of bodily strength, when otherwise he would be puny and fragile. He can assail authorities, and they dare not answer. He can drown down the voice of missionaries, and they are halting in reproval. There are beings so dejected--so penurious--that this swearing constitutes their whole store of worldly opulence. They know it too, in a fashion, although it has never been told them and they themselves are incapable of the telling. So much for swearing when in grim earnest; how are we to account for it in its transition to sport and play? Unless we are greatly mistaken, there has entered into its composition a spirit of broad humour which has, in a manner, rendered it attractive, if not positively amusing. Were we to put the whole body of bad language to a judicial trial, we should in fairness be compelled to admit the extenuating circumstance of a time-expired claim to the mock-heroic and the ludicrous. It certainly does not sparkle now, but it must have come of a witty stock, and have boasted a mirth-provoking pedigree. To have rendered itself so particularly palatable as it has done, like many other kinds of verbal folly, it can only have taken its rise in a perverted spirit of merriment. To apply words, and more especially adjectives, in an unwonted and unusual sense is one of the arts which go a long way to make conversation agreeable. To do this with taste, and without corrupting or annihilating the meaning of the word, demands a certain amount of literary skill. To do so at any price frequently demands skill, and is always fraught with consequences of some kind to the listener. Most of these perversions of highly respectable words have now become so trite that they pass unchallenged. The verb "to bag," for instance, is in jocular use for implying a petty appropriation of property. It must of course at some time have been forcibly wrested from the language of sportsmen, and no doubt with this circumstance secretly underlying it, has been productive, and will be again, of general good-humour. Such another _tour de phrase_ is met with in the verb "to charter." This originally had reference to the hiring of a ship; but when we hear of chartering a fly, or chartering a stretcher, there certainly arises an odd sense of the incongruous. We are far from saying that the merriment in these cases is acute, but we contend that this kind of pleasantry is at the bottom of every phrase or catchword obtaining universal acceptance.