LITTRfi, DUMAS s PASTEUR, AND TAINE. 671 



lived to be near eighty. To these details we will only add that he 

 abstained from every kind of luxury and indulgence, except a holiday 

 of one month in the year, spent on the coast of Brittany. He lived 

 on the smallest pittance on which life could be supported. Hachette 

 allowed him a hundred pounds a year, but half of this sum went to his 

 wife and daughter. He had previously saved forty thousand francs, 

 but that was lost in the Revolution of 1848. The publisher's advances 

 to the author amounted to no more than forty thousand francs, a sum 

 which was eventually repaid out of the profits of the sale. But until 

 the completion of the work the sale was small, and these thirty years 

 of unexampled labor were at the time wholly unproductive. Happily, 

 M. Littre's life was sufficiently prolonged for him to witness the tri- 

 umphant success of his great undertaking. It brought affluence to his 

 declining years ; it placed him on the seats of the French Academy ; 

 it has given him fame far beyond his modest aspirations and his simple 

 tastes. We have been informed that fifty thousand copies of the 

 Dictionary have been sold ; if this is the fact, it is without a paral- 

 lel for a publication of this price and magnitude. 



It is impossible for us within our present limits, and with the task 

 we have now before us, to attempt a critical examination of this great 

 work. Suffice it to say that the conception was as original as the exe- 

 cution is marvelous. The French language has been spoken and writ- 

 ten for seven hundred years ; like all languages, it has undergone vast 

 transformations in that period ; like all living languages, it is still un- 

 dergoing a process of perpetual evolution. The Dictionary of the 

 Academy is the standard of the accepted and existing language of 

 France ; it excludes archaisms, it condemns neologisms, it gives no 

 references or derivations. M. Littre's design is far broader and more 

 vast ; it is based on the historical growth of the language, and it in- 

 cludes the history of every word in the language from its first occur- 

 rence, its etymology, and its various meanings, down to its modern 

 use. The period of what is termed contemporary or classical French 

 dates from Malherbe, a little more than two hundred years back ; but, 

 with few exceptions of recent date, every word has a tradition of cen- 

 turies behind it. Thus, each article in M. Littre's Dictionary in- 

 cludes, first, the word ; then its pronunciation ; then the conjugation 

 of the verbs, if irregular ; then the definition of the various meanings 

 of each word, illustrated by quotations from the best authors of the 

 seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, all textually referred 

 to so 'that they can be found ; and these meanings are scientifically 

 arranged, always proceeding from the more simple and concrete to the 

 more abstract and metaphorical. This classification of meanings is 

 the most remarkable feature in the work, because it is executed with 

 an extraordinary amount of philosophical discrimination. Take, for 

 example, the worc^ Nature : M. Littre dissects and unravels it into 

 twenty-eight shades of meaning, and each of these is verified by ap- 



