212
NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. vn. SEPT. 11, 1920.
INFLUENCE OF FOREIGN
LANGUAGE ON STYLE.
(12 S. vii. 89, 152.)
IN this present age of slipshod English
the statement that the best writer of our
language is he who is familiar with none but
his own should not pass without protest.
It is opposed to all the ideas of English and
education that have prevailed in the past,
and is not, so far as I am aware, supported
by adequate examples. It cuts out nearly
all our famous authors a glorious company
too familiar to lovers of English to be
named in detail. It cuts out the men who
made our English Bible. For centuries our
best writers have been familiar with Latin
and French, and in many cases with Greek.
These languages lie at the back of English,
and are just as important as the Anglo-
Saxon element in it. Without their assis-
tance in form and meaning, it is difficult to
avoid mistakes in English. A character in
' Mansfield Park ' says, *' Shakespeare one
gets acquainted with without knowing how
It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. '
The result of this gay presumption of
knowledge can be seen in many silly books
In a similar way, the average Englishman
thinks that he can talk and write English
without knowing it. The simple fact is tha
he is deceiving himself. He relies on instinc
to carry him through, and it does so wonder
fully on the whole ; but he makes mistake
which remove him from the class of the
best. He needs knowledge of a regularly
inflected language to enable him to ge
right the few remaining inflections in English
He must know foreign languages, to ge
right the many strange words which ou
acquisitive tongue adds so freely to th
common vocabulary. A word taken direc
from the Latin may be plural in English
but derived through French, may be turnec
into a singular. How is the writer wit
nothing but English to know whethe
"propaganda " and "data" take a singula
or a plural verb ? I have seen both wron
within the present week. I have notec
among writers of established repute i
prose and verse errors of which an educatec
man would be ashamed. They venturec
further than they knew. Matthew Amok
when studying education in France, wrot
lat Latin and Greek were "cultivated
[most entirely with a view to giving a pupil a
mastery over his own language," the result
>eing that such mastery was common in
France, and "scarcely ever" attained in.
country. Arnold * also says in his
Betters : " Too much time is wasted over
rammar but it is true, as Goethe said,
,hat no man who knows only his own,
anguage, knows even that."
The verdict of an admirable writer and ritic, who was also directly concerned in ducation, is surely worth considering. I annot suppose that Lord Esher would >rush Arnold away as negligible. It may >e true that a first rate writer of English s born ; but he is also made, and largely made by the study of other languages. The instinct for ornament leads inevitably the use of sonorous words which are not of Anglo-Saxon origin. It leads also in- vitably in the ignorant to the misuse of uch words. Human error after a while >ecomes a depressing subject, otherwise I could easily produce a long list of howlers- 'or the last thirty years, a handbook to English sans le savoir, as she is wrote by all sorts and conditions of Englishmen.
V. R.
THE STATURE or PEPYS (12 S. vi. 110, 216 ;
vii. 155). Your correspondent will find in
one of the issues of Braybrooke's edition
Bohn, 1894) of the 'Diary,' the following
'ootnote to the ' Life,' p. xxxviii.
- ' I am informed by the Rev. Thomas Boyles-
Murray, rector of St. Dunstan's in the East, that in the summer of 1836, when the church of St. Olave, Hart Street, was under repair, a vault was found on the north side of the Communion table, containing a skull and some bones, which being uppermost, were probably the remains of Samuel Pepys, he having been the last of his family there interred. It is singular, that in the same spot a stone of the size of a walnut was- discovered among the remains."
Lof tie in ' In and Out of London ' repeats the first part of the statement. Whether it has any foundation in fact, who shall say ? I cannot find that the Rev. A. Povah, makes any reference to this or to the C r ypt which is strange seeing how ex- haustively he dealt with the church in his 'Annals of St. Olave's.'
The late Bryan Corcoran, in his excellent Guide to the Church, says :
" Unfortunately the ancient crypt beneath the- church, probably divided into several vaults, with its beautiful black and white marble squares, instead of being cleared out and preserved, was filled up in 1853."
