The Teaching and Cultivation of the French Language in England.
By Kathleen Lambley. (Manchester University Press : Longman. 14s. net.)—Miss Lambley has written a remarkably interesting book on the history of the teaching and use of French in England up to 1689. French, or Anglo- French, was the current language of educated Englishmen from the Conquest up to the fourteenth century. English then gradually superseded Anglo-French, and concurrently English- men began to learn the French of Paris and to demand grammars and conversation-books. Our early printers, who knew what their public wanted, produced such books—Caxton a set of dialogues in English and French, Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde a more elementary and practical " book to learn to speak French." Miss Lambley proceeds to examine in detail the progress of French studies under the Tudors, strongly influenced by the coming of Huguenot exiles, many of whcm earned their living as tutors. Cotgrave's famous dictionary of 1611, more valuable now as a guide to the English of his day than for the French, was by no means the first work of its kind. Under the Stuarts, and especially after the Restoration, the French language was highly popular, and every cultivated person was expected to speak it. Miss Lambley writes well and throws new light both on our history and on our literature by treating her subject in an orderly fashion for the first time.
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