It is with extreme diffidence that I offer to read a paper before this Association. My own teaching is done under conditions of such disadvantage—with students so poorly prepared, and with results so unsatisfactory—that I cannot but feel how presumptuous it would be in me to attempt here to teach those who themselves teach under so much happier conditions and to so much better purpose than I can do. My sole apology might be an experience which, covering now three decades of language teaching, has passed through many phases both of our professional activity at large and of my own individual work. But these phases, for myself personally, have been rather renewals of effort and of disappointment than landmarks of progress or of triumph; and this experience, if I could recount it, might serve rather as a warning than as an example. So that it is as a seeker rather than as a giver that I come, to share my counsel with my more favored brethren; in order that by the confession of my own shortcomings, and especially by the criticism and discussion which this paper may elicit, I may be helped —and so perchance may help others—to find “the better way.”

Die Handschrift des Passionsspiels, das wir hiermit der Veröffentlichung übergeben, befindet sich in der Bibliothek des Ex-Präsidenten Hern Andrew D. White, Cornell University, Ithaca. In dieselbe ist sie aus der Sammlung Sir Frederic Madden's übergegangen, wohl im Jahre 1872, denn aus diesem Jahre datirt ein Schreiben Prof. Weigand's an den jetzigen Besitzer der Handschrift, in welchem dieselbe kurz besprochen wird.

Some of the plays published in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623 show in their different parts very great inequalities in style and in dramatic effectiveness. In some places these differences become so marked that the question is forced upon the attentive reader,—Can this play be wholly the work of Shakespeare ?

Three years ago I was one of those who gathered in the Sanders Theatre to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a college founded to perpetuate living learning chiefly by the help of three dead languages, the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin. I have given them that order of precedence which they had in the minds of those our pious founders. The Hebrew came first because they believed that it had been spoken by God himself and that it would have been the common speech of mankind but for the judicial invention of the modern languages at Shinar. Greek came next because the New Testament was written in that tongue, and Latin last as the interpreter between scholars. Of the men who stood about that fateful cradle swung from bough of the primeval forest, there were probably few who believed that a book written in any living language could itself live.

The science of phonetics is still so new that it may seem premature to suggest the possibility of a partially deductive method of exposition, but if it is to be used in teaching beginners in a language how to pronounce, how much easier the task would be if we could begin by stating certain general characteristics which color the whole phonetic field of that language so that the peculiarities of every sound in it, and the rules of phonetic change might be largely explained by and remembered through them. That this will some day be done, I firmly believe, and I wish here to suggest how one such characteristic of French may be used in this way.

As a science develops, the necessity for some methodical record of its literature becomes more and more felt. The annual book-lists published by scientific journals and societies as well as the more extensive bibliographies in all departments of learning, give ample proof of this fact. In the Scandinavian group of languages, Theodore Möbius has performed an admirable task in cataloguing the works relating to the Icelandic language and literature, while Chr. Bruun, the Librarian of the Royal Library, at Copenhagen, is at present engaged on a far more extensive treatment of the Danish side. The latter work, however, by reason of its very completeness, including as it will the whole range of Danish investigation, will not supply exactly the need met by Möbius’ less pretentious but more accessible list. The subjects of the language and literature, too, have not yet been reached and several years will elapse before the completion of the book. The object of the present paper is to give such information respecting the development and the present state of Danish lexicography as may be of practical use, especially to the foreign student of the Danish language. Keeping the practical always in view, I shall give only a very slight description of the earlier dictionaries, confining myself chiefly to such works as are of general use. Before beginning the account, a few words of explanation respecting the bibliographical lists may not be considered inappropriate. In the classification I have striven after consistency, but in some few cases this was found to be impossible, as with the first class of Danish dictionaries, to which Wandal's ‘Catalogus’ does not properly belong. Technical dictionaries, of which there are comparatively few in either Danish or Swedish, are, for sake of convenience, classified with the Fremmedordböger (Dictionaries of foreign words.) This classification is the more defensible in that the same work occasionally combines the characteristics of both. Of international dictionaries I have given only those in the principal languages, French, German and English, and the two former have been grouped together. In every doubtful case the preference has been given to Danish, so that Danish-Swedish and Swedish-Danish dictionaries will be found in the Danish list, as also Danish-Swedish-German, etc

I congratulate the Modern Language Association on the establishment of a section which is as indispensable to language as the character of the Prince of Denmark is to the play of Hamlet. Language lives in sound; and the study of modern languages is the study of the spoken tongues.

Das mouillierte l ist wohl oft in Einleitungen zu altfranzosischen Texten besprochen worden, ist aber nie zum Gegenstand einer Einzeluntersuchung gemacht worden. Als leitendes Princip bei der Untersuchung dienten mir die zwei von W. Förster, Ausg. von ‘Cliges,’ p. lxix, gegebenen Regeln. 1. “Die Schicksale des l können je nach der Natur des vorausgehenden Vokals in ihrer Entwickelung überhaupt verschieden sein, und obendrein brauchen sie zeitlich nicht zusammenzufallen; 2. a priori ist anzunehmen, dass die, einzelnen franzosischen Dialekte dieselbe Lautgruppe verschieden behandelt haben.”

It is well known that two kinds of ne are present in Chaucer, which are written alike in the manuscripts. These two particles, however, must not be confounded. One of them is ne (neque) and the other is ne (non). Compare Old French ne and né (=ni).