CHAPTER XXVI.
THE FUNERAL GAMES.
'Now then,' said Mr.Schnackenberger, entering the Double-barrelled Gun with his friend,--'Now, waiter, let us have Rhenish and Champagne, and all other good things with which your Gun is charged: fire off both barrels upon us: Come, you dog, make ready--present; for we solemnise a funeral to-day:' and, at the same time, he flung down the purchase-money of Juno upon the table.
The waiter hastened to obey his orders.
The longer the two masters of Juno drank together, the more did they convince themselves that her death was a real blessing to herself, who had 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.