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Rh and yet not keep his less favoured readers in the dark; he accordingly uses a literal translation instead of the actual words. It may fairly be doubted whether this is ever worth while; but there is all the difference in the world, as we shall presently exemplify in a pair of contrasted quotations, between the genuine and the ostentatious use. The most familiar phrase thus treated is cela va sans dire; we have of our own I need hardly say, needless to remark, and many other varieties; and the French phrase has no wit or point in it to make it worth aping; we might just as well say, in similar German or French English (whichever of the two languages we had it from), that understands itself; each of them has to us the quaintness of being non-idiomatic, and no other merit whatever. A single word that we have taken in the same way is more defensible, because it did, when first introduced here, possess a definite meaning that no existing English word had: epochmaking is a literal translation, or transliteration almost, from German. We may regret that we took it, now; for it will always have an alien look about it; and, recent in English as it is, it has already lost its meaning; it belongs, in fact, to one of those word-series of which each member gets successively worn out. Epochmaking is now no more than remarkable, as witness this extract from a speech by the Lord Chancellor:

The banquet to M. Berryer and the banquet to Mr. Benjamin, both of them very important, and to my mind epochmaking occasions.—.

The verb to orient is a Gallicism of much the same sort, and the half-world is perhaps worse:

In his quality of eligible bachelor he had no objections at any time to conversing with a goodlooking girl. Only he wished very much that he could orient this particular one.—.

High society is represented by...Lady Beauminster, the half-world by Mrs. Montrose, loveliness and luckless innocence by her daughter Helen.—Times.

The next extract is perhaps from the pen of a