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Besides 'tis known he could speak Greek As naturally as pigs squeak; That Latin was no more difficile That to a blackbird 'tis to whistle.

A Babylonish dialect Which learned pedants much affect.

For though to smatter ends of Greek Or Latin be the rhetoric Of pedants counted, and vain-glorious, To smatter French is meritorious. - Samuel Butler ,

I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses from a female mouth.

. . . Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.

He Greek and Latin speaks with greater ease Than hogs eat acorns, and tame pigeons peas.

Lash'd into Latin by the tingling rod.

He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.

Small Latin, and less Greek.

Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of Latin.

Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.

It is Hebrew to me.

He attempts to use language which he does not know.

This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist and the armipotent soldier.

But those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but for mine own part, if was Greek to me.

Away with him, away with him! He speaks Latin.

O, good my lord, no Latin! I am not such a truant since my coming As not to know the language I have lived in. A strnage tongue makes my cause more strnage, suspicious. Pray speak in English.

He plays o' th' viol-de-gamboys, and speaks three or four languages word for word without book, and hath all the good gifts of nature.

But to the purpose--for we cite our faults That they may hold excused our lawless lives; And partly, seeing you are beautified With goodly shape, and by your own report A linguist, and a man of such perfection As we do in our quality much want--

Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!