commented at some length on the beauty and moral significance ol the French phrase s’orienter and called on his young friends to practise upon it in life.  There was not a Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out what was about east, and to shape his course accordingly.  This charm which a familiar expression gains by being commented, as it were, and. set in a new light by a foreign language, is curious and instructive.  I cannot help thinking that Mr. Matthew Arnold forgets this a little too much sometimes when he writes of the beauties of French style.  It would not be hard to find in the works of French Academicians phrases as coarse as those he cites from Burke, only they are veiled by the unfamiliarity of the language.  But, however this may be, it is certain that poets and peasants please us in the same way by translating words back again to their primal freshness, and infusing them with a delightful strangeness which is anything but alienation.  What, for example, is Milton’s ‘edge of battle’ but a doing into English of the Latin acies?  Was die Gans gedacht das der Schwan vollbracht, what the goose but thought, that the swan full brought (or, to de-Saxonize it a little, what the goose conceived, that the swan achieved), and it may well be that the life, invention, and vigor shown by our popular speech, and the freedom with which it is shaped to the instant want of those who use it, are of the best omen for our having a swan at last.  The part I have taken on myself is that of the humbler bird.

But it is affirmed that there is something innately vulgar in the Yankee dialect.  M. Sainte-Beuve says, with his usual neatness:  ’Je definis un patois une ancienne langue qui a eu des malheurs, ou encore une langue toute jeune st qui n’a pas fait fortune.’ The first part of his definition applies to a dialect like the Provencal, the last to the Tuscan before Dante had lifted it into a classic, and neither, it seems to me, will quite fit a patois/, which is not properly a dialect, but rather certain archaisms, proverbial phrases, and modes of pronunciation, which maintain themselves among the uneducated side by side with the finished and universally accepted language.  Norman French, for example, or Scotch down to the time of James VI., could hardly be called patois, while I should be half inclined to name the Yankee a lingo rather than a dialect.  It has retained a few words now fallen into disuse in the mother country, like to tarry, to progress, fleshy, fall, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some, as in freshet; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the broad Norman pronunciation of e (which Moliere puts into the mouth of his rustics) in such words as sarvant, parfect, vartoo, and the like.  It maintains something of the French sound of a also in words like ch[)a]mber,