The cry is a slang one. Granted. But how
many great and noble names have been
corrupted to mean and base uses? There is a
family in existence now, lineal descendants of
the Plantagenets, who have degenerated into
Plant. Has not the chivalrous sign of the
Landgrave Maurice tavern, in the
Whitechapel Road, subsided into the Grave Morris?
Were not the Chequers once the bearings of
the proud Earls of Arundel? Was not the Bull
and Mouth, the Boulogne Mouth; the Goat
and Compasses, God encompasseth us ; the
Salutation, in Newgate Street, that of the
Blessed Virgin; the Cock, the cognizance
of Saint Peter? "Great Cæsar dead and
turned to clay:" — the proverb is somewhat
musty.

Who does not remember the curious cry
"What a shocking bad hat?" Being, as I
have before confessed, rather loose in my
chronology, I cannot, with any degree of
certainty, decide whether it followed or
preceded " Flare up! " It was a master cry.
It appealed to all bosoms, or rather to all
heads; for a hat might be a "shocking bad
one" if it had cost five guineas instead of five
pence. No man was safe from the imputation
of shocking badness to his hat; and the
ruffians who wore caps had every hat-wearer,
good, bad, and indifferent, on the hip. Look
at a bishop's shovel hat; a judge's three-
cornered cock; the misshapen monstrosity
like a pancake cut in half, which had
been thrust up the chimney, called an opera
hat, which fools were wont to carry into
Fop's Alley for wags to laugh at; the beadle's
gold-laced, tasselled, cocked absurdity; the
miserable delusion of beaver and bullion-cord
that lieutenants in the navy, under hideous
coercive threats from the port admiral, were
forced to wear; the preposterous, crushed,
battered, maniacal figment of a cocked hat,
vacillating in shape between that of a mountebank
in a farce, a French travelling dentist,
and my lord on May-day, which the Lords
Commissioners donned (do they don it still?)
on the prorogation of parliament. Were not
each and every of these hats amenable to the
"Mene, mene, tekel" of shocking badness?
I will quite pass over the postman's hat, the
footman'a hat, and the footpage's hat,—and
yet they were shocking bad, every one of
them.

A man may wear bad boots, but he
can escape, or at least avert, the detection of
their badness by an adroit shuffling of the
feet along the ground, a quick flinging gait,
aided by a dexterousflank movement of a
swinging glove or a jaunted cane, or (and this
is perhaps the best mode of all) by looking
every person he meets steadily in the face.
A bad coat may be carried off by darning,
conscious merit, and the honest pride of
unbegging poverty, ink, or impudence. A
faulty shirt may be disguised and defended
by masked batteries of buttons and cuffs,
breastworks of clean dickies, or rifle-pits of
wristbands, false. But you cannot disguise a
shocking bad hat. It is THERE. It is the
head and front of your offending. It is as
conspicuous as a black eye. A. man who has
no brim — nay, no band — to his hat might
just as well have no nose to his face. The
badness of a hat will make itself felt at first
sight, like the badness of an eye; and the
eye is the fanlight in the back door of the
heart.

The "shocking bad hat" cry was very
prevalent in my hot youth. I have been moved
to tears frequently by its application to my
own personal headgear. I have an idea that
I was once cruelly put upon (and this is
nearly the only instance of infantile ill-treatment
I can remember), in being made to wear
the hat of a Master Sims (calling, appearance,
and subsequent fate, as unknown to me as
the lost books of Livy), which was either too
large, or too small, or too good, or too bad
for him. I dare say the hat was quite good
enough for me; but I was made to wear it
in public; and, being naturally a nervous
child, and suffering besides the additional
misery of gold ear-rings (my ears had
been pierced for weakness of sight), I never
walked abroad without feeling that I was
tied to a stake with buffalo thongs, and baited
by ten thousand wild Indians. And I was
staked and baited, morally. The boys used
to career about me exactly as the striped pig,
the yellow fish, and the spotted eagle of the
Pawnee persuasion used, in the story-book,
to career about their prisoner of the Choctaw
way of thinking. They scorched my feet with
fires of sarcasm; they threw tomahawks of
insult at me; they discharged poisoned
arrows of invective at me; and their war-
whoop was always and ever " Oh! what a
shocking bad hat! Oh! what a shocking
bad hat!"

We lived in the country before this. How
long before, I can no more call to mind than I
can the winners of the Derby and Oaks for the
last half-century. I know it was something
Tree-House; that there was a large garden
smelling very sweet, and curiously associated
in my mind with domestic brewing and somebody
having his ears boxed (I may have
been that culprit), for drinking sweet wort
without permission; and that, at the
bottom of the garden, there was a ruinous
outhouse, where there were several empty
boxes; a dusty, never-used garden-chair;
and a vast quantity of wine-bottles. There
was a tradition, too, that somebody " used
to cut his throat " here, a long time ago.
Some of the wine-bottles were full, and we
boys drew the corks of a few, one day; but
the contents had turned quite sour, and,
throwing the bottles on the ground, we saw
the lees run out like blood, and ran frightened
back to the house.

What something Tree-House had to do
with " a shocking bad hat " shall presently
appear. We kept a carriage. I don't think