venient instrument for general literary purposes. These various reforming influences were largely assisted by the fancy of the time for literary coteries, in which authors and ladies of rank played the chief parts, and which were also frequented by many statesmen and nobles. The famous Madame de Rambouillet was the chief patroness of these meetings, at which much minor poetry and many short prose pieces were composed or recited. But the really great developments of French literature during the first half of the seventeenth century were of a very different kind. Abundant as had been, during the century preceding, the exercise given to the intellect, that exercise had been chiefly confined to religious disputes on questions of church government and a few points of dogma. The unseemly controversies of the earlier religious struggles, and the furious preachings of the League, were succeeded by religious polemics of a more decent kind and by pulpit eloquence which promised the great oratorical displays of the latter part of the century. But the thought of the new age threw itself still more into purely philosophical lines, and into subjects which appeared less dangerous to handle. The old scholastic philosophy, which in various shapes had satisfied the philosophical appetite of the Middle Ages, had been practically dead for a long time, though its forms still continued to be taught in colleges and universities. The sixteenth century, in this as in other things, showing its reverence for classical antiquity, had tried, but without success, to satisfy itself with the actual text of the Greek philosophers. It is the glory of France to have produced, in René Descartes (1596-1650), at once one of the earliest and most skillful writers of a clear, elegant, and scholarly prose in any modern language, and also the first great modern philosopher, taking philosophy in its strictest meaning. The Discours de la Methode and the Meditations of Descartes treat of the most abstruse subjects that can possibly occupy human thought; yet they are written in French so clear and simple that any child, as far as the mere literal and grammatical meaning goes, can understand them at once. Nor did the spirit of discussion stop at profane philosophy. Many points of Christian theology, which had not been made the subject of the great half-political, half-ecclesiastical disputes of the sixteenth century, came in for discussion and study. The renown, also, which France had already acquired for memoir-writing, did not decline in this age, which supplied in

its turbulent and changeable politics abundance of mate. rials for the purpose. Conspicuous among such writers is the great Cardinal Richelieu, who, though not exactly the founder of the Académie, as he is sometimes called, brought it for the first time into a solid and stable condi tion, and transformed it from a mere private club of wits, such as the country saw many of, into an institution formally charged with the overseeing of French language and literature.

The considerations on which the establishment of this institution was founded were, among others: "Que notre langue, plus parfaite déjà que pas une des autres vivantes, pourroit bien enfin succéder à la Latine, comme la Latine à la Grecque, si on prenoit plus de soin qu'on n'avoit fait jusqu'ici de l'élocution; . . que les fonctions des académiciens seroient de nettoyer la langue des ordures qu'elle avoit contractées, ou dans la bouche du peuple, ou dans la foule du palais, et dans les impuretes de la chicane, ou par les mauvais usages des courtisans ignorans, ou par l'abus de ceux qui la corrompent en l'écrivant, et de ceux qui disent bien dans les chaires ce qu'il faut dire, mais autrement qu'il ne faut." These considerations, as well as the work assigned to the Académie, were in perfect harmony with the policy and character of the Cardinal. He loved too much rule and order in everything not to wish to impose them even on the work of imagination; he possessed too much the instinct of gov ernment not to desire to rule and regulate also language and literature. Besides, it gave him an opportunity to denounce officially les ordures que la langue avait contractées dans la foule du palais ou par les usages des courtisans ignorants, whom he put on a par with the lower classes, as far as language was concerned; and also to take out of the hands of the Italian nobles who congregated at the resi dence of Madame de Rambouillet-the headquarters of those who pretended to regenerate the language-the su preme direction of matters of taste; which was a sort of victory over the nobility who tried to be independent, and a triumph over the foreigners who were opposed to him. Moreover, in 1611, Cotgrave had already published in London a French-English and English-French Dictionary, a large work in folio, and it seemed impossible for France to remain behind in the production of a standard work on the national language. In 1680 Richelet published his Dictionary, which, instead of being simply an alphabeti cal list of words, was the first that was composed on a

methodical plan, and indicates the proper and figurative meaning of the expressions, justified by common use and examples taken from good authors. Ten years later appeared, in spite of the opposition of the Académie, the Dictionnaire universel de Furetière, contenant les mots français tant vieux que modernes, a kind of encyclopedia of the language, which had its merits, but obtained greater success abroad than at home.

The Académie française was founded in 1635 pour établir des règles certaines de la langue, et rendre le langage français non seulement élégant, mais capable de traiter tous les arts et toutes les sciences, and its first Dictionnaire was published in 1694. It consists of an alphabetical list of words and their definitions, illustrated by examples consecrated by usage and the practice of the best writers. No word is admitted but on the highest authority, the object of the work being, according to a contemporary critic, to fixer les écrivains, lorsqu'ils ne savent pas bien si un mot est du bel usage; s'il est assez noble dans une telle circonstance; ou si une certaine expression n'a rien de défectueux. As such the Académie has had undeniably a salutary influence on the language; only its forty members are not infallible, and are liable to error as well as the judges of any other tribunal. Such a word as they reject remains in the language not the less, while such other as they have sanctioned disappears. Still, a comparative study of the seven editions of the Dictionary, which have appeared at long intervals in 1694, 1718, 1740, 1762, 1795, 1835, and 1878, shows the happy influence exerted by the Académie upon the public, and reciprocally by the public upon the Académie. Each edition contains words which had been rejected previously, but which the persistency of their use have proclaimed correct and indispensable. Thus, in as much as it takes the Académie many years to prepare a new edition of its Dictionary, and as on principle it registers only such words as are of undoubted national existence, it follows that, in a certain sense, the work is already old the day of its publication. But this flavor of antiquity is not to be disdained; it, on the contrary, offers important advantages; and if the official vocabulary does not include the terms which fashion creates and which occasionally are consecrated by usage, it does not contain either those irregular forms of language, admissible, perhaps, in very familiar style, but not destined to live" words which come like shadows, so depart." Even the severe criticisms which every new edition of

this official dictionary always draws forth have benefited the public by stimulating individual energies; and the consequence is that no language is better provided with dictionaries of every description than the French is to-day.

As the history of the language after the middle of the seventeenth century is purely that of its literature, we close with these remarks on its dictionaries, which, in their various spheres, are to some extent the records of its progress.

CHAPTER II.

ETYMOLOGY.

ETYMOLOGY is usually defined as that department of the study of language which traces words to their elements, their original forms, and primary significations. Similar definitions are given of the terms Philology and Linguistics, and we often find them employed one for another, almost at haphazard, and according to the more or less urgent euphonic requirements of the phrase or the sentence. Still they admit of a nice distinction; and, to illustrate the difference, we quote from a German writer the following ingenious analogy between the philologist and the botanist on the one hand, and the linguist and the horticulturist on the other.1

"Linguistics," he says, "is an historical science, a science which has no place except where we are in possession of a literature and a history. In the absence of monuments of a literary culture, there is no room for the linguist. In a word, linguistics are applicable to historical documents alone. It is very different with philology, whose sole object is language itself, whose sole study is the examination of language in itself and for itself. The historical changes of languages, the more or less accidental development of the vocabulary, often even their syntactical processes, are all but of secondary importance for the philologist. He devotes his whole attention to the study of the phenomenon itself of articulate speech-a natural function, inevitable and determined, from which there is no escape, and which, like all other functions, is of inexorable necessity. It little matters to the philologist that a language may have prevailed for centuries over vast empires; that it may have produced the most glorious literary monuments, and yielded to the requirements of the most delicate and refined intellectual culture. He little cares, on the other hand, whether an obscure idiom

1 A. Schleicher, Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen.