French sing.”[1] In 1549 Joachim de Bellay had written his spirited Défense et illustration de la langue Française, in which he is at pains to prove “que la langue Françoise n’est pas si pauvre que beaucoup l’estiment.”[2] In his intense desire that his countrymen shall write in French he advances the somewhat paradoxical argument that, in view of the present “literary competition,” French writings have the best chance of surviving. “Vrai est que le nom de cesluy cy (i.e. the author who writes in Latin) s’estend en plus de lieux; mais bien souvent comme la fumée qui sort grosse au commencement, peu à peu s’esvanouit parmy le grand espace de l’air, il se perd ou pour estre opprimé de l’infinie multitude des autres plus renommez, il demeure quasi en silence et obscurité.”[3]
These objections to the encroachments of the Latin tongue were largely due to a patriotic desire to dethrone a language whose tendency was to usurp for itself all the high places in literature. Another argument on the same side, the plea of lack of time, had already begun to make itself heard. Merchants wanted to give their sons a good education, but, as they needed their assistance at an early age, grudged the inordinate length of time that had to be spent before good scholarship could be attained. “My father wished to see my learned education completed in one year,” says the school-boy in Cordier’s Colloquies, when told what a long business it is to learn Latin colloquially.[4]
In Germany the vernacular was more backward in asserting itself. Luther’s sermons and hymns were a powerful factor in the development of German style, but the troubled state of the country during the following century hindered any progress towards the refinement of the language. The foundation of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, a kind of “academy” organised at Weimar in 1617 by Ludwig,
