Middletown transcript., 1881-06-17

fast was for long time bread and
milk mo tea, and | ate it out of a two
penny earthen porringer, with pew.
ter spoon. But mark how luxury will
enter families, and make progress, in
spite Of principle. Being called, one
morning to breakfast, 1 found it in a
china bowl with spoon of silver They
had been bought for me without my
knowledge, by my wife, and had cost
her the enormous sum Of three and
twenty shillings, for which she had no
other excuse or apology to make, ''but
that she thought her husband deserved
I a silver spoon and china bowl as well
as any of his neighbors." =" Again he
says: 81 had only one years instruc-
tion in Latin school, and that when
very young, after which l neglected
that language entirely. But when 1
had attained an acquaintance with the
French, Italian and Spanish, l was
surprised to find ON looking over Latin
Testament that l understood more of
that language than I had imagined. y
And yet Franklin, though one of the
greatest of philosophers, profoundly
versed in many abstruse sciences and
skilled in many tongues, uniformly
wrote English of unapproachable sim
plicity.
The writer does not recall to have
met in Paradise Lost, in Tempest OF in
Macbeth, single foreign word. Little
need the student has for dictionary,
other than an English one, when read
ing Macaulay, Scott, Irving or Prescott.
But, touch the minor authors, especially
the manneristic school of to-day, in any
field Of letters, and you find as the good
English goes out the bad French comes
i'll, and the lower you descend, in the
scale of literary merit, the more you
see the foreign phrases hesprinkling a
page, like hot pepper, to spice the stale
dish while just as surely, you discover
this common agreement in all those
great masters of the speech, whose
works the unanimous verdict of poster
ity has pronounced classic, that they all
wrote plain, easy English.
To use foreign words when writing
English, is illogical. Could anything
be more illogical than to write French
for an Englishman to read or, supposing
a foreigner equally absurd, English for
a Frenchman to read And yet this is
what the literary coxcombs Of the two
countries often do. This is, indeed,
justifying that old French saying, that,
because of its tart flavor, has been as
cribed to Talleyrand, that language
was given men to conceal their
thoughts - though this class of writer's
have usually few thoughts to conceal.
Then, it mars the unity of an English
sentence to inject into the middle of it
a foreign word or phrase, that often
agrees but lily with its English fellows,
as a bit Of badly shaped stone does in a
fine mosaic. If the author write, as
surely, he must, to please and profit his
reader, does he the better do this by
COUGHING his thought in language un-
known to that reader ? If he does not
write for such purpose what does he
write for? To display how much he
knows (or thinks he does, and how
little the reader =?
Perhaps and be voted an ass for his
pains Or he does not know the proper
English word to express his idea and
thereupon drags into his sentence the
trite conventional French OF Italian
phrase, often got, parrot-like by rote,
as it is badly used by half the town,
which at once confounds his reader
and shames himself. That he find him
self unable to put his thoughts into
native dress, should be but spur to
urge him to greater diligence to ac-
quire by research and practice that
easy yet elegant mastery of the Ian
guage that marks the best writer's.
Then why be at pains to leave a copi-
Gus vocabulary of over 100000 words,
that like vast army of able soldiers
stand Obedient to any bidding, and seek
the aid of alien hirelings that cause the
writer's verbal army to show like a
tatterdemaiion array of i'll assorted
troopers. Surely the thought of these
writers is not so ponderous that it can
not out of such huge machinery con-
struct for itself vehicle Shakespeare
himself, so supremely lofty in his ge-
MUS that he is called the "myriad-
minded only employed 10000 of this
number, and of these used 5000 but
once, which would leave his usual
working force of words only 10000
less than ten per cent of the language.
Is it not rather tacit confession of
weakness, thus to seek the meretricious
help of other tongues that with high
sounding terms import to the ignor-
ant the notion of great learning, but
which, indeed, is only the vain glorious
display of wordy bombast. Perhaps
it may cost some bravery to be content
with the homely forms of speech which
will generally serve our ends, to clothe
our thoughts in the plain home-spun of
every day working folk: but. if the
thought be great, how by contrast its
greatness shows forth the more visibly.
because of this modest attire, sotrue tits
that Beauty unadorned is adorned the
most. For young writers in particular
it can easily be imagined, that some
frmness is required to refuse the frip-
perry of gaudy dress, trinked out like
the blanket of a savage with cheap for
eign tinsel, and put on, instead, the
quiet Quaker drab of plain common
sense, that common people understand,
n n L