238 ROMANCE LANGUAGES 



persons a very satisfactory explanation. The real reason was that 

 the congresses were to be held, as at St. Louis, during the vacation 

 period, and the gentlemen upon whom the duty would have fallen 

 of planning a meeting of " Romanists " had the weakness to prefer, 

 at that time of year, the country or the seaside to all the congresses 

 in the world. Now, however, I cannot help regretting our indolence. 

 A congress for Romance philology in all probability would have 

 been presided over by the man who was then rightly looked upon 

 as the foremost of French Romance scholars, Gaston Paris, and we 

 should have expected from him an address full of ideas and facts 

 concerning the history and the future of the science to whose advance- 

 ment he had so liberally contributed. 



Forty years ago, when G. Paris and I were merely hopeful young 

 men, it was still possible for a single person to cover the whole range 

 of Romance studies, but to-day the field has become so extended that 

 such an achievement is no longer a possibility. Nevertheless, I shall 

 endeavor to sketch in outline the progress of a science whose limits 

 seem to recede in proportion as one attempts to attain them. 



If I were asked who was the first in the Latin world to take an 

 interest in the languages of Latin origin, I should not hesitate 

 to reply, Dante. The great Florentine in fact possessed a fairly 

 correct knowledge of French and of Provengal of the Langue 

 d'Oil and the Langue d'Oc, to use his own expressions. He had 

 carefully considered the linguistic variety of Italy, and had proposed 

 for the dialects of the peninsula a system of classification which is 

 yet in a large measure acceptable. But the object he had in view, 

 which was the creation of a general language which should receive 

 contributions from all the Italian dialects, was chimerical, and several 

 centuries were to elapse before linguists began to study languages 

 as they are, with no other idea than to describe them accurately and 

 to write the history of their inevitable changes. 



The Italian philologists, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth 

 centuries, devoted a good deal of labor to the study of their lan- 

 guage. Among these, a few had enough of the historical sense to be 

 curious as to its origins, and some of them by intuition even reached 

 the truth on some important points. Maffei, for example, saw in 

 Italian the continuation of the Vulgar Latin of the Romans. But 

 none of them embraced in one view all the Latin idioms, or made 

 any effort to point out the relations which connect them with each 

 other and with their common source. Still more remote in the minds 

 of these scholars was the idea that it would be interesting to include 

 in their researches idioms which had not been made illustrious by 

 literary achievements. 



A somewhat wider conception of the science of language appeared 

 in 1821, when Raynouard published his Grammaire compare des 



