I. A good deal has been incidentally heard of the habitual infelicity of the natives of other European countries where it has been a question of the treatment of our language either colloquially or with a literary object. This was a source of difficulty which must have been generally appreciated; but no one appears to have essayed to come to the succour of the distressed, till in 1578 Jacques Bellot, already mentioned, and the author of a French Grammar printed in 1578, announced in 1580 _The English Schoolmaster, for teaching strangers to pronounce English_. That such a book was published is probable enough, but it is not at present known; and we have meanwhile to content ourselves with speculating what kind of affair such an undertaking could have been, where the writer was a foreign teacher so ignorant of our language! But it was not amiss for Bellot to try his hand in the absence of any other adventurer; nor was it till after the Restoration that a second experiment was made in the same direction by James Howell, the tolerably celebrated author of the _Familiar Letters_, who brought out in 1662 _A New English Grammar, prescribing as certain rules as the language will bear, for foreigners to learn English_. This was nearly a century after Bellot; and Howell was both a linguist and a scholar. Like many other laudable endeavours, however, the proffered help was not much appreciated; and although the Germans, Dutch, and Russians have within the last quarter of a century made remarkable progress in the study of English, the French and other Continental nations remain unable or indisposed to conquer their ancient prejudices. Doubtless, the closer affinity between the languages of Germany and the Low Countries and our own considerably facilitated the mastery of English by the Teutonic community; and it was principally in Flanders that the earliest attention was paid to those highly valuable polyglot hand-books for travellers and students, into which the English, as a rule, was admitted more on account, probably, of its service to the foreign visitor in England than for the sake of the Englishman abroad, as had been the case with certain early vocabularies and primers elsewhere noticed. In the old plays the foreigner is invariably introduced making, consciously or otherwise, the most alarming havoc in our vocabulary and grammar; but the dramatist seems, as a rule, to have drawn a good deal on his own fancy instead of borrowing from life; and such is the case, it must be said, even with Shakespear's _Dr. Caius_, who speaks broken English, but hardly a Frenchman's broken English. The _Duke de Jarmany_ of the same writer would probably have had the same nondescript gibberish put into his mouth had he been brought on the stage; this sort of _dramatis persona_ was among the comic effects.