mbers with a club. As soon as he offends the
common feelings of his fellows he must take the consequences; and
hard-headed persons should turn a deaf ear when any eloquent and
sentimental person chooses to whine about his hero's wrongs.

_March, 1888._

_SLANG_.

Has any one ever yet considered the spiritual significance of slang? The
dictionaries inform us that "slang is a conversational irregularity of a
more or less vulgar type;" but that is not all. The prim definition
refers merely to words, but I am rather more interested in considering
the mental attitude which is indicated by the distortion and loose
employment of words, and by the fresh coinages which seem to spring up
every hour. I know of no age or nation that has been without its slang,
and the study is amongst the most curious that a scholar can take up;
but our own age, after all, must be reckoned as the palmy time of slang,
for we have gone beyond mere words, and our vulgarizations of language
are significant of degradation of soul. The Romans of the decadence had
a hideous cant language which fairly matched the grossness of the
people, and the Gauls, with their descendants, fairly matched the old
conquerors. The frightful old Paris of Francois Villon, with all its
bleak show of famine and death, had its constant changes of slang.
"_Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant,"_ says the burglar-poet, and he
means that the old buffoon is tiresome; the young man with the newest
phases of city slang at his tongue's end is most acceptable in merry
company. Very few people can read Villon's longer poems at all, for they
are almost entirely written in cant language, and the glossary must be
in constant requisition. The rascal is a really great writer in his
abominable way, but his dialect was that of the lowest resorts, and he
lets us see that the copious _argot_ which now puzzles the stranger by
its kaleidoscopic changes was just as vivid and changeable in the
miserable days of the eleventh Louis. In the Paris of our day the slang
varies from hour to hour; every one seems able to follow it, and no one
knows who invents the constant new changes. The slang of the
boarding-house in Balzac's "Pere Goriot" is quite different from that of
the novels done by the Goncourt brothers; and, though I have not yet
mustered courage to finish one of M. Zola's outrages, I can see that the
vulgarisms which he has learned are not at all like any that have been
used in bygo