The Arnalte and Lucenda takes up the major part of the volume, and must be said to be freer from grammatical inaccuracies than that division of the book devoted to grammar. Nor could a man live in London without catching some of the colloquialisms current among its residents. In his Italian Phrases we meet on the English side of the page with: “Hee looketh rather like a cutter or fencer then,” and “He goeth accompanied with Roisters and cutters.”
The French Dictionary of Desainliens was entirely superseded by that of Randle Cotgrave in 1611. The latter spared no pains to make his book a really valuable performance; he invited help from others, and modelled his labours on a fairly intelligible plan, and it remains to this day in the enlarged edition by Howell a standard and indispensable work of reference. It was the only one available for the school-boy and student for a considerable length of time.
III. Delamothe and Erondelle were contemporary with Desainliens, and may have been equally eminent and successful as teachers; but they did not display the same degree of literary activity. The former indeed produced nothing but a French Alphabet (1595). Pierre Erondelle was a native of Normandy; and besides new and improved editions of his predecessor Desainliens, he brought out in 1605 a quaint book of lessons for the acquisition of French, which he called The French Garden for English Ladies and Gentlemen to walk in; Or A Summer day’s Labour. The volume mainly consists of thirteen dialogues in French and English, embracing the various occupations of the day, from the first rising in the morning till bedtime. Some of the conversations are remarkable for their archaic naiveté so far as English ideas of decorum in speech are concerned; but they are nothing more than the plainness of phrase which was once recognised both here and on the Continent, and the banishment of which has, at all events, not of itself added to our morality. Sterne, in his Sentimental Journey, signalises as a French trait the incident of the lady of quality with whom he drove in her carriage; but he must have been aware that the tone in the same circles at home was equally pronounced; and editors of the earlier Georgian literature have to exercise a pruning hand in dealing with MSS. to be presented now-a-days to public view.
Another of these foreign professors was Jacques Bellot, who published several educational works for the instruction of the English in the French grammar and language. Among these Le Jardin de Vertu et Bonnes Moeurs, 1581, where the English and French are given, as usual, in parallel columns, is the most remarkable. There is a Table of Errata for both languages; but that for the English might, from a native point of view, be indefinitely extended, as Bellot proves himself as incapable of comprehending our idiom as the rest of his countrymen. He renders “La memoire du prodigue est nulle” by “Of the prodigall ther is no memory,” and “La seulle vertu est la vraye noblesse” by “The only vertue, is the true nobilitie.”
The writer trips, as may be conjectured, just in those nice points in which even an Englishman is not always at home.
New and improved systems were continually submitted to the public, or rather, in the language of those days, to the Nobility and Gentry. In 1634, the Grammar of Charles Maupas of Blois, an esteemed and experienced teacher, who during a career of thirty years numbered among his pupils many of the young men of family in Holland as well as in England, was adapted by William Aufield for the use of his countrymen. The original is still regarded as a standard work, though discarded by the schools. Both the French and English are of the antique cast, of course, and many of the examples and much of the phraseology are obsolete; but the book was written for Frenchmen and translated for Englishmen, to both of whom the speech of these days would have seemed at least equally strange, and proved not less embarrassing.
The pages of Maupas, as he is presented to us in his English dress, acquire an oddity and an almost humorous side, which are absent from the French text itself; as, for instance:—
“Of making Stop.
“Holà, ho there, prou well, well, so so; assez enough, enough; demeure, arreste, stay, stay, budge not.”
“Of feeling Pain.