On a School of English by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Is there, then, no better way? Yes there is a better way: for the French have it, with their language and literature. In France, as Matthew Arnold noted, a generation ago, the ordinary journeyman work of literature is done far better and more conscientiously than with us. In France a man feels it almost a personal stain, an unpatriotic lâche, to write even on a police-order anything so derogatory to the tradition of his language as our Cabinet Ministers read out as answers to our House of Commons. I am told that many a Maire in a small provincial town in N. E. France, even when overwhelmed -- accablé -- with the sufferings of his town-folk, has truly felt the iron enter into his soul on being forced to sign a document written out for him in the invaders' French.

Cannot we treat our noble inheritance of literature and language as scrupulously, and with as high a sense of their appertaining to our national honour, as a Frenchman cherishes his language, his literature? Cannot we study to leave our inheritance -- as the old Athenian put it temperately, "not worse but a little better than we found it"?