Few persons, when they consider the present greatness and prosperity of the French Empire, bear in mind the heterogeneous elements of which it is composed. For us, Paris is France, and the literature of the realm is comprised in the words, "Paris publications." We think not of the millions of Frenchmen to whom the language of the capital is a sealed letter,--of the Germans of Alsatia, the Flemings of the extreme North-East, the Bretons of the peninsula of Finisterre, the Basques, the Catalans of the mountains of Roussillon, and, more numerous than all these, the fourteen millions of the thirty-seven departments south of the Loire. These speak, to this day, with fewer modifications than have taken place in any other of the European languages during the same lapse of time, the very tongue in which wrote Bertran de Born and Pierre Vidal, the idiom in which Dante and Petrarca found some of their happiest inspirations, and which, we are told, Tasso envied for its poetic capabilities. True, the Provinces of Gascony, Provence, Auvergne may be traversed by the stranger almost without his suspecting that other than the French, more or less badly spoken, is in common use. In hotels and shops he will hear nothing else. The larger towns in direct communication with the capital, and all that is purely exterior in the people, are becoming more and more French every day. But in the family interior, far from the noise of affairs, the bustle of towns, in hamlets, among the vine-growers and tenders of the silk-worm, in the mountains and retired valleys, the home-tongue is again at ease. Simple, ingenuous, amber-like in its sunny tints, it is a reflection of that ardent poetical imagination which made the courts of the Counts of Toulouse the nurseries of modern poesy, when the rest of Europe was little else than one wrangling battle-field. Neither the exterminating crusade against the Albigenses, after which the idiom of Provence was wellnigh stigmatized as heretical, nor the civil and religious wars of the seventeenth century, nor even the _dragonnades_ of Louis XIV., have been able to outroot it. The levelling edicts of the first French Revolution were powerless against it. The Provençal, or Langue d'Oc, if you will, the Gascon, the Auvergnat, are spoken to this day in their respective provinces, universally spoken by the people, who in many instances do not understand French at all. They must be preached to in their own dialect. They have their songs, their theatre even.