Old Grumble on Passing Events

Feilding Star, Volume IX, Issue 157, 4 August 1888, Page 3

Old Grumble on Passing Events

So you have been reading the newspaper, Mrs Grumble, and you want to know the meaning of all the letters that hare lately been written to the Star about a social gathering, and a girl named Nora ? To this question Grumble wisely refrains from giving an opinion, hut supports his left elbow with his right haud, and then allows his left forefinger to tap lightly and gracefully the side of hie nose while he discreetly remarks: Editors have much to trouble them, my dear, the bulk of their correspondents being of two classes : those who write sense nonsensically, aud those 'write nonsense believing it to be sense. Evidently two characters in the world's stage have been performing their parts. One in the amorous third age has been '* sighing like a furnace with a woeful ballad made to his mistress 1 eyebrow," when another, who has reached the soberer fifth, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances, upbraids him for exhibiting such wanton infatuation. That is all Grumble knows about it ; but here is a gentleman who asks some one to tell him the meaning of *' Dazzling intellect that soars majestic through the glorious empyrean of drawing-room songs and insipidity ?" Hand me down my cyclops ! Ha ! here it is. Dazzling intellect, &c. ? — A flower of rhetoric, meaning those bright globules of grease which float upon an unskimmed and unseasoned basin of broth ! Put back the book, my dear. What is this, Mrs GruniMe ? That Hutchison who ousted the veteran Bryce, and supplanted him in his seat in tha House, deals in Latin quotations, does he ? A grievous habit that will never make him an orator : when a speaker hap to resort to a language not his own, and one that is not understood by bis hearers, to expreßS his ideas, his words lose their force, his speech is at once m aiingless, and he becomes unintelligible. The English language is comprehensive enough forsooth te give expression to eveiy thought, feeling, or act, man can possess or do, by those who know how to speak it. Mrs Grumble, when I hear a man frequently interlarding his speech with foreign phrases and quotations, I apprehend directly that he does so from one of two reasons : either because his knowledge of his mother tongue is weak and imperfect, or that it is vanity which prompts him to parade some shallow learning, and a desire to 6how to his listeners that Latin, Greek, or French were taught at the school where he was educated. As for what are called the dead languages, their most fitting places are grave-yards, to be used for epitaphs upon the tombstones, co that - the masses, being unable to comprehend their meaning, may not know the living lie about the dead, and also to save confusion in the spirit world, for few are the souls who could guess it was their own mortal remains over which a hundred virtues were tabulated, and they were accreditted with, virtues which they, when they occupied their earthly tenements, never made pretentions to one tythe of. No, Mrs Grumble, it is better as it is, for if epitaphs were deciphered in plain English, one half of the ghosts would not know their own graves. But the House of Eepresentati res is . not a charnel house, and if a member ! there has anything worth saying he i should speak it in plain English that ! ----- «11 may understand him. Old Gbumble.