manages it by employing the tongue which it is good form to use.  “A long-shanked trooper bearing the name of John Thomas Drew was crawling along under fire of the batteries.  Out pops old Nevil, tries to get the man on his back.  It won’t do.  Nevil insists that it’s exactly one of the cases that ought to be, and they remain arguing about it like a pair of nine-pins while the Moscovites are at work with the bowls.  Very well.  Let me tell you my story.  It’s perfectly true, I give you my word.  So Nevil tries to horse Drew, and Drew proposes to horse Nevil, as at school.  Then Drew offers a compromise.  He would much rather have crawled on, you know, and allowed the shot to pass over his head; but he’s a Briton—­old Nevil’s the same; but old Nevil’s peculiarity is that, as you are aware, he hates a compromise—­won’t have it—­retro Sathanas!—­and Drew’s proposal to take his arm instead of being carried pick-a-or piggy-back—­I am ignorant how Nevil spells it—­disgusts old Nevil.  Still it won’t do to stop where they are, like the cocoanut and pincushion of our friends the gipsies on the downs; so they take arms and commence the journey home, resembling the best friends on the evening of a holiday in our native clime—­two steps to the right, half a dozen to the left, &c.  They were knocked down by the wind of a ball near the battery.  ‘Confound it!’ cries Nevil.  ‘It’s because I consented to a compromise!’”

Most people know that this passage refers to Rear-Admiral Maxse, yet, well as we may know our man, we have him presented like an awkward, silly, comic puppet from a show.  The professor of slang could degrade the conduct of the soldiers on board the Birkenhead; he could make the choruses from Samson Agonistes seem like the Cockney puerilities of a comic news-sheet.  It is this high-sniffing, supercilious slang that I attack, for I can see that it is the impudent language of a people to whom nothing is great, nothing beautiful, nothing pure, and nothing worthy of faith.

The slang of the “London season” is terrible and painful.  A gloriously beautiful lady is a “rather good-looking woman—­looks fairly well to-night;” a great entertainment is a “function;” a splendid ball is a “nice little dance;” high-bred, refined, and exclusive ladies and gentlemen are “smart people;” a tasteful dress is a “swagger frock;” a new craze is “the swagger thing to do.”  Imbecile, useless, contemptible beings, male and female, use all these verbal monstrosities under the impression that they make themselves look distinguished.  A microcephalous youth whose chief intellectual relaxation consists in sucking the head of a stick thinks that his conversational style is brilliant when he calls a man a “Johnnie,” a battle “a blooming slog,” his lodgings his “show,” a hero “a game sort of a chappie,” and so on.  Girls catch the infection of slang; and thus, while sweet young ladies are leading beautiful lives at Girton and Newnham,