n cockney crow-word of
the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow's head from the perusal
of his pothouse newspaper columns?

Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall,
required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to
him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of
collapses. This confession of deficiency in explosive repartee--using
a friend's term for the ready gift--was an old and a rueful one with
Victor Radnor. His godmother Fortune denied him that. She bestowed it
on his friend Fenellan, and little else. Simeon Fenellan could clap the
halter on a coltish mob; he had positively caught the roar of cries and
stilled it, by capping the cries in turn, until the people cheered him;
and the effect of the scene upon Victor Radnor disposed him to rank the
gift of repartee higher than a certain rosily oratorical that he was
permitted to tell himself he possessed, in bottle if not on draught. Let
it only be explosive repartee: the well-fused bomb, the bubble to
the stone, echo round the horn. Fenellan, would have discharged an
extinguisher on punctilio in emission. Victor Radnor was unable to cope
with it reflectively.

No, but one doesn't like being beaten by anything! he replied to an
admonishment of his better mind, as he touched his two fingers, more
significantly dubious than the whole hand, at the back of his head,
and checked or stemmed the current of a fear. For he was utterly unlike
himself; he was dwelling on a trifle, on a matter discernibly the
smallest, an incident of the streets; and although he refused to feel a
bump or any responsive notification of a bruise, he made a sacrifice of
his native pride to his intellectual, in granting that he must have been
shaken, so childishly did he continue thinking.

Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of life, and an odd word
engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, he addressed another
friend, from whom he stood constitutionally in dissent naming him
Colney; and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between
them upon man's present achievements and his probable destinies:
especially upon England's grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent
appreciation of her place in the universe; not to speak of the historic
dignity of London City. Colney had to be overcome afresh, and he
fled, but managed, with two or three of his bitter phrases, to make a
cuttle-fish fight