m "scab" found in No. VI. Webster's forcible picture in
The White Devil--

"Fate is a spaniel; we cannot beat it from us!"

finds a rival in Mr. Irwin's strong simile--"O Fate, thou art a
lobster!" in No. IV. And, to conclude, since such similarities might be
quoted without end, note this exclamation from Beaumont and Fletcher's
Woman's Prize, written before the name of the insect had achieved the
infamy now fastened upon it by the British Matron:

"These are bug's words!"

Not only does this evidently point out the origin of "Jim-jam bugs" in
No. IX, and the better known modern synonym for brain, "bug-house," but
it indicates the arbitrary tendency of all language to create gradations
of caste in parts of speech. It is to this mysterious influence by which
some words become "elegant" or "poetic," and others "coarse" or
"unrefined," that we owe the contempt in which slang is held by the
superficial Philistine.

In Mr. Irwin's sonnet cycle, however, we have slang idealized, or as
perhaps one might better say, sublimated. Evolution in the argot of the
streets works by a process of substitution. A phrase of two terms goes
through a system of permutation before it is discarded or adopted into
authorized metaphor. "To take the cake," for instance, a figure from the
cake-walk of the negroes, becomes to "capture" or "corral" the "bun" or
"biscuit." Nor is this all, for in the higher forms of slang the idea is
paraphrased in the most elaborate verbiage, an involution so intricate
that, without a knowledge of the intervening steps, the meaning is often
almost wholly lost. Specimens of this cryptology are found in many of
Mr. Irwin's sonnets, notably in No. V:

"My syncopated con-talk no avail."

We trace these synonyms through "rag-time," etc., to an almost
subliminal thought--an adjective resembling "verisimilitudinarious,"
perhaps, qualifying the "con" or confidential talk that proved useless
to bring Mame back to his devotion.

In the masterly couplet closing the sestet of No. XVIII, Mr. Irwin's
verbal enthusiasm reaches its highest mark in an ultra-Meredithian
rendition of "I am an easy mark," an expression, by the way, which would
itself have to be elaborately translated in any English edition.

Enough of the glamors of Mr. Irwin's dulcet vagaries. He will stand,
perhaps as the chief apostle of the hyperconcrete. With Mr. Ade as the
head of the school, and insistent upon the didactic value of slang, Mr.
Irw