, and in the Common-School Reports of Boston Corner,--a
style and words that remind us of the country gentry whose titles date
back to the Plantagenets. They look so strangely beside the brisk,
dapper curtnesses in which metropolitan journals transact their daily
squabbles! We never write one of them out without an involuntary
addition of quotation-marks, as a New-Yorker puts to his introduction of
his verdant cousin the supplementary, "From the Jerseys." Their
etymological Herald's Office is kept by schoolmasters, and especially
schoolma'ams, or, in the true heraldic tongue, "Preceptresses of
Educational Seminaries." You may find them in Mr. Hobbs, Jr.'s,
celebrated tale of "The Bun-Baker of Cos-Cob," or in Bowline's thrilling
novelette of "Beauty and Booty, or The Black Buccaneer of the Bermudas."
They glitter in the train of "Napoleon and his Marshals," and look down
upon us from the heights of "The Sacred Mountains."
Occasionally you will find them degraded from their high estate and
fallen among the riff-raff of slang. They become "seedy" words, stripped
of their old meaning, mere _chevaliers d'industrie_, yet with something
of the air noble about them which distinguishes them from the born
"cad.
Pages:
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101