"My father declared he should invent a slip button"
From Lady <PERSON>'s memoir of her father the Rev. <PERSON>, published circa 1855:
The reigning bore at this time in Edinburgh was ——; his favourite subject, the North Pole. It mattered not how far south you began, you found yourself transported to the north pole before you could take breath; no one escaped him. My father declared he should invent a slip button. <PERSON> fled from him as from the plague, when possible; but one day his arch-tormentor met him in a narrow lane, and began instantly on the north pole. <PERSON>, in despair and out of all patience, darted past him, exclaiming, "D— the north pole!" My father met him shortly after, boiling with indignation at <PERSON>'s contempt of the north pole. 406
"Oh, my dear fellow," said my father, "never mind; no one minds what <PERSON> says, you know; he is a privileged person; he respects nothing, absolutely nothing. Why, you will scarcely believe it, but it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator!"
I think it's fairly clear that the meaning of the bolded sentence is "My father said that my father fantasized about inventing a physical device for slipping away from that boring person."
However, what exactly is a "slip button," or what would the circa-1855 reader have understood the circa-1797 Rev. <PERSON> to have meant by the phrase?
Google tells me that a "slip button" may be some part of a drill assembly, such as in an oil well, which coincidentally is also something which bores; but I'm not sure that a clergyman in the 1790s would be making oil-well jokes. I expect the answer to be something about clothing, somehow, but I can't find any textual support for that idea. Anyway, I'd still appreciate an explanation of what a "slip button" is in the borehole context, because I can't make head or tail of the few references I found!
(Most Google results for "slip button" these days are about the button that turns on all-wheel drive mode in your car when it's icy out. That's clearly unrelated to the reverend's meaning here.) 950