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I also learnt that shrugging the shoulders while exhibiting the palms of the hands, and smiting oneself vehemently on the chest, are indispensable elements of the French idiom. The indiscriminate use of the word 'parfaitement' I also noticed to be essential when at a loss for either language or ideas, and have made valuable use of it ever since.
And, in fact, what can be wanting to a species of instruction the object of which is to establish between the deaf and dumb, and the man who hears and speaks, a communication like that established between all men by the knowledge and practice of the same idiom; when the deaf and dumb man, by the help of the education given him, succeeds in decomposing into phrases the longest period; into simple propositions, the most complex phrase; into words, each proposition; into simple words, words the most complex: and when he distinguishes perfectly words derived from primitives; figurative words from proper ones; and when, after having thus decomposed the longest discourse, he recomposes it; when, in short, the deaf and dumb man expresses all his ideas, all his thoughts, and all his affections; when he answers, like men the best-informed, all questions put to him, respecting what he knows through the nature of his intelligence, and respecting what he has learned, either from himself or from him who has enlightened his understanding?
This opinion is very prevalent among the Poles, who, although speaking it with great facility, often better than their native tongue, and frequently using it in their intercourse with each other, yet complain to those who do not speak Polish of the impossibility of rendering the thousand ethereal and shifting modes of thought in any other idiom.
The Berkshires were not by nature proud of stomach, but Connor was a popular man, and the incident of the Sick Horse Depot, as reported by Corporal Bagshot, who kept a diary and a dictionary, tickled their imagination, and they went forth and swaggered before the Indian Native Contingent, singing a song made by Bagshot and translated into Irish idiom by William Connor.
He told them admirably, with a raciness of idiom which I had thought beyond him. They were long tales, and some were as broad as they were long, but Mr. Cargill disarmed criticism. His audience, rather scandalised at the start, were soon captured, and political troubles were forgotten in old-fashioned laughter. Even the Prime Minister's anxious face relaxed.
He then conversed with more freedom relative to his country, government, localities, and religion; I suggested to him that "I understood he was a powerful king, and a great warrior, had many wives and children, that he ruled over much people, and a fine country, that I hear he get much head, that he far pass any of his enemies, and that I be very happy to look so great a king:" or, in other words, that I understood he was a great general, was very rich, was more wise than all his contemporary chiefs, and that it gave me much pleasure to pay my respects to so great a prince: but the former idiom of language is best adapted to convey meaning to the interpreters of the chiefs of Africa, in whatever tongue it may be spoken; being that which they use in translation; and when they are addressed in this phraseology, they convey their ideas with more perspicuity and literal interpretation.
Its mines, the productions of its soil and its manufactures, the shades of its expressive, copious, and most philosophical language, from the classical idiom of Saxony, to the comparatively rude and uncultivated dialect of Austria, the effects on manners, habits, feeling, and intellectual and moral acquirements, produced by the different species of the Christian religion professed, and the different forms of government prevailing in its different parts; all these circumstances, and others of a more evanescent and subtle, though still an influential nature, render Germany a vast field for enquiry and observation.
As an Illyrian soldier, that idiom was familiar to the infancy of Justinian; his youth had been instructed by the lessons of jurisprudence, and his Imperial choice selected the most learned civilians of the East, to labor with their sovereign in the work of reformation.
Every considerable effort to develop a noble idiom will count in the final result, as the writers of early English made possible the language of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. We are perfecting a medium to be used as long as Chinese ideographs have been.
Of the merits incontestable, first and foremost may be mentioned the color and motion of Life which spread like an atmosphere over this fiction. By his inimitable idiom, his knowledge of the polite world, and his equal knowledge of the average human being irrespective of class or condition, Thackeray was able to make his chronicle appear the very truth.
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