The French as a nation have been rather distinguished by their neglect and contempt of all languages save their own; and among those who have mistranslated foreign idioms and mis-spelt foreign words, their travellers deserve a pre-eminent post. One Monsieur Grosley, who wrote about the beginning of the reign of George the Third, committed a most amusing variety of mistakes of both these kinds. He told the good people of Paris, on the authority of M. Condamine, a valuable correspondent, that the boys in London would sometimes call a Frenchman son babitch (we will not correct the orthography); that the orator of the House of Commons was called Le Spik (Speaker) ; and that when members would claim attention to what was said in debate, they shouted ya! ya!

As this Sieur Grosley was so well qualified for it, he went occasionally into disquisitions on the orthography and orthoepy of English words; and he made the notable discovery that the English people pronounced the name of Cromwell as though it were spelt Caramuel. He was only a very short time in England, where some wicked wags must have amused themselves with his ignorance of the language, and have imposed on his credulity by mistranslating words of very different meaning or orthography, but which have the same, or nearly the same, sound when hastily pronounced. To obtain the character of an attentive observer, the ingenious Frenchman sometimes said that he himself had seen the marvellous things he described. Thus, in speaking of the melancholy character of the English people and their predilection for suicide, he said that high balustrades were placed upon all the bridges of London, to prevent them from drowning themselves; and that the banks of the Thames were, as far as possible, carefully blocked up-and that yet, in spite of all these cares, he himself saw eight-and-twenty skulls taken up from that part of the river where a new bridge (Blackfriars) was building. Here had evidently been some wag's double-entendre, and play upon the words -skull, the bone which incases and defends the human brain, and scull, a sort of boat-oar. But on the subject of

oars, poor Grosley was destined to be very unfortunate, and to make a mistake that seriously committed the moral reputation of our London watermen from Wapping old stairs to Vauxhall ferry; for he told the good people of France, who, no doubt, religiously believed the assertion, that he never approached the water-side, but those shameless men came running after him from the public-houses crying out "Des putaines, des putaines, voulez-vous des putaines?"

Our traveller described the fashionable amusement of le boulingrin (the bowling-green); and was very eloquent on the subject of our church-windows, employing another little bit of English on the occasion. The light admitted by those large windows, he tells us, is "nécessaire sans doute sous un ciel communément embrumné, mais éblouissant dans les Glorious Dai."

It should appear that up to that time the French nation had remained ignorant of the nature of an English convivial toast. M. Grosley enlightened them on this head, telling them that "le Tost" is that portion of the day in England in which, when the cloth is removed after dinner, when the ladies have retired and the dining-room has been suffisamment garnie de pots-de-chambre, chacun, les coudes sur la table, se faisant passer de l'un à l'autre, les bouteilles, boit et arrange l'état.

Another French tourist, who published his observations on England shortly after the peace of 1815, gave some additional information regarding le Tost, which will be new to some of our readers.

"In the Bacchanalian exercise of the tost, the lover gives his mistress, the merchant his correspondent, the clergyman his bishop, the bishop his primate, and the primate the Protestant cause; and thus they all get drunk in the politest manner in the world."

The same ingenious writer called our pugilistic combats "Le Boxk." Everybody, he says, knows the passion of all classes and conditions of the English for the Boxk; and he adds, "The Boxk is an indispensable part of a gentleman's education,-fathers and mothers make their children fight in their presence; the professors do

the same in all schools and colleges, and the Boxkeurs begin by butting with their heads_like rams." (Shades of Cribb, Gulley, Belcher, and Dutch Sam, how your noble science of defence has been traduced by the ignorance of a Frenchman!) The extravagant amateurs (les amateurs outrés) of horse-racing, we are informed, are called "Black-legs," from the colour of their boots, which they never take off. (Query, did Monsieur wear white boots?) The "Bond-street loungers" are said to derive the name from a light repast in the middle of the day, which they take in the eating-houses, and which is called a lounge (qy. lunch ?). The patriots of England, according to another accomplished French tourist, are called Wigghes, from the Isle of Wiggh, where all runaway matches are made. But this is less amusing than the felicitous accuracy of a Parisian journalist, who translates the title of our newspaper, "The Independent Whig," by "La Perruque Indépendante.”

The intelligent Spaniard, the Rev. Blanco White, who from his long residence among us, and his devotion to our literature, has attained to write English with classical purity, relates two very amusing_errors he fell into when he first visited our capital. "I still recollect," he says, "the unlucky hit I made on my arrival in London, when, anxious beyond measure to catch every idiomatic expression, and reading the huge inscription of the Cannon Brewery at Knightsbridge, as the building had some resemblance to the great cannon foundry in this town (Seville), I settled it in my mind that the genuine English idiom for what I now should call casting, was no other than brewing cannon. This, however, was a mere verbal mistake. Not so that which I made when the word Nursery' stared me in the face every five minutes, as in a fine afternoon I approached your great metropolis, on the western road. Luxury and wealth, said I to myself, in a tone approaching to philosophic indignation, have at last blunted the best feelings of nature among the English! Surely, if I am to judge from this endless string of nurseries, the English ladies have gone a step beyond the unnatural practice of devolving their first

maternal duties upon domestic hirelings. Here, it seems the poor helpless infants are sent to be kept and suckled in crowds, in a decent kind of Foundling-hospitals. You may easily guess that I knew but one signification of the words nursing and nursery. Fortunately, I was not collecting materials for a book of travels during a summer excursion; otherwise I should now be enjoying all the honour of the originality of my remarks on the customs and manners of old England."*

In the new Dictionnaire de la Conversation et de la Lecture,' a work of great pretension,—wherein peers of France write, and every man signs his own name, and mostly at length, and which is now in course of publication in livraisons, or parts, at Paris,-we have just been shown the following very laughable mistranslation. Monsieur H. Bouchitté, in writing the life of the German theosophist and mystic visionary, Jacob Boehm, gives a list of his numerous works, among which he sets down as one, 'Reflections on Isaiah's boots.' Now these said reflections were applied by Boehm to a theological and controversial treatise, written by a learned divine called Isaiah Stiefel; but Stiefel, as well as being a family name, is the German word for the English boot, French botte, and hence, with the help of a little blundering, came M. Bouchitté's “Reflexions sur les bottes d'Isaie."

The English translator of Beckman's History of Inventions,' calls Barnabò Visconti, one of the signors, or lords of Milan, the Viscount Barnabbo; but this is nothing compared with Hoole, the translator, or traitor † of Tasso and Ariosto, who renders, "I colubri Viscontei," or Viscontian snakes (meaning the arms, or crest of that family), by "the Calabrian Viscounts!"

The French tranlsator of one of Walter Scott's novels, knowing nothing of that familiar name for toasted-cheese, "a Welsh rabbit," rendered it literally by "un lapin du

*Letters from Spain, by Don Leucadio Doblado.

According to an Italian saying, I traduttori sono traditori, or, "Translators are traitors."

pays de Galles," or, a rabbit of Wales, and then told his readers in a note, that the lapins, or rabbits of Wales, have a very superior flavour, which makes them be in great request in England.

The writer of the Neapolitan government paper, ‘Il Giornale delle due Sicilie,' was more ingenuous. He was translating from some English newspaper the account of a man who had killed his wife by striking her with a poker, and at the end of his story the honest journalist, with a modesty unusual in his craft, said "Non sappiamo per certo se questo pokero Inglese, sia uno strumento domestico o bensi chirurgico "-(We are not quite certain whether this English poker (pokero) be a domestic or surgical instrument).

During the last war, an English newspaper told its readers that the whole army of the Archduke Charles was "on horseback, upon the Danube." The reporter of this startling news had been translating from the Moniteur, and did not happen to know the value of a common French military idiom-être à cheval, "to be on both sides of," and signifying, in this instance, that a part of the archduke's army was on the left, and part on the right bank of the Danube.

A writer in the Quarterly Review, in translating from an interesting Italian pamphlet, which gave an account of the sudden seizure by French gensdarmes of the person of Pius VII., makes the Pope say, "Here we are, and here we must remain ;" while the Italian idiomatic expression, "Ci siamo e bisogna starvi," meant "We are in trouble, and we must face it," or, more familiarly, "We are in for it, and must get out of it as well as we ." But the "bisogna starci," which may be rendered into French by il y faut faire face, meant anything rather than "here we must remain; " which desponding expression spoiled the whole context, and gave a false notion of the old Pope's conduct, which was firm and spirited on that trying occasion.

can.

In a surgical treatise on diseases of the bladder, the English author, in order to avoid a coarser expression, says, that in such time after an operation which he re