gh he may gratify all his substantives with
capital letters, employs a small _i_ in writing _ich_; a Spaniard, when
he uses the personal pronoun at all, bestows a small _y_ on his _yo_,
while he honours the person he addresses with a capital _V_. I believe,
indeed--though I am not sufficiently acquainted with foreign languages to
speak with certainty on the point--that the Englishman is the only person
in the world who applies a capital letter to himself. That "I" strikes me
as the triumph of egotism. It is tall, commanding, and so brief! "I"--and
that suffices. How did it originate?'

It was difficult for me to answer M. Zola on the point; I am a very poor
scholar in such a matter, and I could find nothing on the subject in any
work of reference I had by me. I surmised, however, that the capital I,
as a personal pronoun, was a survival of the time when English, whether
written or printed, was studded with capitals, even as German is to-day.
If I am wrong, perhaps some one who knows better will correct me. One
thing I have often noticed is that a child's first impulse is to write
'i,' and that it is only after admonition that the aggressive and
egotistical 'I' supplants the humbler form of the letter. This did not
surprise M. Zola, since vanity, like most other vices, is acquired, not
inherent in our natures. But in a chaffing way he suggested that one
might write a very humorous essay on the English character by taking as
one's text that tall, stiff, and self-assertive letter 'I.'

How far M. Zola actually carried his study of English I could hardly say,
but during the last months of his exile he more than once astonished me
by his knowledge of an irregular verb or of the correct comparative and
superlative of an adjective. And if he seldom attempted to speak English,
he at least made considerable progress in reading it. By the time he
returned to France he could always understand any Dreyfus news in the
English papers. Of course the language in which the news was couched was
of great help to him, as in three instances out of four it was simply
direct translation from the French.

In this connection, while praising many features of the English Press, M.
Zola more than once expressed to me his surprise that so much of the
Paris news printed in London should be simply taken from Paris journals.
Some correspondents, said he, never seemed to go anywhere or to see
anybody themselves. They purely and simply extracted everyt