I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang.  Such an expression as ‘Keep your hair on’ is positively Meredithian in its perverse and mysterious manner of expressing an idea.  The Americans have a well-known expression about ‘swelled-head’ as a description of self-approval, and the other day I heard a remarkable fantasia upon this air.  An American said that after the Chinese War the Japanese wanted ’to put on their hats with a shoe-horn.’  This is a monument of the true nature of slang, which consists in getting further and further away from the original conception, in treating it more and more as an assumption.  It is rather like the literary doctrine of the Symbolists.

The real reason of this great development of eloquence among the lower orders again brings us back to the case of the aristocracy in earlier times.  The lower classes live in a state of war, a war of words.  Their readiness is the product of the same fiery individualism as the readiness of the old fighting oligarchs.  Any cabman has to be ready with his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century had to be ready with his sword.  It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this process should be purely a grotesque poetry.  But as the higher orders of society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in the direction of a rowdy eloquence.  The essential point is that somebody must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a language.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.  If we paused for a moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many sonnets.  To take a single instance:  we speak of a man in English social relations ‘breaking the ice.’  If this were expanded into a sonnet, we should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature, over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the living waters roared and toiled fathoms below.  The world of slang is a kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away with them—­a whole chaos of fairy tales.

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A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP

The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy.  They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour.  The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old.  It is the gravity of astonishment at the