white or tricolor cockade the rose of Bellona, the three-cornered hat the triangle of Mars,--that classic academician talks slang. Algebra, medicine, and botany have their slang. The language employed on shipboard--that admirable sea-language so complete and picturesque, which Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperré spoke, which is mingled with the straining of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the clang of boarding-axe, the rolling, the wind, the gusts, and the cannon--is an heroic and brilliant slang, which is to the ferocious slang of robbers what the lion is to the jackal. All this is perfectly true, but whatever people may say, this mode of comprehending the word "slang" is an extension which everybody will not be prepared to admit. For our part, we perceive the precise circumscribed and settled acceptation of the word, and restrict slang to slang. The true slang, the slang _par excellence_, if the two words can be coupled, the immemorial slang which was a kingdom, is nothing else, we repeat, than the ugly, anxious, cunning, treacherous, venomous, cruel, blear-eyed, vile, profound, and fatal language of misery. There is at the extremity of all abasements and all misfortunes a last misery, which revolts and resolves to contend with the ensemble of fortunate facts and reigning rights,--a frightful struggle, in which, at one moment crafty, at another violent, at once unhealthy and ferocious, it attacks the social order with pinpricks by vice, and with heavy blows by crime. For the necessities of this struggle, misery has invented a fighting language, which is called slang. To hold up on the surface and keep from forgetfulness, from the gulf, only a fragment of any language which man has spoken, and which would be lost,--that is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of which civilization is composed and complicated,--is to extend the data of social observation and serve civilization itself. Plautus rendered this service, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, by making two Carthaginian soldiers speak Phœnician; Molière rendered it also by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of patois. Here objections crop out afresh: Phœnician, excellent; Levantine, very good; and even patois may be allowed, for they are languages which have belonged to nations or provinces--but slang? Of what service is it to preserve slang and help it to float on the surface?