it may be doubted whether in forty years he
could have mastered the language as he has done if he had not married a
native. French has been his home language for 30 years and more, and the
perfect ease and naturalness of his diction are due to the powerful home
influences, especially to the influence of children. A child is born
that speaks the foreign tongue from the first inarticulate beginnings
It makes its own child language, and the father as he hears it is born
over again in the foreign land by tender paternal sympathy. Gradually
the sweet child-talk gives place to the perfect tongue and the father
follows it by insensible gradations, himself the most docile of pupils,
led onward rather than instructed by the winning and playful little
master, incomparably the best of masters. The process here is nature's
own inimitable process. Every new child that is born to a man so
situated carries him through a repetition of that marvellous course of
teaching. The language _grows_ in his brain from the first
rudiments--the real natural rudiments, not the hard rudiments of the
grammarian--just as plants grow naturally from their seeds. It has not
been built by human processes of piecing together, but has developed
itself like a living creature. This way of learning a language possesses
over the dictionary process exactly the kind of superiority which a
living man, developed naturally from the foetus, possesses over the
elastic anatomical man-model of the ingenious doctor Auzoux. The
doctor's models are remarkably perfect in construction, they have all
the organs, but they have not life.

When, however, this natural process of growth is allowed to go forward
without watchful care, it is likely to displace the mother tongue. It is
sometimes affirmed that the impressions of childhood are never effaced,
that the mother tongue is _never_ forgotten. It may be that it is never
wholly forgotten, except in the case of young children, but it may
become so imperfect as to be practically of little use. I knew an
Italian who came to France as a young man and learned his profession
there. He was afterwards naturalized, married a French lady, had several
children, pursued a very successful career in Paris, and became
ultimately French Ambassador at the court of Victor Emmanuel. His French
was so perfect that it was quite impossible for any one to detect the
usual Italian accents. I used to count him as a remarkable and almost
solitary instan