Mistral himself, with the profounder instincts and wiser judgment of a really large mind, has grown more modest from year to year in his hopes concerning the final harvest of that generous enterprise to which his life and powers have been consecrated. He was not quite able to extend a hearty welcome to Alphonse Daudet, when that most humane and sympathetic of realists appeared upon the scene with “Numa Roumestan” and the “Lettres de mon Moulin,” describing in the most pellucid French and with a fidelity equal to his own, the prose aspect of the life of the South, and all the rustic scenes which Mistral had so affectionately poetized. All the _felibre_, indeed, looked askance at Daudet as an intruder, and this is one more sign, if not of the limitations of their leader’s genius, at least of the narrow and ephemeral character of their collective ideal. However, in an address delivered before the previously-mentioned assembly at Hyères in 1885--ten years after Aubanel had hurled his fierce defiance at the French Academy--Mistral might have been heard pleading, with much earnestness and good sense, that French and Provençal should be kept resolutely distinct, both in the teaching of the schools, and in the talk of the people, and that, by way of preserving the purity of _both forms of speech_. His remarks had an especial appropriateness then and there, because the prose work crowned upon that occasion was a series of naïve and highly dramatic dialogues, entitled “Scènes de la Vie Provençale,” by M. C. Sénès, of Toulon, officially known as La Sinse. French of the most barbaric, and Provençal of the most pliant, are mixed up in these delightfully comic dialogues exactly as they are upon the lips of the common folk. It is the most amusing, perhaps the only distinctly amusing work which the school of the _felibre_ has ever produced, and anybody who reads French may read and have a hearty laugh over it. And I may add, from my own experience, that a very short residence in the ancient Provincia is enough to show that the local idiom is much more intelligible phonetically than it looks at first sight upon paper. I may be mistaken, but I take the truth to be that modern Provençal is, after all, a dialect only, and not, as was so long and passionately claimed by the confederate poets, a language. As a matter of fact, it resembles the plastic idiom of the ancient Troubadours very little more than it resembles modern French, and certainly no more than it resembles Gascon, Catalan, or the Italian of the Western Riviera. All the Romance dialects, however fallen from literary honour, or untamed by literary law, are closely akin, and bear marks, even in their utmost degradation, of the same illustrious pedigree. They are like certain wild flowers, the pimpernel, the anemone, whose species can never be mistaken, but whose colours present, and that spontaneously, an almost infinite variety.