Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's,
opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and
French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a
Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize)
the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what
sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.

Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth--a
mere social test--a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter
_h_, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French
education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters
there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into
consideration; it was not to be done at the price.

In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their
sons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by the
way, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee for
bed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something like
thirty pounds a year.

The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes of
exclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so grateful
and comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly British
public-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a dead
language. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never had
before; some of us even manage to do so already.

That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point their
morals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty,