all who go amongst the poor have met, men who well deserved that noble epithet in cottages and corduroy.  Who has not seen illustrious snobs in satin, and sweet, modest gentlewomen in homely print and serge?  A gentleman!  There’s no title shouted at a reception so grand in my idea as this; and yet, methinks, that any man may win and wear it who is brave, and truthful, and generous, and pure, and kind—­who is, in one word, a Christian!

Some people think to make themselves gentlemen by tampering with their patronymics, and by altering their family name.  Brown has added an e to his; and greedy Green, though he had two already, has followed his example; and White spells his with a y; and Bob Smith calls his son and heir Augustus Charlemagne Sacheverel Smythe; and Tailor calls himself Tayleure.  And one day Tailor went out a-hunting, and he worried a whipper-in, who had plenty of work on his hands, with a series of silly questions, until, upon his asking the name of a hound, he received an answer which put an end to the discourse:  “Well, sir,” said the Whip, “we used to call him Towler; but things has got so fine and fashionable we calls him Tow-leure."

Passing from abuse to disuse, I would not refer to words which are gradually becoming obsolete, but which some of us, partly from admiration of the words themselves, and partly from old associations, would not willingly let die.  Beginning alphabetically, the adjective ask is one of those grand old English monosyllables which convey the sense in the sound, It speaks to you of a day in March, when the wind is in the east, and all the clouds are of a dull slate colour, and the roads are white, and the hedges black, and the fallows are dry and hard as bricks, and a bitter, searching, piercing wind whistles at your sealskins and Ulsters, your Lindseys and Jerseys, your foot-warmers and muffatees, and you feel, with Miggs, “as though water were flowing aperiently down your back,” and sit shuddering—­dithering (there’s another word rarely used, but with a sufficient amount of chilliness in it to ice a bottle of champagne) “dithering in the ask, ungenial day.”

Then I like abear (the penultimate a pronounced as e)—­“I can’t abeer him”; addled—­“Bill’s addled noat a three week”; agate—­“I see you’ve agate on’t”; among-hands—­“Tom schemed to do it among-hands”; all along of—­“It was all along of them ’osses”; etc.

Of B’s there is a swarm:  beleddy (a corruption, as most men know, of “by our lady"), and I can only notice a few of the Queens. Botch is a word which, though found in Shakespeare and Dryden, and other authors, is rarely used by us; and yet, methinks, in these days, when the great object seems to be to get quantity in place of quality, and to make as much display as we can at the price—­when so much is done by contract, and there is, in consequence, strong temptation to daub with untempered mortar, to use green timber, to put in bad material where it will not be seen, the verb to botch is only too appropriate to all such scampish proceedings.