Prononce-je bien?
Fort bien. Essayez encore une fois.
Ce mechant u me donne bien de la peine.
Il ne sauroit tant vous en donner que votre th ou ch nous en donne.
Il est malaisé d'avoir la proprieté de votre langue.
L'exercice et la lecture des bons autheurs vous apprendront avec le temps, etc.
He agreed with most of the French teachers of the day in attaching much importance to conversational practice and reading. He also recommended a certain amount of memorising and the study of grammar; general rules and rules of syntax he considered indispensable; but for pronunciation he thought practice of more avail than rules. It is possible, he admits, to learn French by rote, without any grammar rules. But it is not the best way in his opinion. Without grammar rules the student cannot distinguish good French from bad, nor can he translate, write letters, or read; and reading, thought Du Grès, was an essential condition if the cultivation of French in England was to be maintained. FRENCH AT CAMBRIDGEThose who learn by ear are at a loss as soon as they no longer hear French spoken daily. As for those who promise to teach French in a short time, they are nothing but mountebanks. Du Grès held that a man of moderate intellect could, with hard work, learn to understand an ordinary French author in three or four months. He had had, he declares, some pupils at Cambridge who learnt to read and speak fairly well in four months and others who learnt practically nothing in a whole year.
At the end of the seventeenth century the status of French at the universities had undergone no marked change. At the time of the Restoration, a certain Philemon Fabri petitioned Williamson for an appointment as Professor of French eloquence at Oxford, "he having held a similar situation at Strasburg"; he supported his request by an address to the king in French verses, entitled Le Pater Noster des Anglais au Roi. Apparently Fabri did not receive the desired position.[547] At Cambridge we find still less encouragement given to the study of French than at Oxford. During the Commonwealth, Guy Le Moyne, formerly French tutor to Charles I., lived at Cambridge, and no doubt continued to teach French there, as he had done in London and at Court.[548] At the Restoration he petitioned Charles II. to let him have the Fellowship at Pembroke Hall reserved for Frenchmen.[549] Le Moyne was then seventy-two years old, and wished, he said, to end his days at Cambridge.[550] At Cambridge, as at Oxford, there were also French tutors in charge of particular pupils. Many of these were French Protestants. Thus the famous Pierre Du Moulin, arriving in England as a destitute refugee in 1588, was received into the service of the Countess of Rutland, who sent him to Cambridge as tutor to her son. There he remained until 1592, continuing his own studies as well as attending to those of his young charge. He thoroughly disliked his position, and seized the first opportunity of leaving it.[551] We also hear of Herbert Palmer, President of Queen's College (1644-47), who had learnt French almost as soon as he could speak, and could preach in French as well as in English.[552] He won considerable distinction as a college tutor, but whether he placed his knowledge of French at the service of students, as Sanford and Leighton did at Oxford, is not specified.
Yet, even at Oxford, the efforts of this band of French teachers were not on a large enough scale to have any very noticeable effect. Some gentlemen who, like Sanford's pupil, William Grey, had gone to the University to make themselves "fit for honourable imployments hereafter," took advantage of such opportunities as there were of studying French. Thus Henry Smith, while acting as tutor to Mr. Clifford, learnt French himself, and wrote to Williamson in that language.[553] And no doubt the French tutors found enough pupils among those who were drawn more towards the fashionable than the scholastic world. But the inability of the young Oxford student to speak French when in polite London circles was a subject of comment in the seventeenth century as the language became more and more widely cultivated. To speak French was even considered incompatible with a university education, to judge from this passage in one of Farquhar's comedies:[554]
Sir H. Wildair. Canst thou danse, child?