ad
thus obviously escaped a life of severe cudgelling, which her voracity would
have entailed upon her: 'yes,' they both exclaimed; 'a blessing to
herself--to her friends in particular--and to the public in general.'

To conclude, the price of Juno was honourably drunk up to the last farthing,
in celebration of her obsequies at this one sitting.

[Greek: Hos hoi g'amphiepon taphon Hektoros hippodamoio.]

END OF 'MR. SCHNACKENBERGER.'

ANGLO-GERMAN DICTIONARIES.

The German dictionaries, compiled for the use of Englishmen studying that
language, are all bad enough, I doubt not, even in this year 1823; but those
of a century back are the most ludicrous books that ever mortal read:
_read_, I say, for they are well worth reading, being often as good as a
jest book. In some instances, I am convinced that the compilers (Germans
living in Germany) had a downright hoax put upon them by some facetious
Briton whom they had consulted; what is given as the English equivalent for
the German word being not seldom a pure coinage that never had any existence
out of Germany. Other instances there are, in which the words, though not of
foreign manufacture, are almost as useless to the English student as if they
were; slang-words, I mean, from the slang vocabulary, current about the
latter end of the seventeenth century. These must have been laboriously
culled from the works of Tom Brown, Sir Roger L'Estrange, Echard, Jeremy
Collier, and others, from 1660 to 1700, who were the great masters of this
_vernacular_ English (as it might emphatically be called, with a reference
to the primary[27] meaning of the word _vernacular_): and I verily believe,
that, if any part of this slang has become, or ever should become a dead
language to the English critic, his best guide to the recovery of its true
meaning will be the German dictionaries of Bailey, Arnold, &c. in their
earliest editions. By one of these, the word _Potztausend_ (a common German
oath) is translated, to the best of my remembrance, thus:--'Udzooks,
Udswiggers, Udswoggers, Bublikins, Boblikins, Splitterkins,' &c. and so on,
with a large choice of other elegant varieties. Here, I take it, our friend
the hoaxer had been at work: but the drollest example I have met with of
their slang is in the following story told to me by Mr. Coleridge. About the
year 1794, a German, recently imported into Bristol, had happened to hear of
Mrs. X., a wealthy widow. He thought it would be a