d particularly the Russians, write French tolerably well.
The present Lord Mahon and Lady Montaigne, in an excellent _Essay on
Marriage_, are exceptions to the rule. Voltaire used to say,--

"Faites tous vos vers a Paris;
Et n'allez pas en Allemagne!"

And very right he was. His kingly disciple committed more than once such
Irish rhymes as these:

"Je vais cueillir dans leurs sentiers (des Muses)
De fraiches et charmantes roses;
Et je dedaigne les lauriers,
En exceptant les lauriers _sauces_."

Forgetting the difference of pronunciation between the soft _s_ of _rose
(roze)_ and the lisping sound of the _c_ in _sauce (soss)_. As I have not
by me the ponderous and voluminous works of the poetical monarch, I may
have altered some of the words of the quotation; but the rhymes _sauce_ and
_rose_ I aver to be true to the primitive copy. Even Protestant refugees,
born of French parents, brought up amongst their co-religionists and
countrymen, wrote a strange gibberish, often ungrammatical, always
unidiomatic, of which traces may be found even in Basnage and Ancillon. A
recent French theologian, the clever author of a Life of Spinosa, written
in Germany and published in Paris with some success, has such expressions
as these:

"Les villes protestantes preferent la liberte avec Calvin QUE la
tyrannique concorde avec Luther."--_Hist. Crit. du Rationalisme_, p.
49.

"Et ailleuz: Stuttgard Dontil etait conservateur DE LA
Bibliotheque."-_Ib_.

And M. Amand Saintes is a Frenchman, and a most erudite man. The Celebrated
Frau Bettina von Arnim, who dared to translate into English and to print in
Berlin (apud Trowitzsch and Son, 1838), under the new title of _Diary of a
Child_, her own untranslateable letters to Goethe, had at least the very
good excuse of her nationality for her peculiar English, the choicest,
funniest, maddest, and saddest English ever penned on this planet or in any
other, and of which I hope "N. & Q." will accept some small specimens,
taken at random among thousands such. To begin with the opening address:

"_To the English Bards_.

"Gentlemen!--The noble cup of your mellifluous tongue so often brimmed
with immortality, here filled with odd but pure and fiery draught, do
not refuse to taste if you relish its spirit to be homefelt, though not
home-born."

"BETTINA ARNIM."

We will next pass to the "Preamble":

"The translating of Goethe's Corre