* * * *

To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will
sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or
impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot
may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to
point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or
crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a
London street. Upon any one who feels this nameless anarchism there
rests for the time being the spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts
the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he
realises one of our visions.--"The Defendant."

"THE VULGAR TONGUE"
[Sidenote: _Dean Hole_]

First, of abuses. I protest against those sensational adjectives, which
are so commonly misapplied--against the union of grand and noble words
with subjects of a minute and trivial nature. It is as though a huge
locomotive engine were brought out to draw a child's perambulator, or as
though an Armstrong gun were loaded and levelled to exterminate a
tom-tit.

I heard a tourist say the other day that, when he was at Black Gang
Chine, in the Isle of Wight, he had seen the _most magnificent_--what do
you think? A sunset, a man-of-war, a thunderstorm? Nothing of the kind.
He had seen the most _magnificent prawns_ he ever ate in his life.

And when I asked another young gentleman, who was speaking of "_the most
tremendous screw_ ever made in the world," to which of our great
ironclads he referred, he smiled upon me with a benign and courteous
pity, as he said that he "was alluding to a screw into the middle
pocket, which he had recently seen during a game at billiards between
Cook and the younger Roberts."

When you hear one lady informing another that she had just seen simply
the most _exquisite_, the most _lovely_, the most _perfect_ thing in
existence, is she referring to something wonderful in nature, or to
something beautiful in art, or can it be only a bonnet? Has she just
come home from the glaciers of Switzerland, the lakes of Italy, the
mountains of Connemara, or the castles of the Rhine, or can it be that
she has been no farther than Marshall and Snelgrove's shop?

Then there's that awful "_awful_!" Why, if a thousandth part of things
which are commonly affirmed to be aweful were aweful, we should go about
with our faces blanched, like his who drew Priam's curtain in the dead