Littérature Française (Première Année)

Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected and accentuation has been made consistent. All other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has been maintained.
NORMAL SÉRIES
PREMIÈRE ANNÉE
Normal College, New York, auteur des Échos et Reflets, du Colloquial French Drill, et des Élans et Tristesses.

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1885, by Henry Holt & Co.
This volume contains in substance the first part of the course on French Literature given in the Normal College.
Though adapted to the requirements of a special programme and to certain conditions of space and time, it can with advantage be used wherever an interest is taken or instruction given in French Literature. It recommends itself particularly to American teachers and students as a book, not imported into, but grown out of, the class-room.
The biographical and critical notices are short, comprehensive, in the clearest and simplest possible style. There is nothing elaborate in them, nothing superfluous. Each of them is followed by a criticism on the writer under consideration, by some one whose judgment is of some account in the world of letters. It is both interesting and instructive to know what good critics think of good writers.
The texts from the latter have been selected with great care. They are not extracts more or less curtailed, which give an idea of a literary work about as exactly as a stone offers the image of the monument from which it is taken. Whenever it has been practicable, a whole work is reviewed. The parts that are not indispensable are summarily delineated or analyzed; the passages best calculated to illustrate the author's manner and originality are given in full. Thus the reader will find the whole plot of Corneille's tragedy Horace, of Molière's comedy Les Femmes savantes, etc.
Following these texts will be found a collection of the author's sententious and popular sayings. They afford a harvest of beautiful quotations, which every one can turn to account.