Russia's alphabet
was withdrawn from the nurseries as abruptly as it had been brought in,
and le chapean de la cousine du jardinier was re-indued with its old
importance.

I doubt whether Russian would for more than a little while have seemed
to be a likely rival of French, even if M. Kerensky had been the
strong man we hoped he was. The language that succeeded to Latin as the
official mode of intercourse between nations, and as the usual means of
talk between the well-educated people of any one land and those of any
other, had an initial advantage not quite counterbalanced by the fact
that there are in Russia myriads of people who speak Russian, and a few
who can also read and write it. Russian may, for aught I know, be a very
beautiful language; it may be as lucid and firm in its constructions as
French is, and as musical in sound; I know nothing at all about it. Nor
do I claim for French that it was by its own virtues predestined to the
primacy that it holds in Europe. Had Italy, not France, been an united
and powerful nation when Latin became desuete, that primacy would of
course have been taken by Italian. And I cannot help wishing that this
had happened. Italian, though less elegant, is, for the purpose of
writing, a richer language than French, and an even subtler; and the
sound of it spoken is as superior to the sound of French as a violin's
is to a flute's. Still, French does, by reason of its exquisite
concision and clarity, fill its post of honour very worthily, and will
not in any near future, I think, be thrust down. Many people, having
regard to the very numerous population of the British Empire and the
United States, cherish a belief that English will presently be cock of
the world's walk. But we have to consider that English is an immensely
odd and irregular language, that it is accounted very difficult by even
the best foreign linguists, and that even among native writers there
are few who can so wield it as to make their meaning clear without
prolixity--and among these few none who has not been well-grounded
in Latin. By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than
defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent
vehicle for emotional poetry. But foreigners don't much want to say
beautiful haunting things to us; they want to be told what limits there
are, if any, to the power of the Lord Mayor; and our rambling endeavours
to explain do but bemuse and annoy them. They find tha