In the old plays the foreigner is invariably introduced making, consciously or otherwise, the most alarming havoc in our vocabulary and grammar; but the dramatist seems, as a rule, to have drawn a good deal on his own fancy instead of borrowing from life; and such is the case, it must be said, even with Shakespear’s Dr. Caius, who speaks broken English, but hardly a Frenchman’s broken English. The Duke de Jarmany of the same writer would probably have had the same nondescript gibberish put into his mouth had he been brought on the stage; this sort of dramatis persona was among the comic effects.
The Mrs. Plawnish of a modern novelist thought that bad English might be good French; but the jargon of Caius is sui generis; he “hacks our English.” as mine host puts it, but not naturally, although Shakespear must have had the opportunity of studying such a character from the original. But he even confers on the French doctor in the Merry Wives the very name of an actual English one, who was living in his boyhood, and who was not merely a contributor to literature, but a writer on philological subjects; so that those who had been acquainted with the real Caius were apt to feel some mystification at his dramatic presentment, claiming a nationality which did not belong to him, and murdering a language which was his own.
As regards the familiarity of the French and Germans with our idiom, the position is changed; for while that of the former remains nearly stationary, that of Germany has grown more accurate and more general.
II. But the conversance with our language in former times, even among those who devoted their attention to philology and instruction, was excessively scanty and inexact. If no more than a bare quotation, example, or equivalent in English is given, the solecisms are sometimes ludicrous in the extreme; and this branch of the subject is sufficiently interesting and novel to induce me, before I conclude my inquiry, to shew somewhat farther than I have done in the account of the foreign professors of languages settled in London during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ignorance of English exhibited by two distinct classes of writers, namely, by foreigners occupying among us of old the position of tutors or teachers, and by the authors of publications designed for employment by ourselves visiting the Continent, or by our neighbours coming hither.
The notions entertained by educated professional Frenchmen, and even by Hollanders and Germans, about our grammar and idiom were from the outset down nearly to the present century of the vaguest and most puerile character. Perhaps one of the most edifying monuments of this inveterate repugnance to the acquisition of so much as the alphabet of our poor tongue is to be found in a volume printed at Nürnberg so late as 1744 under the title Representation of the High-landers who arrived at the Camp of the Confederated Army, 1743, where beneath the first of a series of plates occurs this elucidation: “The Highlanders in their accostumes clothes and downwards hanging cloak.” The explanatory description of the next engraving is “A High-lander who puts on his cloak about his schoulders, when weather is sed to rain.” These solecisms of course arose from the incompetence of the foreign artist or publisher, or both; but even where an ignorant typographer in a Continental town was employed to set up an English book by the author himself, the liability to blunders was very great, and we are not to be surprised at slips of the press in such a work as Bishop Hooper’s Declaration of the Commandments, printed at Zurich in 1549, when at the end the writer apprises us that “the setters of the print understand not one word of our speech!”
The most diverting illustrations of the jargon which was intended to pass for good conversational English abound in the pocket-guides and dictionaries, of which some went through several editions, and were evidently in great request by the sections of society to which they appealed. One of them is an octoglot vocabulary, 1548, and a second a series of Colloquies in six languages, accompanied by a dictionary, 1576. The English examples in the latter are highly curious, as affording an insight into our language as it was spoken at that date by foreign students and visitors; and, in point of fact, it is hard to choose between the two, which is the more remarkable. Let us take the Preface to the earlier publication from an impression of 1631 before me:—
“To the Reader.
“Beloved Reader this boocke is so need full and profitable / and the vsance of the same so necessarie / that his goodnes euen of learned men / is not fullie to be praised for ther is noman in France / nor in thes Nederland / nor in Spayne / or in Italie handling in these Netherlandes which hat not neede of the eight speaches that here in are writen and declared: Fer whether thad any man doo marchandise / or that hee do handle in the Court / or that hee fo lowe the warres or that hee be a trauailling man / hy should neede to haue an interpretour / for som of theese eight speaches. The which wee considering have at our great cost and to your great profite / brought the same speaches here in suchwise to gether / and set them in order / so that you fromyence fouath shall not neede eny interpretour / but shalbe able to speake them your self / ....”
An extract from one of the interlocutions must suffice:—
“D. Peeter / is that your sone?