into French. It is curious that the spoken language should have developed into this unique isolated instrument, since written French is extremely like any of the other Latin languages; but so it is.

There are no worse linguists in Europe than the French. But this may also be because they care so little about learning foreign languages, have so little esteem for them. It is rare to find a cultivated Frenchman who can speak English with even tolerable ungrammatical fluency, though shopkeepers and hotel porters in France of course speak some English, because it is to their financial advantage to do so. Moreover, even a literary knowledge of other languages is rare among the French. When reputable English or Italian authors have occasion to insert a French sentence in a novel the sentence is usually correct; a French author can seldom so much as quote a foreign phrase correctly. Paul Morand, who, I believe, has spent many years in the Diplomatic Service, and whose brilliant cosmopolitan short stories do reveal interest in the national characteristics of other peoples, is frequently guilty of solecisms in the foreign phrases he now and then employs. In Henri Béraud's excellent historical novel, Le Vitriol-de-Lune, the principal character is an Italian who is called, throughout the book, 'Guiseppe,' though Giuseppe is one of the commonest Italian names. Alone among the contemporary French writers with whose work I am acquainted André Maurois reveals a genuine knowledge of English. And it is significant that he, too, is practically alone in revealing a genuine sympathetic understanding of the English people. Les Silences du Colonel Bramble occasionally crosses the line into national caricature; but it is at least caricature based on knowledge, not wild, unrelated caricature like Abel Hermant's. As for Ariel, a work of far greater importance-well, written by an Italian, it would have been, if surprising, at least credible, since there are many Italians who love and understand Shelley; written by a Frenchman, it appears little short of miraculous. But I repeat that André Maurois stands alone.1

So, reluctantly, I end, as I began, with those two irreconcilable, but I think equally justified, estimates of the Frenchsave that each has at the moment lost something of its intensity for me through the relief of putting it into written words.

It will not be the French who will overthrow the barriers between races, sacrifice their nationality to something broader and greater, or conduct the League of Nations to a position of supreme importance. True, there are those moments of national madness

1 I do not happen to have read anything by Valéry Larbaud, but from what I read about him I conclude that possibly M. Maurois may find a little relief from loneliness in his company.

when it is as though the French were atoni narrowness. But one cannot say: 'Con moment of madness.' No, for the achiever cumscribed ideals the world will have to who in their growth have gradually sloughe restrictive and myopic in their nationality. come in the past, and should come increasin many different peoples-hardly from the 1

On the other hand, even though we ma is narrowing, and that at best it should b end, we may nevertheless be actually gra have made it an end in itself. The similar Poles arouses principally distaste; in the excuse, but admire it. For there is about i their case alone, something akin to the resul tion in agriculture, something that the best must sacrifice (rightly, I think) to broader an orderliness of thought, a fine, neat thoro achievement in any other way than thr nurture of nationality, and to the contempla always turn with pleasure.

CLAU

It is a thousand pities that the old association of rosemary with Christmas should have been allowed to lapse. Time was when its fragrant grey-green branches mingled on every hand, in both church and home, with the dark shining sprays of holly and ivy, holding proud rank with them, if not indeed surpassing them in closeness of tie with the festival. Old writings and old carols make this point abundantly clear. The poet Gay, over two centuries ago, even speaks of rosemary as a herald of Christmas:

When Rosemary and Bays-the poet's crown

Are bawl'd in frequent cries through all the town,
Then judge the festival of Christmas near,
Christmas the joyous period of the year;

while churchwardens' accounts referring to the amounts paid for greenery for church decorations frequently include payments for rosemary. Thus in the records of St. Margaret's, Westminster, for VOL. XCVIII-No. 586

797

3 F

1647, two years before King Charles was be paid for Rosemarie and Bayes that were st at Christmas, Is. 6d.' Indeed, our forefath so lavish in their Christmas joy that later t at the plethora of ivy, holly, and rosemar church into shady walks' and 'arbours.'

Not less abundant was it in the hous Christmas carol included in Poor Robin's Al of much older date-describes how:

With holly and ivy

So green and so gay
We deck up our houses
As fresh as the day.
With bays and rosemary
And laurels compleat
And everyone now

Is a king in conceit;

and Herrick, a century earlier, makes it pl habitual even in Elizabethan days, for in of the doings on Candlemas Eve, Februa which was the taking down of the Christm exclaims:

Down with the Rosemary and so
Down with the Baies and Mistletoe,
Down with the Holly, Ivy, all

Wherewith ye dressed the Christmas h

and the fact that its name comes first suggests the chief of the evergreens used. A small bu point is that rosemary and bays are almost in together in these old writings, while holly an linked, and the reason for this association is unless, indeed, the holly and ivy are merely rosemary and bay have certain aromatic qualit

It is, perhaps, a little curious that rosemary this prominent part in the celebration of the f most truly national one, for it is not really a Bri not known here until the middle of the fourtee manuscripts tell us that the first rosemary plant were sent over here by the Countess of Hainau her daughter Philippa, who had married our Edv thus Queen of England. With the plants the ( fully sent a Latin treatise setting forth the inherent in them. Writers of the time speak c that the scole of Sallerne wroat to the Cuntasse sche sente the copie to hir dougter Philip the qu Apparently the book was commissioned by the C

translation of it (still preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge) the translator (who describes himself as ' danyll bain,' or, as we should say to-day, Daniel Bain) refers to his work thus: 'This is ye lityl boke of ye vertuys of rosmaryn yt ye scole of Salerne gaderyd and compiled at instance of ye Cowntesse of Henowde, I, danyll bain, translated into vulgar ynglysch worde for werde as fonde in latyn.' Daniel Bain further adds that before 1432 rosemary was unknown in England.

The Countess evidently knew what would please her daughter, for Queen Philippa appears to have delighted in treatises of this sort, and there are in the British Museum and elsewhere still existing various little 'bokes' on the virtues of herbs which once belonged to her.

Rosemary seems to have 'caught on ' in a wonderful way, and Miss Eleanor Rohde, in her Old English Herbals, gives a list of fourteenth and fifteenth century documents that were written (and are yet extant) to extol rosmaryne, rosemary, rosus marinus, rose mary, rosses mare, or rose-marry, as it is variously called. The title of one of them-' The Vertu of Rose-marry and other Secrets' (fifteenth century)-has a distinctly intriguing sound. But apparently (according to Miss Rohde) none of them, except the first 'litel boke,' mentions the rather pretty old tradition that rosemary never grew taller than the height of Christ when He was man on earth, and, moreover, that when it is thirty-three years old its growth upwards stops, any further increase being in girth only. This tradition still lingers in remote country parts.

The plant thus became notable and of widespread reputation; and some of its virtues, evidently based on those given in Queen Philippa's book, are quaintly set out in the first English herbal that was ever printed-Bancke's Herbal, 'imprynted by me Rycharde Banckes/ dwellynge in Lōdō/ a lytel fro ye Stockes in ye Pultry/ ye XXV day of Marche. The yere of our Lorde MCCCCC & XXV.' Reading them through, one is struck with what our friends across the Atlantic would call their 'uplift,' general beneficence and exhilaration. Thus we are told:

'Take the flowers thereof and make powder thereof and binde it to thy right arme in a linnen cloath and it shale make thee light and merrie.'

'Also put the leaves under thy bedde and thou shalt be delivered of all evill dreams.' (Always has rosemary been bound up with the idea of happy dreams. I dreamt last night of Rosemary; that betokens Honour,' wrote Estcourt in 1706.)

But not only did it invigorate the mind and spirit: it also helped the body to greater beauty:

'Boyle the leaves in white wine and washe thy face therewith and thy browes and thou shalt have a fair face.'