diers, lawyers, doctors, huntsmen, architects, and cooks owe to France, has been fairly acknowledged. Italy has given us the words ever in the mouths of our painters, sculptors, and musicians. The Portuguese traders, three hundred years ago, helped us to many terms well known to our merchants. Germany, the parent of long-winded sentences, has sent us very few words; and these remind us of the Thirty Years' War, when English and Scotch soldiers were fighting on the right side.[1] To make amends for all this borrowing, England supplies foreigners (too long enslaved) with her own staple — namely, the diction of free political life.[2] In this she has had many hundred years' start of almost every nation but the Hungarians; she has, it is true, no home-born word for coup d'état; but she may well take pride in being the mother of Parliaments, even as old Rome was the source of civil law.[3]
- ↑ The word plunder is due to this war. The Indian Mutiny gave us loot, and the American Civil War created the bummer, called of old marauder.
- ↑ I take the following from D'Azeglio's Letters to his wife, page 244 (published in 1871): ‘Abbiamo avuto qui Cobden, il famoso dell' Anti-Corn-Laws-League. Ho dovuto far l'inglese puro sangue, più che si potesse, coi speeches e i toast, che sono stati i seguenti: “a S.M. Carlo Alberto — alla Queen Victoria — a Cobden.”’ The great patriot, as we see, makes rather a hash of his English. We also supply foreigners with sportsmanlike terms; le groom anglais est pour le cheval français.
- ↑ Coup d'état reminds me of one effect of Napoleonism. The greatest of French Reviews says in an article on Manzoni (July 15, 1873): ‘quantité de termes, qui n'étaient permis qu'aux halles, ont passé dans le langage de la cour.’ Paris is here meant.
