among the other French words belonging to the same department which became English before the end of the thirteenth century' are armour, assault, banner, battle, fortress, lance, siege, standard, and tower—all of them made citizens of our vocabulary, after having renounced their allegiance to their native land. Another quotation from Dr. Bradley imposes itself. He tells us that the English writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries felt themselves at liberty to introduce a French word whenever they pleased. 'The innumerable words brought into the language in this way are naturally of the most varied character with regard to meaning. Many of them, which supplied no permanent need of the language, have long been obsolete.'

This second sentence may well give us heart of hope considering the horde of French terms which invaded our tongue in the long years of the Great War. If camion and avion, vrille and escadrille supply no permanent need of the language they may soon become obsolete, just as mitrailleuse and franc-tireur slipped out of sight soon after the end of the Franco-Prussian war of fifty years ago. A French modification of the American 'gatling' was by them called a mitrailleuse; and nowadays we have settled down to the use of machine-gun. A franc-tireur was an irregular volunteer often incompletely uniformed; and when he was captured the Prussians shot him as a guerrilla. It will be a welcome relief if camouflage, as popular five years ago as fin-de-siècle twenty-five years ago, shall follow that now unfashionable vocable into what an American president once described as 'innocuous desuetude'. Perhaps we may liken mitrailleuse and franc-tireur, vrille and escadrille, brisance and rafale, to the foreign labourers who cross the frontier to aid in the harvest and who return to their own country when the demand for their service is over.

III

The principle which ought to govern can be stated simply. English should be at liberty to help itself freely to every foreign word which seems to fill a want in our own language. It ought to take these words on probation, so to speak, keeping those which prove themselves useful, and casting out those which are idle or rebellious. And then those which are retained ought to become completely English, in pronunciation, in accent, in spelling, and in the formation of their plurals. No doubt this is to-day a counsel of perfection; but it indicates the goal which should be strived for. It is what English was capable of accomplishing prior to the middle of the seventeenth century. It is what English may be able to accomplish in the middle of the twentieth century, if we once awaken to the danger of contaminating our speech with unassimilated words, and to the disgrace, which our stupidity or laziness must bring upon us, of addressing the world in a pudding-stone and piebald language. Dr. Bradley has warned us that 'the pedantry that would bid us reject the word fittest for our purpose because it is not of native origin ought to be strenuously resisted'; and I am sure that he would advocate an equally strenuous resistance to the pedantry which would impose upon us words of alien tongue still clad in foreign uniform.

Mark Twain once remarked that 'everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it'. And many people think that we might as well hope to direct the course of the winds as to order the evolution of our speech. Some words have proved intractable. In the course of the past two centuries and a half, scores and even hundreds of French words have domiciled themselves in English without relinquishing their French characteristics. Consider the sad case of élite (which Byron used a hundred years ago), of encore (which Steele used two hundred years ago) of parvenu (which Gifford used in 1802), of ennui (which Evelyn used in 1667), and of nuance (which Walpole used in 1781).

No one hesitates to accept these words and to employ them frequently. Ennui and nuance are two words which cannot well be spared, but which we are unable to reproduce in our native vocalization. Their French pronunciation is out of the question. What can be done? Can anything be done? We may at least look the facts in the face and govern our own individual conduct by the results of this scrutiny. There is no reason why we should not accept what is a fact; and it is a fact that ennui has been adopted. So long ago as 1805 Sidney Smith used it as a verb and said that he had been ennuied. Why not therefore frankly and boldly pronounce it as English—ennwee? Why not forswear French again and pronounce nuance without trying vainly to preserve the Gallic nasality of the second n—newance? And as for a third necessary word, timbre. I can only register here my complete concurrence with the opinion expressed in Tract No. 3 of the Society for Pure English—that the 'English form of the French sound of the word would be approximately tamber; and this would be not only a good English-sounding word, like amber and chamber, but would be like our tambour, which is tympanum, which again is timbre'.

Why should not séance (which was used by Charles Lamb in 1803) drop its French accent and take an English pronunciation—see-ance? Why should not garage and barrage rhyme easily with marriage? Marriage itself came to us from the French; and it sets a good example to these two latest importations. Logic would suggest this, of course; but then logic does not always guide our linguistic practices. And here, again, I am glad to accept another suggestion which I find in Tract No. 3, that naivety be recognized and pronounced as an English word, and that 'a useful word like malaise could with advantage reassume the old form "malease" which it once possessed'.

I have asked why these thoroughly acclimated French words should not be made to wear our English livery; and to this question Dr. Bradley supplied an answer when he declared that 'culture is one of the influences which retard the process of simplification'. A man of culture is likely to be familiar with one or more foreign languages; and perhaps he may be a little vain of his intimacy with them. He prefers to give the proper French pronunciation to the words which he recognizes as French; and moreover as the possession of culture, or even of education, does not imply any knowledge of the history of English or of the principles which govern its growth, the men of culture are often inclined to pride themselves on this pedantic procedure.

It is, perhaps, because the men of culture in the United States are fewer in proportion to the population that American usage is a little more encouraging than the British. Just as we Americans have kept alive not a few old words which have been allowed to drop out of the later vocabulary of the United Kingdom, so we have kept alive—at least to a certain extent—the power of complete assimilation. Restaurant, for example, is generally pronounced as though its second syllable rhymed with 'law', and its third with 'pant'. Trait is pronounced in accordance with its English spelling, and therefore very few Americans have ever discovered the pun in the title of Dr. Doran's book, 'Table Traits, and something on them'. I think that most Americans rhyme distrait to 'straight' and not to 'stray'. Annexe has become annex; programme has become program—although the longer form is still occasionally seen; and sometimes coterie and reverie are 'cotery' and 'revery'—in accord with the principle which long ago simplified phantasie to fantasy. Charade like marmalade rhymes with made. Brusk seems to be supplanting brusque as risky is supplanting risqué.