THE STUDY OF FRENCH IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES. $7.\ 



parti) rescinded, since the results of much scientific research 

 accomplished by the famous Italian. Pio Rajna. have rendered 

 it highly probable that, though French in form and development, 



it is Germanic in it> origin.* What a pile of manuscripts to be 

 deciphered, tabulated and indexed : what a heap of texts to be 

 classified and epitomised; what a quantity of foreign literature to 

 be perused, compared and studied, to obtain what is worth}- of the 

 name of scientific result! And when the Middle Ages have hem 

 successfully coped with, there is the literature of the 15th century 

 in front of you, a transition period bristling with difficulties, and 

 the texts of which are not infrequently even harder to locate and 

 to classify than the majority of the mediaeval ones. After the I5 rn 

 you plunge into the 1 6th century, which, from beginning to end, 

 will bring you into contact with the literature of the Greeks and 

 Romans, wherever you wish to satisfactorily explain its character. 

 Safely landed now in the domains of the modern era. you might 

 think that your path will henceforward be a smoother one. 

 Nothing of the kind. ' )nly a strictly scientific method of teach- 

 ing will enable you to explain the great writer-, of whom several 

 have bequeathed or will bequeath immortal works to posterity. 

 What gropings, what perplexities have not preceded the establish- 

 ment of tlie authentic text of Pascal's Pensces ! That the latest 

 edition of this work, that of Brunschwigk < 1895), is at the same 

 time the latest proof, and a decisive one. that it is impossible to 

 fix upon any classification of the Pensees! What an amount of 

 research work was not required to write the biography of Moliere! 

 A scholar of the standing of Ernest Havet ha- not deemed 

 it below him to give to the world a classical edition of some few 

 of Pascal's '* Lettres provinciales ": and what a delightfully novel 

 series of subjects did the great German professor Tobler 

 inaugurate when, about twenty-five years ago. he proposed to the 

 students of his " Seminaire roman." to take in hand the Esopian 

 fable in the Latin Phaedrus and sedulously to follow its track via 

 the Romulus and the various mediaeval Ysopets, up to that admir- 

 ably original work that wound the wreath of immortality round 

 the brow of La Fontaine! The fresh breeze of modern philology 

 is now blowing through the literary faculties of all the univer- 

 sities. Times have, happily, gone by when it wa< generally 

 believed that only Virgil and Livy. Homer and Sophocles were 

 worthy of the precincts of the university, and that Shakespeare 

 and Moliere, Goethe and Victor Hugo were only good enough to 

 be pleasantly talked about on winter evenings, by a talented and 

 fashionable lecturer, for the benefit and edification of a select 

 public of society ladies and gentlemen in evening dress. The 

 classrooms of the secondary schools also were places where these 

 modern authors could be appropriately discussed, read and ex- 

 plained and usefully made into intellectual pabulum for school 

 boys and girls. But to admit them at the University was a thing 

 that could not be thought of. Happily, all this has been altered. 



* P. Rajna: Origini dell' Epopea franceie (18841. 



