Not on professorial recommendations; thriven, or perished, or
put on new faces!
I would make an exception to this rule. Foreign importations which do
not belong to us by right, idioms we have enticed from over the sea for
one reason or another, ought to remain, as it were, stereotyped. They
are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let
them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be
allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a
corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express.
What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back,
with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly
misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise
a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad,
or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent.
My apologies to the French language, to the cats, and to the reader....
Now whoever wishes to see a truly macabre exhibition at Rome may visit
the Peruvian mummies in the Kircher Museum. It is characteristic of the
spirit in which guide-books are written that, while devoting long
paragraphs to some worthless picture of a hallucinated venerable, they
hardly utter a word about these most remarkable and gruesome objects.
