istened enraptured. I once fell from
grace; but not from my reverence for him, by making a mistake in my
search for knowledge which involved his age. It was very easy to ask
him whether Anne Boleyn had asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escape
from the family denunciation that followed. It seemed that he had not
lived at or near the court of Henry VIII!

Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick" for "ill" is taboo in
England, except among the very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr.
Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes so far in one of the speeches
of the atrocious Mrs. Tennsen, that the shocking word "bloody" used by
Mr. Bernard Shaw on one famous occasion sinks into a pastel tint! Mr.
Mencken says:

The Pilgrims brought over with them the English of James I. and the
Authorized Version, and their descendants of a century later,
inheriting it, allowed the fundamentals to be but little changed by
the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during
the early part of the Eighteenth Century.

The Bible won against the prudery of the new English; prudery will go
very far, and I can recall the objection of an evangelical lady, in
Philadelphia, who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave Maria" by a
little Papist relative. This was not on religious grounds; it was
because of "blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus," in the prayer. The
little Papist had been taught to repeat the salutation of the Angel
Gabriel in Latin, so, at bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructus
ventris tui" and the careful lady thought it sounded "more decent"!

Poker players may be interested in Mr. Mencken's revelation that "ante"
came into our language through the Spanish; he says,

cinch was borrowed from the Spanish "cincha" in the early Texas
days, though its figurative use did not come in until much later.

It is pleasant to note the soundness of Mr. Mencken's judgment in regard
to that very great philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he
quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of the English language,
another great Dane, Doctor Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our
tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It has rare elements of
strength in its simplicity. In English the subject almost invariably
precedes the verb and the object follows it; even in English poetry this
usage is seldom violated. In Tennyson, its observance might be counted
at 80,

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