“Aou, haou, aouf, ah, of, alas. The same words will serve in English.”
“Of Joy.
“Gay, deliait, alaigrement, heighday, as a man woud wish, merrily then.”
Claudius Mauger and Paul Festeau were two other professors at a somewhat later date, who endeavoured to secure patronage for their methods and books by throwing special temptations in the way of customers. The former, who seems to have been resident in London, introduced into his pages as an attractive novelty a series of Dialogues illustrative of English exploits by land and sea, as well as of contemporary French history, while Festeau baited his hook with the two scarcely reconcilable assurances that his plan was the exactest possible for attaining the purity and eloquence of the French tongue, as it was spoken about 1660 in the Court of France, and that Blois, his native place, was the city “where the true tone of the French tongue was found by the unanimous consent of all Frenchmen.”
XIX.
Foreigners’ English.
I. A good deal has been incidentally heard of the habitual infelicity of the natives of other European countries where it has been a question of the treatment of our language either colloquially or with a literary object. This was a source of difficulty which must have been generally appreciated; but no one appears to have essayed to come to the succour of the distressed, till in 1578 Jacques Bellot, already mentioned, and the author of a French Grammar printed in 1578, announced in 1580 The English Schoolmaster, for teaching strangers to pronounce English. That such a book was published is probable enough, but it is not at present known; and we have meanwhile to content ourselves with speculating what kind of affair such an undertaking could have been, where the writer was a foreign teacher so ignorant of our language! But it was not amiss for Bellot to try his hand in the absence of any other adventurer; nor was it till after the Restoration that a second experiment was made in the same direction by James Howell, the tolerably celebrated author of the Familiar Letters, who brought out in 1662 A New English Grammar, prescribing as certain rules as the language will bear, for foreigners to learn English. This was nearly a century after Bellot; and Howell was both a linguist and a scholar.
Like many other laudable endeavours, however, the proffered help was not much appreciated; and although the Germans, Dutch, and Russians have within the last quarter of a century made remarkable progress in the study of English, the French and other Continental nations remain unable or indisposed to conquer their ancient prejudices. Doubtless, the closer affinity between the languages of Germany and the Low Countries and our own considerably facilitated the mastery of English by the Teutonic community; and it was principally in Flanders that the earliest attention was paid to those highly valuable polyglot hand-books for travellers and students, into which the English, as a rule, was admitted more on account, probably, of its service to the foreign visitor in England than for the sake of the Englishman abroad, as had been the case with certain early vocabularies and primers elsewhere noticed.