To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 23, 1951

I believe Cory cabled to you last night answering “Yes” to your question whether we agreed to correct inaccuracies in my text about matters of fact, such as that “all” colonists in America were British and “all” Protestants. I wish you had noted other phrases which might irritate my readers uselessly; because, as you know, I am not writing with statistics and books of reference before my eyes, but only evoking the dramatic and moral aspects that things seem to have or to have had. Of course, I knew that even within the United States there had been French Catholics (Acadians & Evangeline, and also in Louisiana) and British Catholics in Maryland; but I was thinking of New England in my boyhood where, in spite of crowds of Irish, it seemed to the stranger that the whole life of the country was Protestant and Anglosaxon. In any case, it led the new comers to drop or hide their peculiarities and plunge into the inescapable current. The Jews do the same, and even sometimes take the reins into their own hands, as if they were purer or more absolute Americans than anybody else. I should have preferred the Puritan purity, if it made room, in other circles, for manners and feelings of other kinds. . . .

A propos of the melting-pot, and the confusion before the mixture becomes perfect, I have had a letter from San Antonio, Texas, describing what happens there in Mexican families. People simply sprinkle English words on their Spanish conversation as I remember we used to do in my family in my boyhood. But my sister and I were never tempted to do so in Avila, where no one else spoke English. The solution would be to keep each language for the milieu where it prevailed and was pure. And this is not impossible if the two spheres are both well dominated, as Latin and the national language were in the late middle ages. Of course one could mix them on purpose for fun, as people did in comic verses. I think now that if I had been free from engagements at 30, as I was at 50, I might have written Spanish verses as easily as English prose without spoiling either medium.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.