The chapters of Pasquier’s[190] _Recherches de la France_, in which he deals with French literature, are perhaps the most interesting of the whole. [Sidenote: _Pasquier: The_ Recherches.] He had himself been an ardent disciple of the _Pléiade_, and a pleasant poet, in his youth; and in his maturer years he applied to the history of literature the same untiring research and sound good sense which made him the first historical inquirer, as distinguished from mere chroniclers, in France. It is not entirely unimportant that, in his preliminary remarks on the subject, he announces his intention of devoting his seventh book to French Poetry and his eighth to French language—a pointed if unintentional expression of the predominance of poetry in literature even as late as the end of the sixteenth century. His first observations are directed to the difference between French and other modern languages on the one hand, and ancient poetry on the other, in the matter of rhyme, which he would derive (not without at least as much justification of probability and history as other theorists can allege) from the rhythmical parallelisms of prose speech, at first accidentally sweetened by homœoteleuton, and then deliberately by rhyme itself. He is well aware that the language of the Franks must have been German; and his theory of French as composed of three languages, Walloon (by which he probably means Gallic or Celtic), Latin, and Frankish, will be more obnoxious to philological pedants than to philosophical philologists. He knows the monorhymed _chansons_ such as _Berte aux grans Piés_, but is disposed to put them unnecessarily late—nay, he seems to think that there was little before the thirteenth century and Philip Augustus. Yet he is not unaware of the much greater antiquity of the decasyllable as compared with the Alexandrine. ----- Footnote 190: The _Recherches_ have not been completely reprinted, I think, since 1723. All their literary matter, however, is included in M. Léon Feugère’s extremely useful and well-edited _Œuvres Choisies d’E. P._ (2 vols., Paris, 1849). It extends from i. 230 to ii. 134, what follows on the University of Paris being itself not quite irrelevant. -----