The Germanic element in the race, however, being far less than the Gallic basis or the Roman accretions, naturally began to lose ground. The same thing took place in the language; Celtic and Latin advanced, Germanic retreated. That noble speech, which we know only at its highest stage, and which might have risen even higher, began to decline and become corrupted towards the end of the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth, it was no more than a patois, from which the Germanic elements had completely disappeared. The treasury was exhausted; and what remained was an illogical and barbarous anomaly in the midst of the progress of Celtic and Latin. Thus in the sixteenth century the revival of classical studies found the language in ruins, and tried to remodel it on the lines of Greek and Latin. This was the professed aim of the writers of this great age. They did not succeed, and the seventeenth century, wisely seeing that the irresistible march of events could in no wise be curbed by the hand of man, set itself merely to improve the language from within; for every day it was assuming more and more the forms best suited to the dominant race, the forms, in other words, into which the grammatical life of Celtic had formerly been cast. Although both the _langue d’oil_ and French proper are marked by a greater unity than the _lingua romana_ (since the mixture of races and languages that gave birth to them was less complex) yet they have produced separate dialects which survive to this day. It is not doing these too much honour to call them dialects, not patois. They arose, not from the corruption of the dominant type, with which they were at least contemporary, but from the different proportions in which the Celtic, Latin, and Germanic elements, that still make up the French nationality, were mingled. To the north of the Seine, we find the dialect of Picardy; this is, in vocabulary and rhythmic quality, very near Flemish, of which the Germanic character is too obvious to be dwelt upon. Flemish, in this respect, shows the same power of choice as the _langue d’oil_, which could in a certain poem, without ceasing to be itself, admit forms and expressions taken bodily from the language spoken at Arras.[139] As we go south of the Seine towards the Loire, the Celtic elements in the provincial dialects grow more numerous. In Burgundian, and the dialects of Vaud and Savoy, even the vocabulary has many traces of Celtic; these are not found in French, where the predominant factor is rustic Latin.[140] I have shown above[141] how from the sixteenth century the influence of the north had given ground before the growing preponderance of the peoples beyond the Loire. The reader has merely to compare the present sections on language with my former remarks on blood to see how close is the relation between the speech of a people and its physical constitution.[142]