THE PROGRESSIVE FRENCH READER; SUITED TO THE GRADUAL ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNERS GENERALLY, AND ESPECIALLY ADAPTED TO THE NEW METHOD. WITH Notes and a Lexicon. BY NORMAN PINNEY, A. M. NEW YORK: F. J. HUNTINGTON, AND MASON BROTHERS, 28 PARK ROW, (OPPOSITE THE ASTOR HOUSE.) Educt 1518.52,618 ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, in the Clerk's office of the District Court of Connecticut. Stéréotypé par HARTFORD, CONN. PREFACE. ALTHOUGH the New Method of learning to write and speak the French language has now been for some time in general favor, yet no Reader has heretofore appeared on a corresponding plan. The learner has been obliged either to complete the whole method before beginning to read a French book, or else to read what he cannot grammatically understand. By the former of these courses, he is exercised on the grammar alone until a great part of the French language has been acquired. This requires, frequently, a long time, and teachers and learners have commonly preferred the latter course. When the pupil has been through a few lessons of the Method, he has been usually required to translate into English, books prepared with little or no reference to his degree of advancement. Moods and tenses of the verbs and grammatical principles, which are taught, perhaps, at the end of the Method, occur on the first pages of his Reader, and he is practiced in giving their equivalents in English, months and months before he has been taught what they are: To attempt rectifying this, by teaching him the paradigms of the verbs and furnishing him with literal translations, is but an imperfect remedy, unsatisfactory to judicious teachers, and unfavorable to correct scholarship. The present Reader I have attempted to adapt fully to the New Method. It is designed to be taken up, when the learner has completed the twenty-sixth lesson of the Practical French Teacher. The first selection is of such a kind that no grammatical knowledge is required, for its full understanding, which the pupil has not already been taught; and the same may be said of all the other lessons, if the Teacher and the Reader be studied on regularly together. The numbers placed at the |