Part 16 (1/2)

See this faire shooing

Put on those pompes”

After all, possibly, such publications as that before me are chiefly valuable for a purpose for which they were not designed--for the bounteous light which they shed on our old English customs and notions; and I do not think that they have been hitherto fully brought into employment It is obviously impossible for , more particularly as the quotations suffer by curtailment or paraphrase

The _Arnalte and Lucenda_ takes up the rammatical inaccuracies than that division of the book devoted to gra so its residents In his _Italian Phrases_ we e with: ”Hee looketh rather like a cutter or fencer then,” and ”He goeth accompanied with Roisters and cutters”

The French Dictionary of Desainliens was entirely superseded by that of Randle Cotgrave in 1611 The latter spared no pains to make his book a really valuable performance; he invited help froible plan, and it reed edition by Howell a standard and indispensable work of reference

It was the only one available for the school-boy and student for a considerable length of time

III Delamothe and Erondelle were contemporary with Desainliens, and may have been equally eminent and successful as teachers; but they did not display the saree of literary activity The for but a _French Alphabet_ (1595) Pierre Erondelle was a native of Normandy; and besides new and iht out in 1605 a quaint book of lessons for the acquisition of French, which he called _The French Garden for English Ladies and Gentlemen to walk in; Or A Summer day's Labour_ The volulish, e the various occupations of the day, fro till bedtime Some of the conversations are relish ideas of decoru nised both here and on the Continent, and the banishment of which has, at all events, not of itself added to our nalises as a French trait the incident of the lady of quality hoe; but he must have been aware that the tone in the same circles at hoian literature have to exercise a pruning hand in dealing with MSS to be presented now-a-days to public view

Another of these foreign professors was Jacques Bellot, who published several educational works for the instruction of the English in the French gra these _Le Jardin de Vertu et Bonnes Moeurs_, 1581, where the English and French are given, as usual, in parallel columns, is the es; but that for the English ht, from a native point of view, be indefinitely extended, as Bellot proves hi our idiom as the rest of his countryue est nulle” by ”Of the prodigall ther is no memory,”

and ”La seulle vertu est la vraye noblesse” by ”The only vertue, is the true nobilitie”

The writer trips, as may be conjectured, just in those nice points in which even an Englishman is not always at home

New and improved systems were continually sube of those days, to the nobility and Gentry In 1634, the Grammar of Charles Maupas of Blois, an estee a career of thirty years nu land, was adapted by Williainal is still regarded as a standard work, though discarded by the schools Both the French and English are of the antique cast, of course, and y are obsolete; but the book ritten for Frenchlishmen, to both of whom the speech of these days would have seee, and proved not less ees of Maupas, as he is presented to us in his English dress, acquire an oddity and an almost humorous side, which are absent from the French text itself; as, for instance:--

”OfStop

”Hola, ho there, prou well, well, so so; assez enough, enough; de Pain

”Aou, haou, aouf, ah, of, alas The salish”

”Of Joy

”Gay, deliait, alaigrehday, as a er and Paul Festeau were two other professors at a soe for theirspecial temptations in the way of customers The former, who seees as an attractive novelty a series of Dialogues illustrative of English exploits by land and sea, as well as of contemporary French history, while Festeau baited his hook with the two scarcely reconcilable assurances that his plan was the exactest possible for attaining the purity and eloquence of the French tongue, as it was spoken about 1660 in the Court of France, and that Blois, his native place, was the city ”where the true tone of the French tongue was found by the unaniners' English

I A good deal has been incidentally heard of the habitual infelicity of the natives of other European countries where it has been a question of the treate either colloquially or with a literary object This was a source of difficulty which enerally appreciated; but no one appears to have essayed to come to the succour of the distressed, till in 1578 Jacques Bellot, already mentioned, and the author of a French Gralish Schoollish_ That such a book was published is probable enough, but it is not at present known; and we havewhat kind of affair such an undertaking could have been, where the writer was a foreign teacher so ignorant of our language! But it was not amiss for Bellot to try his hand in the absence of any other adventurer; nor was it till after the Restoration that a second experiment was made in the same direction by James Howell, the tolerably celebrated author of the _Falish Grae will bear, for foreigners to learn English_ This was nearly a century after Bellot; and Hoas both a linguist and a scholar

Like many other laudable endeavours, however, the proffered help was not h the Germans, Dutch, and Russians have within the last quarter of a century lish, the French and other Continental nations remain unable or indisposed to conquer their ancient prejudices Doubtless, the closer affinity between the languages of Germany and the Low Countries and our own considerably facilitated the lish by the Teutonic community; and it was principally in Flanders that the earliest attention was paid to those highly valuable polyglot hand-books for travellers and students, into which the English, as a rule, was adn visitor in England than for the sake of the Englishman abroad, as had been the case with certain early vocabularies and priner is invariably introducedhavoc in our vocabulary and graood deal on his own fancy instead of borrowing from life; and such is the case, it must be said, even with Shakespear's _Dr Caius_, who speaks broken English, but hardly a Frenchlish The _Duke de Jarmany_ of the saibberish put into his e; this sort of _dra the comic effects

The Mrs Plawnish of a ood French; but the jargon of Caius is _sui generis_; he ”hacks our English” as h Shakespearsuch a character froinal But he even confers on the French doctor in the _Merry Wives_ the very na in his boyhood, and as not ical subjects; so that those who had been acquainted with the real Caius were apt to feel so a nationality which did not belong to hiards the familiarity of the French and Gered; for while that of the forrown eneral