Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 8.djvu/266

256 twenty years past. However, I was forced to submit to wiser judgments than my own.

Thirdly, as this most useful treatise is calculated for all future times, I considered, in this maturity of my age, how great a variety of oaths I have heard since I began to study the world, and to know men and manners. And here I found it to be true, what I have read in an ancient poet:

For nowadays men change their oaths, As often as they change their clothes.

In short, oaths are the children of fashion; they are in some sense almost annuals, like what I observed before of cant words; and I myself can remember about forty different sets. The old stock oaths, I am confident, do not amount to above forty-five, or fifty at most; but the way of mingling and compounding them is almost as various as that of the alphabet.

Sir was the first man of quality, whom I find upon record to have sworn by God's wounds. He lived in the reign of queen Elizabeth, and was supposed to be a natural son of Henry the Eighth, who might also probably have been his instructor. This oath indeed still continues, and is a stock oath to this day; so do several others that have kept their natural simplicity: but infinitely the greater number has been so frequently changed and dislocated, that if the inventors were now alive, they could hardly understand them.

Upon these considerations I began to apprehend, that if I should insert all the oaths that are now current, my book would be out of vogue with the first change of fashion, and grow as useless as an old dictionary: