“Almost the whole of our philosophic and scientific vocabulary is foreign; we are obliged to know Greek and Latin to make use of it properly, and, most frequently, employ it badly.  Innumerable terms find their way out of this technical vocabulary into common conversation and literary style, and hence it is that we now speak and think with words cumbersome and difficult to manage.  We adopt them ready made and conjoined, we repeat them according to routine; we make use of them without considering their scope and without a nice appreciation of their sense; we only approximate to that which we would like to express.  Fifteen years are necessary for an author to learn to write, not with genius, for that is not to be acquired, but with clearness, sequence, propriety and precision.  He finds himself obliged to weigh and investigate ten or twelve thousand words and diverse expressions, to note their origin, filiation and relationships, to rebuild on an original plan, his ideas and his whole intellect.  If he has not done it, and he wishes to reason on rights, duties, the beautiful, the State or any other of man’s important interests, he gropes about and stumbles; he gets entangled in long, vague phrases, in sonorous common-places, in crabbed and abstract formulas.  Look at the newspapers and the speeches of our popular orators.  It is especially the case with workmen who are intelligent but who have had no classical education; they are not masters of words, and, consequently, of ideas; they use a refined language which is not natural to them; it is a perplexity to them and consequently confuses their minds; they have had no time to filter it drop by drop.  This is an enormous disadvantage, from which the Greeks were exempt.  There was no break with them between the language of concrete facts and that of abstract reasoning, between the language spoken by the people and that of the learned; the one was a counterpart of the other; there was no term in any of Plato’s dialogues which a youth, leaving his gymnasia, could not comprehend; there is not a phrase in any of Demosthenes’ harangues which did not readily find a lodging-place in the brain of an Athenian peasant or blacksmith.  Attempt to translate into Greek one of Pitt’s or Mirabeau’s discourses, or an extract from Addison or Nicole, and you will be obliged to recast and transpose the thought; you will be led to find for the same thoughts, expressions more akin to facts and to concrete experience; a flood of light will heighten the prominence of all the truths and of all the errors; that which you were wont to call natural and clear will seem to you affected and semi-obscure, and you will perceive by force of contrast why, among the Greeks, the instrument of thought being more simple, it did its office better and with less effort.”

Among the good books of the year, two belong to a special walk of letters in which we have not hitherto excelled the English Translation.  There are periods