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Rh schoolmaster would have the support of Sovereigns and Ambassadors.

The ‘Foreign Office hand’ in England was a legacy of Canning and Palmerston. Canning laid down the rule that not more than ten lines should be put into one page of foolscap. Palmerston advised Lord Malmesbury, when he assumed the charge of the Foreign Office, to insist on all official correspondence being written in a plain hand and with proper intervals between the lines; and he named some Ministers ‘whose writing was quite illegible’.

Neither French nor any other language now holds the place of privilege from which French had supplanted Latin before the middle of the eighteenth century as the usual, though not universal, language of treaties and of diplomatic instruments for European States. But a ready command of French, to be spoken with that ‘easy elegance’ which a polite ambassador ascribed to the speech of our Queen Elizabeth in Latin, has