trotter cases, or grabbers. Food is grub,
prog, and crug ; a hackney cab is a
shoful ; a Punch's show a schwassle-box ; a
five pound note is a flimsy ; a watch a ticker ;
anything of good quality or character is
stunning, ripping, out-and-out ; a magistrate is a
beak, and a footman a flunkey. Not less can
I set down as slang the verbiage by which
coats are transformed into bis-uniques,
alpacas, vicunas, ponchos, anaxandrians, and
siphonias.

The slang expressions I have herein set
down I have enumerated, exactly as they
have occurred to me, casually. If I had made
research, or taxed my memory for any
considerable time, I have no doubt that I could
augment the slang terms and synonyms to at
least double their amount. And it is possible
that an accomplished public will be able to
supply from their own recollection and experience
a goodly addition to my list. The
arrival of every mail, the extension of every
colony, the working of every Australian
mine would swell it. Placers, squatters,
diggers, clearings, nuggets, cradles, claims—
where were all these words a dozen years ago?
and what are they, till they are marshalled
in a dictionary, but slang? We may say
the same of the railway phraseology: buffers,
switches, points, stokers, and coal bunks—
whence is their etymology, and whence their
authority?

But slang does not end here. It goes higher
—to the very top of the social Olympus.
If the Duchess of Downderry invites some
dozen of her male and female fashionable
acquaintances to tea and a dance afterwards,
what do you think she calls her tea-party?
A thé dansante—a dancing tea. Does tea
dance? Can it dance? Is not this libel upon
honest Bohea and Souchong slang?—pure,
unadulterated, unmitigated slang.

The slang of the fashionable world is
mostly imported from France; an unmeaning
gibberish of Gallicisms runs through English
fashionable conversation, and fashionable
novels, and accounts of fashionable parties in
the fashionable newspapers. Yet, ludicrously
enough, immediately the fashionable magnates
of England seize on any French idiom, the
French themselves not only universally
abandon it to us, but positively repudiate it
altogether from their idiomatic vocabulary.
If you were to tell a well-bred Frenchman
that such and such an aristocratic marriage
was on the tapis, he would stare with astonishment,
and look down on the carpet in the
startled endeavour to find a marriage in so
unusual a place. If you were to talk to him
of the beau monde he would imagine you
meant the world which God made, not
half-a-dozen streets and squares between Hyde
Park Corner and Chelsea Bun House. The
thé dansante would be completely inexplicable
to him. If you were to point out to him the
Dowager Lady Grimguffin acting as chaperon
to Lady Amanda Creamville, he would
imagine you were referring to the petit
Chaperon Rouge—to little Red Riding Hood.
He might just understand what was meant
by vis-a-vis, entremets, and some others of the
flying horde of frivolous little foreign
slangisms hovering about fashionable cookery
and fashionable furniture; but three-fourths
of them would seem to him as barbarous
French provincialisms, or, at best, but as
antiquated and obsolete expressions picked
up out of the letters of Mademoiselle Scuderi,
or the tales of Cribillon the younger.

But, save us, your ladyship, there are
thousands of Englishmen who might listen to
your ladyship for an hour without
understanding half-a-dozen words of your discourse.
When you speak of the Iast faux pas, of poor
Miss Limberfoot's sad mésalliance, of the
Reverend Mr. Caudlecup's being " so full of
soul," of the enchanting roulades of that
ravishing cantatrice Martinuzzi, of your dinner
of the day before being recherché, of your gens
being insolent and inattentive, how shall plain
men refrain from staring wonderstruck at
your unfathomable discourse?

And when your ladyship does condescend
to speak English, it is only with a delightful
mincingness of accent and a liberal use of
superlatives. The Italian singer you heard
last night was a "divine creature;" if you
are slightly tired or dull you are "awfully
bored" or "devoured with ennui;" if your face
be pale you vow you are a " perfect fright;"
if a gentleman acquaintance volunteer a very
mild joke he is a "quizzical monster"— a
dreadful quiz, he is so awfully satirical; and
the comic actor last night was "killing;" and
Julie, my child, hand me my vinaigrette, and
take a shilling out of my porte-monnaie, and
tell Adolfe to get some jujubes for Fido; and,
let me see, if I go out in the pilentum to-day,
or stay, the barouche (we have a char-à-banc
down at our place. Doctor), I will wear my
moire antique and my ruche of Brussels lace,
and my mantelet, and my chatelaine, with all
the " charms" Lord Bruin Fitzurse brought
me from Dresden, and then we will take a
drive into the Park, and I will leave a card at
Bojannee Loll's for my next "Thursday," for
really my dear "lions" are so scarce now,
that even Bojannee Loll will be an acquisition:
and so on.

I believe the abominable slang practice of
writing P. P. C. on a card of leave-taking,
and R. S. V. P. at the bottom of a letter when
you wish an answer to it, is gone out of
fashion, and I rejoice that it has.

Young Lord Fitzurse speaks of himself
and of his aristocratic companions as
"fellows" (very often pronounced "faywows";)
if he is going to drive a four-horse coach
down to Epsom Races, he is going to "tool
his drag down to the Derby." Lord Bobby
Robbin's great coat, which he admires,
is "down the road." An officer in the
tenth hussars is "a man in the tenth;" a
pretty young lady is a "neat little filly;" a