_Tom._ I suppose so. You couldn’t have popped in more opportunely! Allow me to introduce to you my companion and cousin, Jeremiah Hawthorn, Esquire, from Somersetshire; Jerry Hawthorn, Doctor Logic, commonly called Bob Logic--Doctor Logic, Jerry Hawthorn. Bob is the most finished man of all the pavé, Jerry, whether for drinking, roving, getting in a row or getting out of one.
_Log._ Oh, you flatter me! I yield the palm to you in those particulars. To be sure I always was a knowing one.
_Log._ (_To Jerry_). Your most obedient, sir; happy to see you. Where did you pick him up? (_To Tom_).
_Tom._ A slip from the chawbacons; rescued him from yokels. The business is this; bred up in Somersetshire. Jerry has never before crossed Claverton Downs. He is now come to see life, and rub off a little of the rust. In effecting this desirable consummation you can materially assist; under so skilful a professor of the flash as you, Bob--
_Log._ Flash, my young friend, or slang as others call it, is the classical language of the Holy Land; in other words, St. Giles’s Greek.
_Jerry._ St. Giles’s Greek; that is a language, doctor, with which I am totally unacquainted, although I was brought up at a Grammar School.
_Log._ You are not particular in that respect; many great scholars, and better linguists than you, are quite as ignorant of it, it being studied more in the Hammer Schools than the Grammar Schools. Flash, my young friend, or slang, as others call it, is a species of cant in which the knowing ones conceal their roguery from the flats; and it is one of the advantages of seeing Life in London, that you may learn to talk to a rogue in his own language, and fight him with his own weapons.
_Tom._ I was telling him before you came in, Bob, that he must go in training for a swell, and he didn’t understand what I meant.
_Tom._ No, no, you didn’t; come, confess your ignorance.
_Jerry._ “Green! fly! awake!” D--me, but I’m at fault. I don’t understand one word you are saying.
_Log._ We know you don’t, and that’s what we’re telling you. Poor young man--very uninformed.
_Log._ Melancholy to think of--quite lamentable.
_Tom._ You must go to school, again, Jerry.
_Log._ Yes, take your degrees under the classical Captain Grose. A swell, my dear boy, or rather an empty swell, is an animal very plentiful in the fashionable world; which, like the frog in the fable, wishing to appear greater than it is, and vie with the substantial John Bulls of the Exchange, keeps puffing and puffing itself out, till it bursts in the attempt, and proves its appearance, like itself, a bubble.