PRIVATE, n. A military gentleman with a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack and an impediment in his hope.
REALITY, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.
HYDRA, n. A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads.
PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. A desiccated epigram.
REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached.
GENEROUS, adj. Originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.
MERCY, n. An attribute beloved of detected offenders.
SPOOKER, n. A writer whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks.
RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.
A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the pa.
Suddenly to change one’s opinions and go over to another party. The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turn-coat by some of our partisan journals.
OBSTINATE, adj. Inaccessible to the truth as it is manifest in the splendor and stress of our advocacy.
LIAR, n. One who tells an unpleasant truth.
OATH, n. In law, a solemn appeal to the Deity, made binding upon the conscience by a penalty for perjury.
POCKET, n. The cradle of motive and the grave of conscience. In woman this organ is lacking; so she acts without motive, and her conscience, denied burial, remains ever alive, confessing the sins of others.
Aristocrats: n. fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts – guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.
INDISCRETION, n. The guilt of woman.
INJUSTICE, n. A burden which of all those that we load upon others and carry ourselves is lightest in the hands and heaviest upon the back.
RETRIBUTION, n. A rain of fire-and-brimstone that falls alike upon the just and such of the unjust as have not procured shelter by evicting them.