Excerpt from The Story of the Stick in All Ages and Lands
Sir Thomas Urquhart "shook and laughed in Rabelais" easy chair;" and he put his delight into an alleged version of certain books of the Cure of Meudon which has become an English classic. We owe a great debt to him, and to his admirers and followers, the quaint old Norman "city merchant" Motteux, and Ozell. But Rabelais remains and to the end of time will remain untranslated and untranslatable. I have always held it an abomination to interlard English writing or English talk with foreign phrases or words. But if one is ever obliged (as may possibly happen) to cite a foreign author, it is not only an abomination, but the abomination of desolation, to cite him in any language but his own. Years ago, during a visit to England, I spent a summer afternoon with that delightful Spanish scholar and ideal Tory, Richard Ford, who thought Wellington and Waterloo the final cause of Spain and the Spaniards. It was at a charming villa, long since swept away in the maelstrom of modern improvements, near Wimbledon; and at his request I made Mr. Ford a sherry cobbler, of which in those days Englishmen had heard only from globetrotters and wandering Yankees, as the homekeeping dames of the Middle Ages heard of Persian sherbets from stray pilgrims and returned Crusaders. While we talked, one of the company quoted a proverb as from the lips of Sancho Panza. "Sancho Panza never said anything of the sort," replied Mr. Ford, "Motteux said it."
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