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FRENCH-ENGLISH.

All recent works of fiction exhibit the deplorable corruption of the vernacular English.  You cannot open a novel or book of travels printed within the present year without stumbling on French or Italian words, and so frequent is their occurrence, that they are often printed in the same type as the rest of the page, not in italic, as of old.  In short, some of the authors of the present day seem to have “worn their language to rags, and patched it up with scraps and ends of foreign.”  This, in great measure proceeds from “some far-journeyed gentlemen, who, at their return home, powder their talk with over-sea language.  He that cometh lately out of France, will talk French-English, and never blush at the matter.”

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DEBAUCHERIES OF PARIS.

We see daily instances giving us cause to lament protracted residence abroad, and also the haunts of incessant transit across the channel, which makes our young men more familiar with the passages, arcades, and cafes of the Palais Royal, than with the streets of our own metropolis.  We have seen many who could name each single quay along the borders of the Seine; but who were totally ignorant of those great works of art, the bridges, docks, and warehouses of their native Thames, otherwise than as they were hurried past them in the Calais steam-boat.

Quarterly Review.

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We have been somewhat amused with the oddity of a few similes in the article in Phillips’s State Trials, in the last No. of the Edinburgh Review.  Thus an ordinary reader would lose his way in Howell’s State Trials, at the second page, “from the number of volumes, smallness of print, &c.”  “A Londoner might as well take a morning walk through an Illinois prairie, or dash into a back-settlement forest, without a woodman’s aid.”  Mr. Phillips has “enclosed but a corner of the waste, swept little more than a single stall in the Augean stable;” “holding a candle to the back-ground of history,” &c.

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LORD COLLINGWOOD

Went to sea when eleven years old.  He used, himself, to tell as an instance of his simplicity at this time, “that as he was sitting crying for his separation from home, the first lieutenant observed him; and pitying the tender years of the poor child, spoke to him in terms of such encouragement and kindness, which, as Lord C. said, so won upon his heart, that taking this officer to his box, he offered him in gratitude a large piece of plum cake, which his mother had given him.”

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CHANGES OF SOCIETY.