He says he resides with his ma in Mayfair
Though his letters are postmarked E.C.
He looks very well that's beyond all dispute
For at Blackford's he's rigged up and down,
For Blackford lends suits, from the hat to the boots,
And that just suits the Boy about Town."
Blackfriars (thieves' slang), used as a warning; "look out!" French thieves would say, "acresto!"
Blackguard (common), a low, disreputable fellow. Dr. Johnson, Gifford, and others derive this from an attendant on the devil, and also from the mean dependants of a great house, who were generally called the black guard as early at least as the beginning of the sixteenth century.
We have neither school nor hospital for the distressed children called the blackguards.—Nelson: Address to Persons of Quality.
A lousy knave, that within this twenty years rode with the blackguards in the duke's carriage, 'mongst spits and drippingpans.—Webster: The White Devil.
Thieves and murderers took upon them the cross to escape the gallows; adulterers did penance in their armour. A lamentable case that the devil's blackguards should be God's soldiers.—Fuller: The Holy War.
C. G. Leland says:—"It is probably the old Dutch thieves' slang word blagaart, from blag, meaning a man (but always in an inferior sense), and art, the commonest termination for a noun. 'The greater part of the nouns in slang which are of Dutch origin, are formed with the ending aard (aart, erd, ert), er, rik, heid, and ing.'—James Teirlinck, Woordenboek van Bargoensch. To those who would object that man does not necessarily mean a vulgar or low person, I would suggest that in thieves' patois it means nothing else, and that in our British tinkers' dialect, subil siableach (Gaelic for a vagabond) is used simply to denote any man."
Likewise in the French argot, gonce, originally a fool (occasionally used with that meaning now), has the signification of man, individual. Wright has, however, shown that the entirely English term blackguard, as applied to scullions, was in general use at an early date.
Her Majesty, by some means I know not, was lodged at his house Ewston, farre unmeet for her highness, but fitter for the black garde.—Lodge's Illustrations, ii. 188.
I was alone among a coachful of women, and those of the elector's duchesse chamber, forsooth, which you would have said to have been of the blacke guard.—Morisons Itinerarie.
Though some of them are inferior to those of their own ranke, as the blackeguard in a prince's court.—Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy.
Nor must her cousin be forgot, preferr'd
From many years' command in the black guard,
To be an ensign.
Whose tatter'd colours well do represent
His first estate i' th' ragged regiment.
