LEARNING FRENCH.
Fashion dominates in this, as in other things. Of late its dictation has been to cradle children in French; often, even to prohibit English in the nursery and school-room; and, frequently, at a later time, to detach our youth from their own country, for the sake of forwarding the same object in foreign pensions, or schools. We have seen this fashion extending itself to more mature life; and serious and discreet men, senators and judges, toiling painfully through elements, vocabularies, and rules of pronunciation, to acquire an amount of speech sufficient to attract ridicule, and produce inconvenience, but very inadequate to any useful or ornamental purpose.—Ibid.