a house which he had to let,
said, "It is free from opacity, tenebrosity, fumidity, and injucundity,
or translucency. In short, its diaphaneity, even in the crepuscle, makes
it a pharos, and without laud, for its agglutination and amenity, it is
a most delectable commorance; and whoever lives in it will find that the
neighbours have none of the truculence and immanity, the torvity, the
spinosity, the putidness, the pugnacity, nor the fugacity observable in
other parts of the town. Their propinquity and consanguinity occasions
jucundity and pudicity, from which and the redolence of the place they
are remarkable for longevity."

Altiloquents are not unfrequently found among a class of young persons
who think they must talk in a manner corresponding with their dress and
appearance--fine and prim. A barber is a "tonsorial artist," and the
place in which he works a "hair-dressing studio;" a teacher of swimming
is a "professor of natation," and he who swims "natates in a
natatorium;" a common clam-seller is a "vender of magnificent bivalves;"
a schoolmaster is a "preceptor," or "principal of an educational
institute;" a cobbler is a "son of Crispin;" printers are "practitioners
of the typographical art;" a chapel is a "sanctuary," a church a
"temple," a house a "palace" or an "establishment," stables and
pig-styes are "quadrupedal edifices and swinish tenements."

One of this class, a young lady at school, considering that the word
"eat" was too vulgar for refined ears, is said to have substituted the
following: "To insert nutritious pabulum into the denticulated orifice
below the nasal protuberance, which, being masticated, peregrinates
through the cartilaginous cavities of the larynx, and is finally
domiciliated in the receptacle for digestible particles."

* * * * *

"It is impossible," says a recent writer, "not to deplore so pernicious
a tendency to high-flown language, because all classes of society
indulge in it more or less; and because, as we have already said, it
proceeds in every instance from mental deficiencies and moral defects,
from insincerity and dissimulation, and from an effeminate proneness to
use up in speaking the energy we should turn to doing and apply to life
and conduct. Without a substratum of sincerity, no man can speak right
on, but runs astray into a kind of phraseology which bears the same
relation to elegant language that the hollyhock does to the rose."

The