Word: french
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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...volume in French, which a scandalized bench...
...ministry may have charms for me. In either case, dead Latin and Greek are better than living English, German, and French to inspire me for future work...
...would be an easy matter to find similar remarks on English in the writings of French authors. M. Taine claims to appreciate our language and literature at least as fully as any of his countrymen; but in his remarks on Shakespeare you can see, if you examine at all closely, a lurking pity for the poor islanders who have found nothing better than an extremely improbable and barbarous language to express their ideas...
...language surprising and ridiculous which is not his own. This point is well illustrated by Montesquieu, who makes nis countrymen ask their visitor from the East, "Comment peut-on etre Persan?" But Heine, whom we quoted above, was above the influence of this prejudice, as he knew Italian and French very thoroughly, and never found anything ludicrous in the sound of these languages. Since this is so, we must conclude that there was to him something particularly unexpected about the sounds of English. In fact, there is as little in the sounds of the English language that indicates that...
...love of the beautiful reigned supreme, uncontaminated by the more artificial tastes of later times, when genius commanded the respect and position which gold does now, and painters and sculptors held a rank second to none in the estimation of the people. In modern schools of art-the French and German, for example-we find much of good, but fail to discover any lofty devotion to the cause; for the money-getting mania of the nineteenth century rules even men of genius, and much rubbish is cast upon the world in the shape of carelessly executed work. Still, we here...