Page:Chesterton - The Defendant, 1904.djvu/121

 than yer 'ed...there's precious little of yer, and that's clothes...that's right, put yer cigar in yer mouth 'cos I can't see yer be'ind it...take it out again, do yer! you're young for smokin', but I've sent for yer mother.... Goin'? oh, don't run away: I won't 'arm yer. I've got a good 'art, I 'ave.... "Down with croolty to animals," I say,' and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a coster puts into a curse; his speech is one long allegory, like Spenser's 'Faerie Queen.'

I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as 'Keep your hair on' is positively Meredithian in its perverse and mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Americans have a well-known expression about 'swelled-head' as a description of self-approval, and the other day I heard a remarkable fantasia upon this air. An American said that after the Chinese War the Japanese wanted 'to put on their hats with a shoe-horn.' This is a monument of the true nature of slang, which consists in getting further and further away from the