Page:Tex; a chapter in the life of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (IA texchapterinlife00mcke).pdf/114



*erage which my specialist ordered me to take instead of tea or coffee

''I jump at the chance of playing the school-*master in the matter of those capital letters. It is too utterly jolly finding you in a compliant mood''

''My rule and yours might well be to start with a definite prejudice against capital letters in the middle of a sentence, combined with a resolve never to use them if it can be avoided. Having taken up this firm standpoint, we can afford and we can begin to make concessions. For instance, my heart leapt with joy, nearly twenty years ago, when the founders of the Burlington Review decided to abolish all capitals to adjectives, to print "french, german, egyptian, persian," etc. You have no idea how well this affected the page. But what is all right in a majestic review (or was it magazine, by the way?) like the Burlington may look ultraprecious in a novel. Therefore I concede French, German, etc. Only remember that it is a concession, a concession to Anglo-American vulgarity. A Frenchman writes (and that not invariably: I mean, not every Frenchman). "Un Français les Anglais," but (invariably) "L'elan français, le rosbif anglais" The Germans and Danes begin all nouns with a capital (as the English did, in some centuries), but''