who is a Rugby and Cambridge man, have some effect in arousing his
countrymen to the study which they have heretofore so strangely
neglected of a tongue which threatens to obliterate in time the
inconveniences occasioned by the Tower of Babel. English is every day
more and more spoken, and French less and less.

In delivering his address of welcome to M. Lemoinne, M. Cavillier Fleury
said: "You are one of the creators of the discussion of foreign affairs
in the French papers: you gave them the taste for interesting themselves
in the concerns of foreign countries. Few of us before steam had
shortened distance really knew England. Voltaire had by turns glorified
and ridiculed it; De Staël had shown it to us in an agreeable book; the
witty letters of Duvergier de Hauranne had revealed the secrets of its
electoral system. Your correspondence of 1841 completed the work." He
might pertinently have added, "Because you are about the only French
newspaper writer who ever thoroughly understood the English language,
and could thus avoid ridiculous blunders."

It has been observed that the _Débats_ almost exclusively supplies the
Academy with its contingent of publicists--a circumstance accounted for
by that journal being jealous of the purity of its language, and in
other respects preserving a high and dignified standard. It has, indeed,
for an unusually long period enjoyed its reputation. French and Belgian
newspapers are very much of a mystery to an Anglo-Saxon. They seem to
flourish under conditions impracticable to American or English journals.
The _Indépendance Belge_ and the _Journal des Débats_ lie before us.
Neither of them contains sufficient advertisements to make up three of
our columns, yet their expenses must, we should suppose, especially in
the case of the _Débats_, published as it is where prices are so high,
be very large. Both these papers contain articles evidently the work of