, there was not an oath from the great and tremendous oath of William the conqueror (By the splendour of God) down to the lowest oath of a scavenger (Damn your eyes) which was not to be found in Ernulphus.—In short, he would add—I defy a man to swear out of it.

The hypothesis is, like most of my father’s, singular and ingenious too;— nor have I any objection to it, but that it overturns my own.