for wit in the eating-house when Runting asks Bunter what he is going to have for dinner this after-tea.'

It will perhaps be said that we ought not to draw this indictment against a whole set of words and phrases without giving some reason for the disapprobation with which we have regarded them. All people capable of forming a rational opinion will, we may fairly assume, agree that cheap and conventional jocularities of the sort we have given are to be condemned; but they may still like to have the sources of disgust analysed and investigated. In our opinion, one of the chief reasons why verbal jocularities are so shocking is to be found in the fact that they are blurred and defaced by usage. They were originally made of somewhat soft metal, and they are now blunted and rubbed into shapeless caricatures of their former selves. They are, in fact, like those worn engravings of pictures which one sees in seaside lodgings. The original picture may have been well enough, but the ten-thousandth impression is a most revolting object. The shadows and lights are all run together, and the total effect is unbearable.

When Diogenes, or whoever it was, asked Aristotle to take 'pot luck' with him the phrase was bright and clean, meant something, and was sufficiently humorous. Now, however, that it has been used a million times it is as greasy as one of the 50-centime notes that used to pass current in Italy. 'Feeling below par,' again, may have been a tolerable Stock Exchange witticism when Mr. Levison first let it off at the House to an admiring 'runner.' Now it is so sorry a joke that in pity the doctors are making it into a technical expression for a condition of health below normal. The first boy

too, who complained of 'a bone in his leg' had, no doubt, a right to be proud of his inventiveness; but who feels inclined to laugh at it now? Turns of phrase intended to be comic are all very well, and should not necessarily be discouraged; but they must be had in, as the shops say, 'fresh-and-fresh.' The moment they are the least bit stale they not merely cease to amuse, but are justly the cause of loathing, and become things as abominable as eggs that have ceased to be fresh. In their case, too, no one has a right to act like the humble curate who replied: 'Fresh enough for me, thank you,' when the green shade in his egg had made the wife of his beneficed brother parson exclaim: 'Dear me, I am afraid your egg isn't quite fresh.' We can keep the unfreshness of our eggs to ourselves, but not so the unfreshness of our jokes.

In addition, also, to those worn-out jokes whose ghosts, like the ghosts in 'Julius Cæsar,' scream and jibber in the public streets, and bear about with them a ghastly mockery of fun, there are jocularities which were never anything but vulgar and disgusting. They are disgusting because they are disgusting, and of him who cannot recognise them we can only say-if we are charitably inclined as we say of a man who has no sense of smell, that he escapes a great deal. No doubt there remains, when all is said and done, a certain scope for private judgment. The best judges of pictures and music never quite agree in their censures. For example, some would condemn 'A little bird told me' as a jocularity. To the present writer the phrase is so venerable and so historic that he cannot place it among jocularities. It was under cover of this form of speech

that our ancestors passed to each other some dangerous piece of news:

Ding-a-ding-ding,

I heard a bird sing,
The Parliament soldiers

Are gone to the King.

That was how the news that Monk was going to bring back Charles spread among the people who had grown tired of the reign of the Saints. To condemn the old phrase may, for all we know, be to condemn primitive man's first attempt at the use of an indirect mode of expressing his meaning. The maids who called on Hertha in deep forest glades' doubtless found the phrase invaluable for introducing some woodland on dit of their own invention

U

'A PERFECT LADY'

VERY few ladies, perfect or the reverse, have gone through life without constantly encountering the phrase 'a perfect lady.' There are plenty of people among the lower-middle class who have the words continually on their lips. Again, among women-servants it is the commonest form of encomium. It is their highest expression of approval to say of a mistress that she is a 'perfect lady.' The two words when thus used become one, and take on a different meaning from that conveyed by the mere substantive 'lady' and the adjective 'perfect' in agreement. To speak of a female person thus is not to use a vague superlative description, but to place her to whom the words apply in a category apart—a category clearly defined and well understood by those who use the term. 'Perfect lady' evidently means something as distinct as 'thorough indoor' or 'professed cook'whatever may be the true and inner meaning of that strange term.

But though it is quite certain, from the manner in which the expression 'a perfect lady' is habitually employed, that it is a designation, not a mere complimentary phrase, it is by no means easy to say what exactly is meant thereby. The classes which use the words most are, unfortunately, at their weakest in the matter

of definition. Try to get the cook, professed or otherwise, to give you a definition of any household expression with which she is familiar and you will fail miserably. Socrates himself would have failed to elicit from her an intelligible description of the working of the 'dampers' in the kitchener. It would be equally useless to stay the exit of the household after morning prayers and inquire from each member what she meant by a perfect lady' You would certainly stop the house-work for twenty-four hours, and in all probability would get no more than the declaration, 'I'm sure you wouldn't deny, Mum, that a perfect lady is a lady what always acts, and always will, as a perfect lady to all.' A little pressure, and in all likelihood you would be told: 'It's what I've never been accustomed to before, wherever I've lived, to be spoke to like this.' No experienced housekeeper, we will engage, would permit such a question. It could serve no good end, and, if the questioner were a lady, would soon settle the question of perfection irrevocably against her. The only way to find out what is meant by 'a perfect lady,' is to observe how the phrase is applied, and then to proceed by a process of inductive reasoning. There is no lack of instances, and therefore the quest on these lines should not prove wholly abortive.

Those who embark upon the curious speculation we suggest will no doubt at once call to mind one of the late Mr. Keene's most admirable designs. A number of country neighbours are asking the wife of the village butcher what sort of a person is the squire's newly married wife. To these inquiries they receive the oracular but none the less convincing reply: 'A puffect lady-she don't know one joint of meat from