Of course it is an abuse of language to say that the beauty of a pretty girl strikes you with awe. But he who _first_ said of some girl that she was “awfully” pretty, was abundantly justified by the half humorous half serious consideration of all the effects such loveliness may produce. But then, because this was felt to be the case, and the _mot_ was accepted, all the tens of thousands of idiotic cretins who have been rubbed down into exact similarity to each other by excessive locomotion and the “spread” of education--spread indeed after the fashion in which a gold-beater spreads his metal--imitate each other in the senseless use of it. They are just like the man in the _Joe Miller_ story, who, because a laugh followed when a host, whose servant let fall a dish with a boiled tongue in it, said it was only a _lapsus linguæ_, ordered his own servant to throw down a leg of mutton, and then made the same remark! There was an old gentleman who had a very tolerable notion of what is vulgar and what is not, and who characterised “imitators” as a “servile herd.” And surely, if, as we are often told, this is a vulgar age, the fact is due to the prevalence of this very tap-root of vulgarity, imitation. Of course I am not speaking of imitation in any of the various cases in which there is an end in view outside the fact of the imitation. The child in order to speak must imitate those whom it hears speaking. If you would make a pudding, you must imitate the cook; if a coat, the tailor. But the imitation which is essentially vulgar, the very tap-root, as I have said, of vulgarity, is imitation for imitation’s sake. And that is why I think modern slang is essentially vulgar. If it is your real opinion--right or wrong matters not--that any slang phrase expresses any idea with peculiar accuracy, vividness, or humour, use it by all means; and he is a narrow blockhead who sees any vulgarity in your doing so. But for heaven’s sake, my dear Dick, don’t use it merely because you heard Bob use it! Yet there is something pathetically humble too about a man so conscious of his own worthlessness as to be ever anxious to look like somebody else. And surely a man must have a painful consciousness of his inability to utter any word of his own with either wit or wisdom or sense in it, who habitually strives to borrow the wit of the last retailer of the current slang whom he has heard.