For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin epigraph,
unluckily appended an English translation,--a concession to the country
gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately abstained,
holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison's own phrase)
"words to the wise," of no concern to unlearned persons.[72]
Notes:
[70] _Esmond_, Book ii, chap, ii.
[71] _Ib_. Book iii, chap, iii.
[72] _Spectator_, No. 221, November 13, 1711.
This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of would-be perfect
imitation. But it also serves to bring us finally to the vocabulary of
_Esmond_. As to this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes been
advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a high journalistic
authority, that "no man, woman, or child in _Esmond_, ever says anything
that he or she might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne." This is
one of those extreme utterances in which enthusiasm, losing its head,
invites contradiction. Thackeray professedly "copied the language of
Queen Anne,"--he says so in his dedication to Lord Ashburton; but he
himself would certainly never have put forward so comprehensive a claim
as the above. There is no doubt a story that he challenged Mr. Lowell
(who was his fellow-passenger to America on the _Canada_) to point out
in _Esmond_ a word which had not been used in the early eighteenth
century; and that the author of _The Biglow Papers_ promptly discovered
such a word.
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