witty, and capable of suggesting a humorous idea with singular felicity. Argot is but a bastard tongue grafted on the mother stem, and though it is no easy matter to coin a word that shall remain and take rank among those of any language, yet the field of argot, already so extensive, is ever pushing back its boundaries, the additions surging in together with new ideas, novel fashions, but especially through the necessities of that class of people whose primary interest it is to make themselves unintelligible to their victims, the public, and their enemies, the police. “Argot,” again quoting Nodier’s words, “is an artificial, unsettled tongue, without a syntax properly so called, of which the only object is to disguise under conventional metaphors ideas which are intended to be conveyed to adepts. Consequently its vocabulary must needs change whenever it has become familiar to outsiders, and we find in _Le Jargon de l’Argot Réformé_ curious traces of a like revolution. In every country the men who speak a cant language belong to the lowest, most contemptible stratum of society, but its study, if looked upon as an outcome of the intellect, presents important features, and synoptic tables of its synonyms might prove interesting to the linguist.” The use of argot in works of any literary pretensions is of modern introduction. However, Villon, the famous poet of the fifteenth century, a _vaurien_ whose misdeeds had wellnigh brought him to the gallows, as he informs us:-- Je suis François, dont ce me poise, Né de Paris emprès Ponthoise, Or, d’une corde d’une toise, Saura mon col que mon cul poise-- Villon himself has given, under the title of _Jargon ou Jobelin de Maistre François Villon_, a series of short poems worded in the jargon of the vagabonds and thieves his boon companions, now almost unintelligible.