a republic moreover—could be under any
circumstances an empire. Another town of
theirs is the "crescent city," and so fond of
the name of city are they, that they
frequently apply it to a group of half-a-dozen
log cabins and a whisky shop in a marsh, on
tae banks of some muddy, fever-haunted
river. Every speculator in "town lots"
(slang again) in the States has founded half-
a-dozen such "cities."

In the United States if half-a-dozen
newspaper editors, post-masters, and dissenting
ministers, two or three revolvers, a bowie
knife, a tooth-pick, and a plug of tobacco get
together in the bar room of an hotel, the
meeting is forthwith called a "caucus" or a
"mass meeting." If Joel J. Wainwright
blows out General Zebedee Ruffle's brains on
the New Orleans levee, it is not murder but
a "difficulty." In South America, if a score
of swarthy outlaws—calling themselves
generals and colonels, and who were muleteers
the week before—meet in an outhouse to
concert the assassination of the dictator of
the republic, (who may have been the
landlord of a venta or a hide jobber a year ago)
the ragged conclave calls itself a
"pronunciamento."

And touching the use of the terms "monster,"
"mammoth," "leviathan," how very
trying have those misplaced words become!
Their violent transformation from substantives
into adjectives is the least of their
wrongs; the poor harmless animals have
been outraged in a hundred ways besides.
The monster, I believe, first became
acquainted with a meeting in connection with
that great agitator, so calm now in Glasnevin
cemetery, and whose agitation has been
followed by such a singular tranquillity and
apathy in the land he agitated. As
something possibly, but not necessarily expressing
hugeness (for the most diminutive objects
may be monstrous) the term of monster
was not inapplicable. But in a very few
months every re-union of four-and-twenty
fiddlers in a row was dubbed a monster
concert; a loaf made with a double allowance of
dough was a monster loaf; every
confectioner's new year's raffle was a monster
twelfth cake; we had monster slop-selling
shops, and the monster pelargonium drove
our old familiar friend, the enormous gooseberry,
from the field. Then came the
mammoth. An American speculator—who in the
days when spades were spades, would have
been called a showman, but who called
himself a "professor and a tiger king," neither of
which he was—had a horse, some hands above
the ordinary standard of horseflesh, and
forthwith called him the mammoth horse.
That obsolete animal the Mammoth being
reputed to have been of vast dimensions ,
gave to the horse this new nickname; but
in a short time there started up from all
quarters of the Anglo-Saxon globe, from
the sky, the earth, and from the waters
under the earth, a plethora of mammoths.
The wretched antediluvian beast was made
to stand godfather to unnumbered things
that crawled, and things that crept, and
things that had life, and things that had
not. The mammoth caves of Kentucky
howled from across the Atlantic. Peaceable
tradesmen hung strange signs and wonders
over their shop-doors; and we heard of
mammoth dust pans, and mammoth loo tables,
and mammoth tea trays. Large conger eels,
fruits of unusual growth, and cheeses made
considerably larger than was convenient,
were exhibited in back streets at sixpence a
head, under the false pretence of being
mammoths. If anybody made anything, or saw
anything, or wrote anything big, it became
a mammoth, that the credulous might suppose
the Titans, Anak and all his sons, were come
again, and that there were giants in the land.
We wait patiently for a plesiosaurus pumpkin,
or an ichthyosaurus hedgehog; and we
shall have them in good time, together with
leviathan lap-dogs, behemoth butterflies, and
great-sea-serpent parliamentary speeches.

Brigands, burglars, beggars, impostors, and
swindlers will have their slang jargon to the
end of the chapter. Mariners too, will use the
terms of their craft, and mechanics will borrow
from the technical vocabulary of their trade.
And there are cant words and terms
traditional in schools and colleges, and in the
playing of games, which are orally authorised
if not set down in written lexicography. But
so universal has the use of slang terms
become, that, in all societies, they are frequently
substituted for, and have almost usurped the
place of wit. An audience will sit in a
theatre, and listen to a string of brilliant
witticisms with perfect immobility; but let
some fellow rush forward and roar out "It's
all serene," or "Catch 'em alive, oh I" (this
last is sure to take) pit, boxes and gallery
roar with laughter.

I cannot find much tendency to the employment
of slang in the writings of our early
humorists. Setting aside obsolete words and
phrases rendered obscure by involution, there
are not a hundred incomprehensible terms in
all Shakspeare's comedies. The glut of
commentators to the paucity of disputed words is
the best evidence of that. We can appreciate
the humour of Butler, the quaintness of
Fuller, the satire of Dryden, the wit of
Congreve and Wycherly, nay, even the
scurrilities of Mr. Tom Brown, as clearly as
though they had been written yesterday. In
Swift's Polite Conversation, among all the
homely and familiar sayings there is no slang;
and you may be sure, if there had been any of
that commodity floating about in polite circles
then, the Dean would have been the man to
dish it up for posterity. Fielding and Smollett,
in all their pictures of life, with all their
coarseness and indecency, put little slang into
the mouths of their characters. Even Mr.
Jonathan Wild the great, who, from his