NATIONAL STYLE 215 



The following sentence might be proposed as a puzzle to 

 school-boys. Examine and analyse its structure. You will 

 find it difficult to determine whether Scaliger or Muretus was 

 the old friend and the guest : l 



In September, 1562, Muretus came to France, and as an old friend 

 of bis father, Julius Cassar Scaliger, and bis guest at Agen, Joseph was as 

 much with him as Muret's only occasional visit to Paris from Charlieu 

 made possible. 



Take the next, and explain to which of the plurals in this pro- 

 position the italicised word their should logically be referred : 2 



Not so many places were ravaged by the Protestants as suffered 

 from the Catholic troops, but as many or more in proportion to their 

 numbers. 



I have chosen these instances of slovenly writing almost 

 at random from Mr. Pattison's justly famous Quarterly 

 articles on the Stephenses and Scaliger, and from the 

 fragment of his * Life of Joseph Scaliger.' They show that 

 in England even a thinker so vigorous, a man of learning so 

 exact, and a critic so scrupulous as the late Rector of Lincoln 

 College, is capable of ignoring the graces of form, and 

 violating the rules of language. Mr. Pattison pours contempt 

 on French schon-geisterei, girds at the shallowness of Italian 

 erudition, and utters the astonishing paradox that ' disgust 

 at pedantry prevents French writing from ever rising above 

 the level of good drawing-room conversation." 3 Yet when 

 he uses his own mother tongue, he blunders into linguistic 

 errors which would have brought the ferule of the pedagogue 

 down with force upon the knuckles of Poliziano, and which 

 M, Nisard would have accounted more discreditable than a 

 false quantity. If learning, long study of the Greek and 

 Latin classics, and the aristocratic habit of mind which lends 

 an almost arrogant hauteur to this exacting scholar, could not 

 preserve him from such ugly vulgarisms, we have the right 

 to demand more of schon-geisterei and less of scientific 

 pedantry. 



1 Pattison's Essays, vol. i. p. 206. 2 Ibid. p. 235. 



3 Ibid. p. 116. 



