It is not too much to look for such things in children's writing and speaking.

The first shoots and leaves may come up early though the full growth and flower may be long waited for.

These characteristics are often better put into words by foreign critics than by ourselves, for we are inclined to take them as a whole and to take them for granted; hence the trouble experienced by educated foreigners in catching the characteristics of English style, and their surprise in finding that we have no authentic guides to English composition, fend that the court of final appeal is only the standard Of the best use.

The words of a German critic on a Collection of English portraits in Berlin are very happily pointed and might be as aptly applied to writing as to painting.
"English, utterly English! Nothing on God's earth could be more English than this whole collection.

The personality of the artist (_it happened that he was an Irishman_), the countenances of the subjects, their dress, the discreetly suggestive backgrounds, all have the characteristic touch of British culture, very refined, very high-bred, very quiet, very much clarified, very confident, very neat, very well-appointed, a little dreamy and just a little wearisome--the precise qualities which at the same time impress and annoy us in the English." This is exactly what might be said of Pater's writing, but that is full-grown English.