les Baudelaire.
Minor Poets of the Second Romantic Group.
Dupont. The Parnasse. Minor and later Dramatists.
Scribe. Ponsard. Emile Augier. Eugene Labiche. Dumas
the Younger. Victorien Sardou. Classes of Nineteenth-century
Fiction. Minor and later Novelists. Jules Janin.
Charles de Bernard. Jules Sandeau. Octave Feuillet.
Murger. Edmond About. Feydeau. Gustave Droz.
Flaubert. The Naturalists. Emile Zola. Journalists
and Critics. Paul de St. Victor. Hippolyte Taine.
Academic Critics. Linguistic and Literary Study of
French. Philosophical Writers. Comte. Theological
Writers. Montalembert. Ozanam. Lacordaire. Ernest
Renan. Historians. Thierry. Thiers. Guizot. Mignet.
Michelet. Quinet. Tocqueville. Minor Historians.

CONCLUSION 579

INDEX 591

BOOK I.

MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.

THE ORIGINS.

[Sidenote: Relation of French to Latin.]

Of all European literatures the French is, by general consent, that
which possesses the most uniformly fertile, brilliant, and unbroken
history. In actual age it may possibly yield to others, but the
connection between the language of the oldest and the language of the
newest French literature is far closer than in these other cases, and
the fecundity of mediaeval writers in France far exceeds that of their
rivals elsewhere. For something like three centuries England, Germany,
Italy, and more doubtfully and to a smaller extent, Spain, were content
for the most part to borrow the matter and the manner of their literary
work from France. This brilliant literature was however long before it
assumed a regularly organized form, and in order that it might do so a
previous literature and a previous language had to be dissolved and
precipitated anew. With a few exceptions, to be presently noticed,
French literature is not to be found till after the year 1000, that is
to say until a greater lapse of time had passed since Caesar's campaigns
than has passed from the later date to the present day. Taking the
earliest of all monuments, the Strasburg Oaths, as starting-point, we
may say that French language and French literature were nine hundred
years in process of formation. The result was a remarkable one in
linguistic history. French is unquestionably a daughter of Latin, yet it
is not such a daughter as Italian or Spanish. A knowledge of the older
language would