done much to dispel the gloom of the Englishman's brumous environment and make him realize his relationship to Man.

It may be urged that the great English humorists are as much read in this country as in their own; that Dickens, for example, has long "ruled as his demesne" the country which had the unhappiness to kindle the fires of contempt in him and Rudyard Kipling; that "the excellent Mr. Twain " has a large following beyond the Atlantic. This is true enough, but I am convinced that while the American enjoys his Dickens with sincerity, the gladness of his soul is a tempered emotion compared with that which riots in the immortal part of John Bull when that singular instrument feels the touch of the same master. That a jest of Mark Twain ever got itself all inside the four corners of an English understanding is a proposition not lightly to be accepted without hearing counsel.

1903.

WORD CHANGES AND SLANG

T

HAT respectable words lose caste, becoming the yellow dogs and very lepers of language, is a familiar fact hospitable to abundant illustration. One of these words has just fallen from my pen; fifty or a hundred years from now it will be impossible, probably, for any writer having a decent regard to the value of words to use the word "respectable" of anything truly meriting respect. For the past half-century it has been taking on a new and opprobrious character. Already the type of the "respectable" man, for example, is the prosperous, wool-witted Philistine, who complacently interlocks his fat fingers under the overhang of his stomach, and surveying the world from the eminence of his own esteem, tries vainly to imagine what it would be without him.

The word "respectable" is indubitably doomed: etymology can not save it, any more than it could save the word "miscreant," which means by derivation, as at one time it

meant actually, infidel, unbeliever. In its present abasement we may hear a faint, far whisper of the old, old days of religious intolerance. It stands in modern speech a verbal monument to the odium theologicum reposing beneath in the sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection.

A half-century ago the word "awful" was plumped into the mire of slang, where it has weltered ever since, without actual immersion, but apparently with no hope of extrication. The writer who would use it to-day in a serious sense has need to be well assured of his hold upon the reader's mood. It may perchance whisk that person away from the sublime to the ridiculous, with the neathanded nimbleness of Satan snatching a soul from the straight and narrow way, to send it spinning aslant into the red-and-black billows of everlasting damnation!

There are transformations of a contrary sort-promotions and elevations of words, as from slang to poetry. Between the extremes of speech which are the extremes of thought, for speech is thought-between the upper and the lower deep, the heaven and the earth, is a Jacob's-ladder which these winged messengers of mind ascend and descend.

Grave advocacy of slang is not lacking: Professor Manley, of Harvard, is afield in defence of it. Some slang, he justly says, is

strong and poetical." It is "strong " because graphic and vivid, "poetical" because metaphorical; for the life and soul of poetry is metaphor.

Professor Manley thinks that the story of the Prodigal Son could have been better told this way:

The world gave him the marble heart, but his father extended the glad hand.

Yes, if those phrases had then been first used professors of literature might, as he suggests, be now expatiating on the beautiful simplicity of the diction and bewailing the inferiority of modern speech. But that is no defence of slang. It would not have been slang, any more than avowed or manifest quotations from the Scriptures as we have them are slang.

Professor Manley is especially charmed with the phrase "bats in his belfry," and would indubitably substitute it for "possessed of a devil," the Scriptural diagnosis of insanity. I don't think the good man meant to be

irreverent, but I should not care for his Revised Edition.

Somewhat more than a generation ago John Camden Hotten, of London, a publisher of "rare and curious books," put out a slang dictionary. Its editor-in-chief was that accomplished scholar, George Augustus Sala. It was afterward revised by Henry Sampson, famous later as an authority in matters of sport, to whom I gave such assistance as my little learning and no sportsmanship permitted. The volume was a thick one, but contained little that in this country and period we know (and suffer) as "slang." Slang, as the word was then used, is defined in the Century Dictionary thus: "The cant words or jargon used by thieves, peddlers, beggars, and the vagabond classes generally."

To-day we mean by it something different and more offensive. It is no longer the argot of criminals and semi-criminals, "whom one does not meet," and whose distance-when they keep it-lends a certain enchantment to the ear, but the intolerable diction of more or less worthy persons who obey all laws but those of taste. In its present generally accepted meaning the word is thus defined by the authority already quoted: "Colloquial words and phrases which have originated in