242 ROMANCE LANGUAGES 



into one chapter all that he found concerning the French language 

 in the first volume of Diez's grammar. The result was far from 

 satisfactory. Ampere knew very little about Old French, and took 

 no pains to assimilate the rigorous method of his model. The personal 

 observations which he inserted here and there in his often inaccurate 

 abridgment of Diez's doctrine were well calculated to deter his 

 readers from referring to the original. Under such circumstances 

 we can hardly be surprised that the value of the grammar was 

 underestimated in France. French scholars continued, therefore, 

 to publish books on the origins and history of the French language 

 in which the same general questions were brought up time after 

 time, no one apparently having an inkling of the right way to 

 approach such questions, and works in which a learning, in some 

 cases very sound but ill directed, exerted its energies without leading 

 to any definite results. Among these were the Essai philosophique 

 sur la formation de la langue frangaise by Ede*lestand du Me"ril (1852), 

 and the three volumes on the Origines et formation de la langue 

 fran$aise (1853-57) by Albin de Chevallet, books which were still- 

 born, little read in their day, and without influence. At the same 

 time the only two chairs of French philology that existed in France 

 those of the College de France (founded 1852) and of the Ecole des 

 Chartes (1847) were held by professors who knew no German. Littr^ 

 himself, who contributed so much by his articles in the Journal des 

 Savants and by his dictionary to the progress of French philology, 

 and who had not the excuse of not knowing German, as he translated 

 several German books into French, even Littre" seems never to have 

 used Diez's grammar. He had some acquaintance with the Etymo- 

 logisches Worterbuch der Romanischen Sprachen, which he drew 

 upon liberally for his dictionary, as the Belgian scholar, Auguste 

 Scheler, had done before him in a Dictionnaire etymologique du 

 fran$ais (first edition, 1862). The methodical study of the Romance 

 languages in France was destined not to begin until after the public- 

 ation of the second edition of Diez's grammar, about 1860. The 

 appearance in 1862 of Gaston Paris's book,Swr le role de I'accent latin 

 dans la langue fran$aise (his thesis at the Ecole des Chartes), marks 

 the beginning of a new epoch. 



In Italy, the application of the methods received from Germany 

 was made a little later than in France; the first works of Professor 

 Ascoli employed them with signal success. In Portugal, F. A. Coelho 

 introduced the same methods in the study of his native tongue (1872). 

 Spain also entered the same path, only much later. 



We must not imagine that even in Germany the movement toward 

 the scientific study of the Romance languages, so brilliantly begun 

 by Diez, made rapid progress immediately. For many years Diez was 

 the sole representative not only of Romance philology as a whole but 



