"I have often wished, that as in our Constitution there are several persons whose business it is to watch over our laws, our liberties, and commerce, certain men might be set apart as superintendents of our language, to hinder any words of a foreign coin from passing among us; and, in particular, to prohibit any French phrases from becoming current in this kingdom, when those of our stamp are altogether as valuable. The present war has so adulterated our tongue with strange words, that it would be impossible for one of our grandfathers to know what his posterity have been doing, were he to read their exploits in a modern newspaper."
Oh, Addison, stop thy ears, and veil thy face!
M. Hippolyte Cocheris, the learned French philologist, quotes, in one of his writings, a piece of prose from an aristocratic pen, which appeared in No. 116 of the New Monthly. It runs as follows:
"I was chez moi, inhaling the odeur musquée of my scented boudoir, when the Prince of Z—— entered. He found me in my demi-toilette, blasée sur tout, and pensively engaged in solitary conjugation of the verb s'ennuyer, and though he had never been one of my habitués, or by any means des nôtres, I was not inclined at this moment of délassement to glide with him into the crocchio restretto of familiar chat."
To edify his readers, and make them appreciate this little masterpiece of hybrid style at its due value, M. Cocheris proceeds to translate the piece into French, carefully replacing all the words in italics by English ones, thus:
J'étais at home, aspirant la musky smell de mon private room, lorsque le Prince de Z—— entra. Il me trouva en simple dress, fatigued with everything, tristement occupé à conjuguer le verbe to be weary, et quoique je ne l'eusse jamais compté au nombre de mes intimates, et qu'il ne fût, en aucune façon of our set, j'étais assez disposée à entrer avec lui dans le crocchio restretto d'une causerie familière.
M. H. Cocheris maintains that a French author would never dare to have recourse to such a literary proceeding. Nonsense! Read our novels, read our newspapers. At every page, you find mention made of fashionables in knickerbockers, who, dressed in ulsters, repair to the turf in a dogcart with a groom and a bulldog. They bring up at a bar and eat a slice of pudding or a sandwich, washed down with a bowl of punch or a cocktail. These gentlemen have the spleen, in spite of the comfortable life they lead. In the evening, they go and applaud the humor of a clown, and call snobs those who prefer the Comédie Française.
If this picture of the state of things be really a true one, the French Academy, which was founded to look after the mother tongue of Molière, had better lower its blinds and burn tapers.