Sheridan) was made to tell Mr. Leon Quartermaine (as Charles) that, in his laughter at the discovery of Lady Teazle, he was not to expect the “sympathy of the audience.” _That_, I feel sure, was an anachronism, a bit of quite modern theatrical lingo. I should guess that it came to us from the French, who are fond of talking of a _rôle sympathique_. Mr. du Maurier, if any one, must remember his father’s delightful sketch of English people shopping in Normandy, when the artful shopwoman is cajoling a foolish-faced Englishman with “le visage de monsieur m’est si sympathique.” The Italian _simpatico_ is, of course, even more hard-worked. I felt sure, then, as I say, about the anachronism; but I am quite aware that it is never safe to trust to one’s instinct in these matters. It is by no means impossible that some one may triumphantly produce against me a newspaper or book of 1775 which speaks of “the sympathy of the audience.” The unexpected in these cases does occasionally happen. And certainly any one who has tried his hand at a _pastiche_ of a dead and gone author will have frequently been astonished, not at the antiquity but at the modernity of the style. Language changes less rapidly than we are apt to suppose. The bad writers seem to get old-fashioned earliest—because, I suppose, they yield most easily to ephemeral tricks of speech. For example, Fanny Burney, who, I cannot but think, wrote a bad style, and in her later books (as Macaulay pointed out) a kind of debased Johnsonese, is now decidedly old-fashioned. But Jane Austen, whose style, though scarcely brilliant, was never bad, is not. A modern Mr. Collins would not talk of “elegant females”—but even then he was put forward as ridiculous for doing so. Jane was fond of “the chief of the day” and “the harp was bringing.” These phrases are _passées_, but I doubt if you will find many others.