Students may have different but equally legitimate aims in the study of French and it is the duty of a fully developed department to furnish them with the necessary opportunities.

On the one hand, some men desire a knowledge of the language for immediate and practical purposes, or to become familiar with French in the study of the development of thought.

On the other hand, passing beyond the College and entering the Graduate School whither resort mainly those with ambitions to become scholars and teachers, we can again make a division into two parts and recognize those who approach the study from the "scientific" or from the "literary" standpoint.

To the first subdivision of the above two classes belong those who study a modern language to obtain a tool for other studies. Such students, for the most part undergraduates of the lower classes, must be supplied with a thorough training in the principles of the language and must be put through a full course of reading destined to give the familiarity and ease which a study of grammar alone cannot supply. This work, useful as it is in the present organization of study in this country, does not really belong to a college, but is rather the kind of training which a foreign university man expects to find done in the schools, so that in the presence of visiting Europeans one is constantly in the apologetic attitude of explaining how secondary work finds place in a university. In fact, such study can acquire the disciplinary

value expected in a college only by increased speed of progress, by which greater concentration is demanded of the student, but through which those who are by nature inapt for the study of languages are likely to be sacrificed. Moreover, in view of the necessity of maintaining the educational value of French as a substitute, a very insufficient one, it is true, for such infinitely more valuable processes of mental discipline as Greek and Latin, care must be taken not to concede too much to the advocates of the so-called "natural" method, which instead of driving the boy forward and developing his powers of mental acquisition, deliberately carries him back to childhood and starts out in French as the baby starts out to acquire a vocabulary, by a system of kindergarten linguistics. Hence, though there is a place in college for conversation courses, they must not be made the haven of those who wish merely to ask for bread, butter, or a postage-stamp in French, but should be strengthened by grammatical instruction.

There are, however, many undergraduates with higher aims, who wish to know French in order to be familiar with French thought and the expression of thought. French writers have contributed much to the world's wealth and the qualities which have distinguished French literature since the seventeenth century-to use the pet terms of French critics, the qualities of clarte, of precision and of logique--can be of use in counteracting the muddled tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon mind and in inculcating the ability to classify one's knowledge and to express it in a systematic form. Here the teacher of French finds himself in a perilous position from which his classical colleague is safe. It is his duty to avoid pleasing the superficial by devoting too much attention to the wishy-washy commonplaces of second rate contemporary criticasters and novelists. He must, however, as sedulously avoid the pitfall which the classical teacher has not always escaped, of over-indulgence in grammar and linguistics. The motive of those who have made the mistake is again the laudable one of causing the study of the language to go hand-in-hand with mental training, but the process may be carried too far by those whose enthusiasm for philology exceeds their discretion in literature; who, as Professor Gildersleeve said a few years ago in an article

in the Atlantic Monthly, "make the strings of the poet's lyre a clothes line for the airing of grammatical notions." The majority of college students de not need a detailed knowledge of French earlier than the sixteenth century; in many cases the seventeenth century suffices, but of this century one's knowledge cannot be too thorough. It is a waste of energy to try to transform the average man into a medievalist. Pressure of time prevents him from taking up hours in the costly process of sifting wheat from chaff. Only a minority need to be made aware of the continuity of tradition, social life and literary expression which is drawn from the Middle Ages to modern times, linking together the rationalism of Jean de Meun and the Reason of Boileau, the sententiousness of Alain Chartier and that of the modern political tribune.

In the Graduate School the conditions change. The scholar must know all he can of his subject and know it as thoroughly as possible. He may, however, approach it from more than one point of view. Just as we are told that in philosophical thought every man is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, so in the advanced study of French one may proceed by analysis or by synthesis. The hard-headed, practical American will probably find the former method more attractive. He is now charmed by subjects which in his undergraduate days seemed flat, stale and unprofitable. He delights in the dissection of morphological or syntactical forms and finds in the gutturals or dentals of old French more melody than in the music of the spheres. Other students may proceed by way of synthesis and try to grasp the general thoughts, rather than the minute facts, which underlie the intellectual development of the French. Such students are few, because the American does not readily handle the phraseology of abstract thought. Its intangibility and the difficulty of making it stand for the definiteness which he desires cause him to look upon it either as superficial or as a sort of chaos Scoticum. If, by chance, his inclinations do direct him to abstract thought, he is apt to go. over entirely to philosophy, and, as a result of the unfortunate partitiones scientiarum existing in our over-organized University, he confines himself to metaphysics, and logic, and is lost to literature.

There is, however, a third course of study which combines many of the qualities of the two tendencies just mentioned, the painstaking accuracy of the scientific method and the generalizations of the thinker. It is, in fact, the method which is probably destined to supersede all other systems of advanced literary study, I mean the scientific investigation of literature on a comparative basis. The new intellectual Cosmopolitanism, which has taken the place of the older Classical Humanism, has obliged even the Frenchman to acknowledge that some good things can come from outside his own country. Hence, ceasing for a time that self-centred admiration of his literature of which Nisard furnishes one of the best examples, which reminds one of the sage engrossed in the contemplation of his own navel, he at last acknowledges relationships with other literatures. No longer testing them by the standard of seventeenth century Classicism alone he admits the claims to examination of the thought of other lands. And this field is the one to which the American specialist, who is not a philologist only, is likely to turn more and more. To become an adept in such a science requires, in its present condition, all the painstaking accuracy of the student of language. The scholar's time is now largely taken up with the investigation of minute and apparently arid and unprofitable questions of origins and sources, which exercise the qualities of dogged persistency and laborious, often uninspired grubbing now chiefly characteristic of American scholarship. This method, once confined to medieval literature, is now applied to modern times and even to the nineteenth century and we can grub at the origins of Classicism or dig out the influences upon Romanticism as we trace the genealogy of a chanson de geste or the evolution of a Romance of the Round Table.

From what I have said above it may be seen that the tendencies in the study of French at the present time (and the same may, with qualifications, be asserted of the other modern languages), are threefold and divided into superimposed stages in each one of which there seems to be a different ideal. In the lowest stage the aim is utilitarian: the student wants a practical knowledge of the language; the teacher tries to supply that want without forgetting that as a college instructor he must lay stress on accuracy of study and pre