Ladies and Gentlemen:—I purpose to treat the subject of the study of modern languages in our higher institutions. By reason of my absence from the convention last year, I failed to hear two or three papers of great value treating the same general matter. It is, however, a subject of perennial interest, and though I shall not claim to contribute anything very new or original to the discussion, it seems worth while to go over again the different aims and methods of modern language study and to emphasize the importance of treating our classes with definite regard to these aims.

There has been produced up to the present time no complete manual or treatise, exhibiting the origin and development of our prose. The works of Minto and Saintsbury are characterized by marked excellences, but they fail in some points of essential interest and importance. Our standard literary historians ignore, for the most part, this phase of their subject, and there is more of stimulating, suggestive criticism to be gathered from the terse prefaces that accompany Mark Pattison's edition of Pope, than from the elaborate manuals of Morley and Arnold. In discussing the growth of English prose from Elizabeth to Victoria, it is not my purpose to ignore the periods that precede the Elizabethan age. The germ of our English prose antedates by many generations the advent of that era. It may be traced back as early as the epoch of “the blameless King,” Alfred, in whose ideal character were concretely displayed those qualities of mind and heart of which the romancers of the Arthurian cycle but dreamed.

In the paper which I had the pleasure of presenting at the last convention of our Association, I spoke of the French language in Louisiana, and took the opportunity, while giving a brief history of the language in our State, to assert that the Louisianians speak a pure and correct French. I think, in order to prove this, that it may be advisable this year to give an account of our Louisiana literature, and I hope that the subject may be of interest to the members of the Modern Language Association.

At its last annual session, this Association listened to two papers, one on “The Place of English in the College Curriculum,” by Professor Hunt, of Princeton College, and the other on “The Requirements in English for admission to College,” by Professor McElroy, of the University of Pennsylvania, and at its preceding session to one on “The College Course in English Literature, how it may be Improved,” by Professor Hart, of the University of Cincinnati,—the subjects of all of which, taken together, are cognate with that of the present paper. I do not design, however, to go over the same ground as that so well treated in those papers.

Language is changeable and language is unchangeable. It is unchangeable in the sense that the laws governing its development can not be arbitrarily changed by human action; it is changeable in the sense that the rules governing the use of language are never precisely the same for any two successive periods.

Under every great political, social, religious, and educational movement, there are found certain truths or principles that act as motive power. The movement may be very complex and varied in its manifestations, but the underlying truths or principles are generally clear and simple. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, for example, with all the civil and ecclesiastical disturbances it brought about, was based on these two well-known principles: 1. Men are saved by faith alone; and 2. The Bible is the only rule of faith and practice in religion. The American Revolution, with all its multiplicity of events, was founded on the principle that taxation without representation is tyranny. Illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely; but the truth will hardly be questioned that great movements in society generally derive their impulse from one or more principles which admit of perspicuous statement.

Among the most difficult questions with which the student of Faust has to deal are those which modern criticism has raised concerning the unity and coherency of the work and the continuity of the author's plan. That there are serious perplexities of this sort will be admitted, I presume, by all, except perhaps those for whom the interpretation of Faust is only an exercise of the speculative imagination. The long and peculiar genesis of the poem has left marks upon it.

The only known manuscript of the Old French Metrical romance quoted as Guillaume de Dole, but entitled by its author the “Romans de la Rose,” is preserved in the Library of the Vatican at Rome (Regina, No. 1725). It is a small folio of the fourteenth century, on parchment, 130 leaves, inscribed in a neat and sufficiently legible Gothic character, without ornamentation; and, with the exception of several leaves at the beginning, which are lost, is in a good state of preservation.

In Canada, at different periods of her history, we find all those causes existing that produce speech mixture in its various degrees from the union of two wholly divergent idioms, as in the case of the French and Indian, down through forms of language that are more or less closely related according as they belong to the same general stock or are contained, as special varieties, within the domain of a single common type. The conditions, furthermore, of antagonistic racial difference, of incompatible stages of civilisation, of strong variations of traditional culture, of divergence of social customs, of well marked and persistent dialect varieties, give to the problem here a many-sidedness and a kaleidoscopic coloring which are indicative, from the beginning, of its complex nature.