uncle" is another saying, not in this case contemptuous but rather
complimentary--signifying "I'll dress you down to some purpose". One
piece of slang we share with Holland: the reference to the pawnbroker
as an uncle. In Holland the kindly friend at the three brass balls
(which it may not be generally known are the ancient arms of Lombardy,
the Lombards being the first money lenders,) is called Oom Jan or
Uncle John.

There is still another phrase, "Dutch news," which might be
explained. The term is given by printers to very difficult copy--Dean
Stanley's manuscript, for example, was probably known as Dutch news,
so terrible was his hand,--and also to "pie". The origin is to be
found in the following paragraph from _Notes and Queries_. (The Sir
Richard Phillips concerned was the vegetarian publisher so finely
touched off by Borrow in _Lavengro_.)

In his youth Sir Richard Phillips edited and published a paper at
Leicester, called the _Herald_. One day an article appeared in it
headed 'Dutch Mail,' and added to it was an announcement that it had
arrived too late for translation, and so had been cut up and printed
in the original. This wondrous article drove half of England crazy,
and for years the best Dutch scholars squabbled and pored over it
without being able to arrive at any idea of what it meant. This famous
'Dutch Mail' was, in reality, merely a column of pie. The story Sir
Richard tells of this particular pie he had a whole hand in is this:--

"One evening, before one of our publications, my men and a boy
overturned two or three columns of the paper in type. We had to
get ready in some way for the coaches, which, at four o'clock in the
morning, required four or five hundred papers. After every exertion we