contempt of Philistines and cast the shaft of their scorn at what they call “dross.”  So far as money goes, I fancy that the oratorical, and grandiose poet is often the most greedy of individuals; and, when, in his infinite conceit, he sets himself up above common decency and morality, I find it difficult to confine myself to moderate language.  A man of genius may very well be chaste, modest, unselfish, and retiring.  Byron was at his worst when he was producing the works which made him immortal; I prefer to think of him as he was when he cast his baser self away, and nobly took up the cause of Greece.  When once his matchless common sense asserted itself, and he ceased to contemplate his own woes and his own wrongs, he became a far greater man than he had ever been before.  I should be delighted to know that the cant about the lowering restrictions imposed by stupidity on genius had been silenced for ever.  A man of transcendent ability must never forget that he is a member of a community, and that he has no more right wantonly to offend the feelings or prejudices of that community than he has to go about buffeting individual members 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,