366 THE STUDY OF FRENCH IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES. 



minor problems to be found fully worthy of the philologer's re- 

 search. 



When arrived at the first great literary period, viz., the 12th 

 and 13th centuries, we feel utterly at a loss, what to pick from 

 the huge profusion of texts, for our study of that fine langue 

 d'oil, which Brunetto Latini* called: "La Parleiire la plus dcli- 

 table qui soyt an monde," a statement repeated by Martino da 

 Canale.f where he says: "he langue francoise cort parmi le 

 monde et est plus delitable a lire et a oir que nule autre." A fine 

 language indeed it was : a language possessed of a system of 

 declension and conjugation that abounded in harmonious forms, 

 regularly sprung from Latin ; a language which, in spite of the 

 multiplicity of its dialectical varieties ( in fact every author had 

 his own!) stood conspicuous for its marvellous grammatical 

 unity, its elegance and the supple pliancy of its forms ; a language, 

 in short, the loss of which all the dainty refinement of modern 

 French has as yet never been able to make up for. Then, on 

 the threshold of the modern French period, during the era 

 covered by the Renaissance and its sequela, we see the language 

 ruthlessly invaded by classical Latin, which, while doing it the 

 kind turn of swelling its vocabulary, foisted upon it a large 

 number of artificial, merely f renchified Latin forms ; spoiled for 

 ever its phonetic orthography, and transferred supreme authority 

 with regard to speech from the mouth of the people to the edicts 

 of sifting and systematising grammarians. Later on we notice 

 the literary, and along with it the national, influence exercised on 

 French by Spanish and Italian. After that, towards the middle 

 of the 17th century, we stand in the awful presence of a brilliant 

 body, the " Academie Francaise." which, after laying hold of the 

 ruling power, imprinted on the language of the great authors of 

 the golden era the stamp of absolute law, thus ostensibly dividing 

 the language of the lettered world from the speech of the vulga r . 

 Finally, in our own days, we are witnesses of the fact that this 

 demarcation is gradually becoming more and more vague and . 

 blurred, so as to be practically obliterated. In fact, the ever- 

 increasing importance allotted to the living language has drawn 

 us so forcibly towards the popular parlance, that not infrequently 

 we are guilty of injustice towards the literary language. It 

 looks as if we resented the fact that it has for such a length 

 of time engrossed and monopolised the entire attention of 

 philologers ; and that, in certain centres, it was considered to be 

 the only language that was worth being studied. We see the 

 men of letters dive into the popular speech, thence to draw their 

 smartest and most picturesque similes ; they borrow from it 

 many a quaint image or expression, they call back to life vocables 

 which had fallen either into desuetude or oblivion ; they coin 

 new words and compounds ; they handle their periods with a 



* The famous tutor of the more famous Dante Alighieri. 

 t He translated into French the "History of Venice." which he had 

 written in Latin. 



