NOTES:
Born 1851; ordained 1874; died 1877.
XXIX.
VERBAL INFELICITIES.
"Se non è vero," said a very great Lord Mayor, "è ben traviata." His lordship's linguistic slip served him right. Latin is fair play, though some of us are in the condition of the auctioneer in The Mill on the Floss, who had brought away with him from the Great Mudport Free School "a sense of understanding Latin generally, though his comprehension of any particular Latin was not ready." But to quote from any other language is to commit an outrage on your guests. The late Sir Robert Fowler was, I believe, the only Lord Mayor who ever ventured to quote Greek, but I have heard him do it, and have seen the turtle-fed company smile with alien lips in the painful attempt to look as if they understood it, and in abject terror lest their neighbour should ask them to translate. Mr. James Payn used to tell a pleasing tale of a learned clergyman who quoted Greek at dinner. The lady who was sitting by Mr. Payn inquired in a whisper what one of these quotations meant. He gave her to understand, with a well-assumed blush, that it was scarcely fit for a lady's ear. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed; "you don't mean to say ----" "Please don't ask any more," said Payn pleadingly; "I really could not tell you." Which was true to the ear, if not to the sense.
Municipal eloquence has been time out of mind a storehouse of delight. It was, according to tradition, a provincial mayor who, blessed with a numerous progeny, publicly expressed the pious hope that his sons might grow up to be better citizens than their father, and his daughters more virtuous women than their mother. There was a worthy alderman at Oxford in my time who was entertained at a public dinner on his retirement from civic office. In replying to the toast of his health, he said it had always been his anxious endeavour to administer justice without swerving to "partiality on the one hand or impartiality on the other." Surely he must have been near akin to the moralist who always tried to tread "the narrow path which lay between right and wrong;" or, perchance, to the newly-elected mayor who, in returning thanks for his elevation, said that during his year of office he should lay aside all his political prepossessions and be, "like Caesar's wife, all things to all men." A well-known dignitary, rebuking his housemaid for using his bath during his absence from the Deanery, said, "I am grieved to think that you should do behind my back what you wouldn't do before my face;" and it was related of my old friend Dean Burgon that once, in a sermon on the transcendent merits of the Anglican school of theology, he exclaimed, with a fervour which was all his own, "May I live the life of a Taylor, and die the death of a Bull!" The late Lord Coleridge, eulogizing Oxford, said in his most dulcet tone, "I speak not of this college or of that, but of the University as a whole; and, gentlemen, what a whole Oxford is!"