olar and yet "was afraid to enter into discourse" with a
French boy, for fear he should speak too quickly! The position of these
scholars relatively to Latin was in fact too isolated for it to have
been possible that they should reach the point of mastery. Suppose a
society of Frenchmen, in some secluded little French village where no
Englishman ever penetrates, and that these Frenchmen learn English from
dictionaries, and set themselves to speak English with each other,
without anybody to teach them the colloquial language or its
pronunciation, without ever once hearing the sound of it from English
lips, what sort of English would they create amongst themselves? This is
a question that I happen to be able to answer very accurately, because I
have known two Frenchmen who studied English literature just as the
Frenchmen of the sixteenth century studied the literature of ancient
Rome. One of them, especially, had attained what would certainly in the
case of a dead language be considered a very high degree of scholarship
indeed. Most of our great authors were known to him, even down to the
close critical comparison of different readings. Aided by the most
powerful memory I ever knew, he had amassed such stores that the
acquisitions, even of cultivated Englishmen, would in many cases have
appeared inconsiderable beside them. But he could not write or speak
English in a manner tolerable to an Englishman; and although he knew
nearly all the words in the language, it was dictionary knowledge, and
so different from an Englishman's apprehension of the same words that it
was only a sort of pseudo-English that he knew, and not our living
tongue. His appreciation of our authors, especially of our poets,
differed so widely from English criticism and English feeling that it
was evident he did not understand them as we understand them. Two things
especially proved this: he frequently mistook declamatory versification
of the most mediocre quality for poetry of an elevated order; whilst, on
the other hand, his ear failed to perceive the music of the musical
poets, as Byron and Tennyson. How _could_ he hear their music, he to
whom our English sounds were all unknown? Here, for example, is the way
he read "Claribel:"--

"At ev ze bittle bommess
Azvart ze zeeket lon
At none ze veeld be ommess
Aboot ze most edston
At meedneeg ze mon commess
An lokez dovn alon
Ere songg ze lintveet svelless
Ze clirvoic-ed mavi dvell