in no writer attracted any attention beyond his immediate vicinity;
and it is significant that the Felibres themselves were long in
ignorance of Jasmin. It is then not difficult to demonstrate that the
Felibrige revival bears more the character of a creation than of an
evolution. It is not at all an evolution of the literature of the
Troubadours; it is in no way like it. The language of the Felibres is
not even the descendant of the special dialect that dominated as a
literary language in the days of the Troubadours; for it was the speech
of Limousin that formed the basis of that language, and only two of the
greater poets among the Troubadours, Raimond de Vaqueiras and Fouquet de
Marseille, were natives of Provence proper.

The dialect of Saint-Remy is simply one of countless ramifications of
the dialects descended from the Latin. Mistral and his associates have
made their literary language out of this dialect as they found it, and
not out of the language of the Troubadours. They have regularized the
spelling, and have deliberately eliminated as far as possible words and
forms that appeared to them to be due to French influence, substituting
older and more genuine forms--forms that appeared more in accord with
the genius of the _langue d'oc_ as contrasted with the _langue d'oil_.
Thus, _glori_, _istori_, _paire_, replace _gloaro_, _istouero_, _pero_,
which are often heard among the people. This was the first step. The
second step taken arose from the necessity of making this speech of the
illiterate capable of elevated expression. Mistral claims to have used
no word unknown to the people or unintelligible to them, with the
exception that he has used freely of the stock of learned words common
to the whole Romance family of languages. These words, too, he
transforms more or less, keeping them in harmony with the forms peculiar
to the _langue d'oc_. Hence, it is true that the language of the
Felibres is a conventional, literary language, that does not represent
exactly the speech of any section of France, and is related to the
popular speech more or less as any official language is to the dialects
that underlie it. As the Felibres themselves have received all their
instruction and literary culture in the French language, they use it
among themselves, and their prose especially shows the influence of the
French to the extent that it may be said that the Provencal sentence, in
prose, appears to be a word-for-word translatio