ot, Lamartine, Dupin,
Arago, &c. &c. are quite sufficient to demonstrate this--but simply
from the intricacy and difficulty of the French language. A worthy
alderman gets up, as the phrase is, and addresses a speech of some
three quarters of an hour to the collective wisdom of the livery; and
although he may be frequently interrupted by thunders of applause, he
is never checked for any solecisms in his grammar: he may drive a
coach and six through Lindley Murray; he may inflict heaven knows how
many fractures on poor Priscian's head, yet to criticise him on so
mean a score as that of mere diction, would not be thought of for a
moment. Not so in France: the language is one of equivoque and
subtlety; the misplacement of a particle, the change of a gender, the
employment of any phrase but the exact one, might be at any moment
fatal to the sense of the speaker, and would inevitably be so to his
success. It was not very long since, that a worthy deputy interrupted
M. Thiers by alleging the non-sequitur of some assertion, "_Vous n'est
pas consequent_," cried the indignant member, using a phrase not only
a vulgarism in itself, but inapplicable at the time. A roar of
laughter followed his interruption. In all the journals of the next
day, he was styled the deputy _consequent_; and when he returned to
his constituency the ridicule attached to his blunder still traced his
steps, and finally lost him his election.

"Thank God I am a Briton," said Nelson; a phrase, doubtless, many more
of us will re-echo with equal energy; but while we are expressing our
gratitude let our thankfulness extend to this gratifying fact, that
the liberty of our laws is even surpassed by the licence of our
language. No obscure recess of our tongue is so deep that we cannot by
_habeas corpus_ right bring up a long-forgotten phrase, and provided
the speaker have a meaning and be able to convey it to the minds of
his hearers, we are seldom disposed to be critical on the manner, if
the matter be there. Besides this, there are styles of eloquence so
imbued with the spirit of certain eras in French history, that the
discussion of any subject of ancient or modern days, will always have
its own peculiar character of diction. Thus, there is the rounded
period and flowing sententiousness of Louis XIV., the more polished
but less forcible phraseology of the regency itself, succeeded by the
epigrammatic taste and pointed brevity introduced by Voltaire. The
empire l