parts as was stated by the Times a short time ago, I have only to remark that amongst the costers and the wild inhabitants of the streets he is better known as PAM. I have often heard the cabmen on the "ranks" in Piccadilly remark of the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he has been going from his residence at Grosvenor Gate, to Derby House in St. James's Square,"hollo, there! de yer see old Dizzy doing a stump?" A PLUMPER is a single vote at an election, not a SPLIT-TICKET; and electors who have occupied a house, no matter how small, and boiled a pot in it, thus qualifying themselves for voting, are termed POT-WOLLOPPERS. A quiet WALK OVER is a re-election without opposition and much cost. Who that occasionally passes near the Houses of Parliament has not often noticed stout or careful M.P.s walk briskly through the Hall, and on the curb-stone in front, with umbrella or walkingcane uplifted, shout to the cabmen on the rank, FOUR-WHEELER! The term is a useful one, but I am afraid we must consider it slang, until it is stamped with the mint mark of lexicographical authority.

Military, or Officers' slang is on a par, and of a

character with the Dandy slang. Inconvenient friends, or elderly and lecturing relatives are pronounced DREADFUL BORES. Four-wheel cabs are called BOUNDERS; and a member of the Four-inhand Club, driving to Epsom on the Derby day, would, using fashionable slang phraseology, speak of it as TOOLING HIS DRAG DOWN TO THE DERBY. A vehicle, if not a DRAG (or dwag) is a TRAP, or a CASK; and if the TURN OUT happened to be in other than a trim condition, it is pronounced at once as not DOWN THE ROAD. Your city swell would say it is not UP TO THE MARK; whilst the costermonger would call it WERY DICKEY. In dandy or swell slang, any celebrity from Robson, of the Olympic, to the Pope of Rome, is a SWELL. Wrinkled faced old professors, who hold dress and fashionable tailors in abhorrence, are called AWFUL SWELLS, if they happen to be very learned or clever. I may remark that in this upper class slang a title is termed a HANDLE; trousers, INEXPRESSIBLES; a reunion, a SPREAD; a friend (or a "good fellow "), a TRUMP; a difficulty, a SCREW LOOSE; and everything that is unpleasant, "from bad sherry to a writ from a tailor," JEUCED INFERNAL. The military custom of "sending a man to

COVENTRY," or permitting no person to speak to him, although an ancient phrase, must still be considered slang.

The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the great public schools, are the hotbeds of fashionable slang. Growing boys and high-spirited young fellows detest restraint of all kinds, and prefer making a dash at life in a slang phraseology of their own, to all the set forms and syntactical rules of Alma Mater. Many of the most expressive words in a common chit-chat, or free and easy conversation, are old University vulgarisms. CUT, in the sense of dropping an acquaintance, was originally a Cambridge form of speech; and HOAX, to deceive or ridicule, we are informed by Grose, was many years since an Oxford term. Among the words that fast society has borrowed from our great scholastic [I was going to say establishments, but I remembered the linen drapers' horrid and habitual use of the word] institutions, I find CRIB, a house or apartments; DEAD-MEN, empty wine bottles; DRAWING TEETH, wrenching off knockers; FIZZING, first-rate, or splendid; GOVERNOR, the general term for a male parent; PLUCKED, defeated or turned back; QUIZ, to cru.

tinize, or a prying old fellow; and Row, a noisy disturbance. There are other slang expressions but seldom used outside the walls of Eton or Oxford, such as SCOUT, an errand boy; SCULL, a master of a college; SIZE, to sup at one's own expense; and SOPH, an undergraduate in his second year.

Religious slang, strange as the compound may appear, exists with other descriptions of vulgar speech at the present day. Punch, a few weeks ago, in one of those half-humorous, half-serious articles in which he is so fond of lecturing any national abuse or popular folly, remarked that slang had "long since penetrated into the Forum, and now we meet it in the Senate, and even the pulpit itself is no longer free from its intrusion." I would not, for one moment, wish to infer that the practice is general. On the contrary, and in justice to the clergy it must be said, that the principal disseminators of pure English throughout the country are the ministers of our Established Church. Yet it cannot be denied but that a great deal of slang phraseology and disagreeable vulgarism has gradually crept into the very pulpits which should give forth as pure speech as doctrine.

What can be more objectionable than the irreverent and offensive manner in which many of the dissenting ministers continually pronounce the names of the Deity, God and Lord. God, instead of pronouncing in the plain and beautifully simple old English way, God, they drawl out into GORDE or GAUDE; and Lord, instead of speaking in the proper way, they desecrate into LOARD or LOERD,lingering on the u, or the r, as the case may be, until an honest hearer feels disgusted, and almost înclined to run the gauntlet of beadles and deacons, and pull the vulgar preacher from his pulpit. I have observed that many of the young preachers strive hard to acquire this peculiar pronunciation, in imitation of the older ministers. What can more properly, then, be called slang, or, indeed, the most objectionable of slang, than this studious endeavour to pronounce the most sacred names in a uniformly vulgar and unbecoming manner. If the old-fashioned preacher whistled cant through his nose, the modern vulgar reverend whines slang from the more natural organ. These vagaries of speech will, perhaps, by an apologist be termed "pulpit peculiarities," and the writer dared to intermeddle with a subject that is or should be re