and his mates, until a Villon arrives to prove that this language, too, was awaiting the advent of its bully and master.  In the meantime, what directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench!  It is the trite story,—­romanticism forced to plead at the bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by Blackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna Seward.  Accuser and accused alike recognise that a question of diction is part of the issue between them; hence the picturesque confession of the culprit, made in proud humility, that he “clicked a red ’un” must needs be interpreted, to save the good faith of the court, into the vaguer and more general speech of the classic convention.  Those who dislike to have their watches stolen find that the poorest language of common life will serve their simple turn, without the rich technical additions of a vocabulary that has grown around an art.  They can abide no rendering of the fact that does not harp incessantly on the disapproval of watch-owners.  They carry their point of morals at the cost of foregoing all glitter and finish in the matter of expression.

This sort of slang, therefore, technical in origin, the natural efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation.  But there is another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle.  There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any incident in the beaten round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt, can set his fancy rolling through the music-halls, and thence into the street, secure of applause and a numerous sodden discipleship.  Of the same lazy stamp, albeit more amiable in effect, are the thought-saying contrivances whereby one word is retained to do the work of many.  For the language of social intercourse ease is the first requisite; the average talker, who would be hard put to it if he were called on to describe or to define, must constantly be furnished with the materials of emphasis, wherewith to drive home his likes and dislikes.  Why should he alienate himself from the sympathy of his fellows by affecting a singularity in the expression of his emotions?  What he craves is not accuracy, but immediacy of expression, lest the tide of talk should flow past him, leaving him engaged in a belated analysis.  Thus the word of the day is on all lips, and what was “vastly fine” last century is “awfully jolly” now; the meaning is the same, the expression equally inappropriate.  Oaths have their brief periods of ascendency, and philology can boast its fashion-plates.  The tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip the fear of solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common talkers, as they run hither and thither