PREFACE

Elementary bookg are constantly issuing from the press, calculated to afford every facility for obtaining a speedy and accurate knowledge of foreign languages. But the knowledge so acquired must necessarily be also elementary, unless ihe study of thèse books be succeeded by a course of reading, which will render the learner familiar with the language as it is written and spoken at the présent day. Hère a great difficulty présents itself to the teacher of French, for while the language of educated society in France has undergone a great change from the influence of modem writers, the works themselves which exercise this influence are most of them totally unfit to be put into the hands of young people. A comparison between the familiar phraseology of the works of the last century, and even of the élégant writer De Jouy in the beginning of this, with the works which now give the tone to conversational French, will demonstrate the great idiomatic révolution which has taken place in the language within the last quarter of a century ; yet young people still continue to read extracts from Gil Blas, Marmontel's taies, Marivaux's novels, &c, to obtain a knowledge of the French idiom of the présent day. It is as though a Frenchman should présent himself in an English circle with fashionable phrases from Johnson's Rambler, or Goldsmith's comédies.

Books exemplifying the modem idiomatic construction of the language must, therefore, be found of great assistance to its teachers. The chief object of the présent volume is to offer this assistance, by affording the means of imparting to youth a knowledge of the French language, as it is spoken at the présent day, and as it is presented in the works of the modem authors of France, without the risk of sullying the mind of the young reader by an introduction to such scènes and principes as but too often disgrâce the pages of writers, who would be an honor to humanity were their moral qualities but equal to their genius.