we cannot hear the name of the one without in
voluntarily thinking of the other. Written for a
Parisian public, Tartarim of Tarascon is far better
and more widely known than Mireio, although
the bombast of the former is not one bit more
characteristic of the region than the beauty and
native grace of the latter.
In our own land the subject of Modern Proven
cal has hardly reached a higher level than the
magazine article, and the attention of those who
are amused with any new account of an odd and
unfamiliar corner of modern Europe. The lead
ing monthly magazines have lately had chatty and
well illustrated articles on Southern France and
in the current volume of ''The Century," there is
a very entertaining series of papers by an author
whose express object it is to report th?. present
condition and activities of the leaders of the move
ment, to whom he goes as ambassador. As such,
let us leave to him the last word ! I'.
A NEWSPAPER IN LATIN.
A real curiosity comes to us in the shape of a
little newspaperin the Latin Linguage publication,
at Aguila, a small town in the Abruzzi, Italy. The
enterprising editor, variously known as Signor Ar
rigo Ulrico or Carolus Henricus Ulrichs, would
be plain Harry Ulrichs with us ; he was a few years
ago a student in Munich, whence he transferred
his learning and his activity to the little place
above named. He calls his paper Alandae, "the
Larks," and nourishes for the diminutive sheet an
ambition quite out of proportion to its size. For,
with the idea and the motto that "the Latin lan
guage has a wonderful power of uniting mankind,"
he actually aims at restoring the tongue of the Cae
sars to its former place as the language of diploma
cy, of art, of science, literature and law ; with the
added purpose of making it a universal language.
The editor believes that the speech of ancient
Rome can be adapted to modern ideas, and bent
to the uses of recent discoveries, inventions and
modes of life, disregarding the fact of the rise of
THE FREE LANCE.
a whole set of languages, the Romance group, on
the ruins of a speech which was found twelve
centuries ago too set and too flexible for further
use in the daily vicissitudes of life.
The notion of a universal language is one that
recurs periodically in our days and is never com
pletely lost sight of. Yet no idea is more delu
sive. Max Muller says that it is "one of those re
forms which we must leave to the next century to
carry out,"—a graceful way of shelving the whole
question. For if there is anything that modern
philology has shown, it is that language is no arti
ficial and arbitrary creation, at the will of any set
of men or any nation. The discovery of Grimm's
law, Verner's law and a host of minor principles
has shown that language is a growth, a steady and
orderly progression. The study of Phonetics
alone accounts for many, an apparent vagary,
many a seemingly capricious alteration or new
form of expression. Besides all this, in the nat
•ural course of events and by an almost subcon
scious process, one language is fast becoming
the accepted medium of communication on all the
routes of travel and avenues of trade. Through
the conquests, the enterprise and the persist
ence of the Anglo Saxon race, English is
rapidly taking for the world the place that
French still holds in Europe, Arabic in Asia
and Northern Africa and Malay in the East
Indies,—the place of a common dialect. No lan.
guage has in its diffusion so shrunk the globe for
us as the tongue which now leads one easily and
agreeably around the world in less than "eighty
days "
A direct inference from this is, that if the de
votees of Volapuk, or any other puk, would turn
their attention from delusive artificial systems to
the study of English, they would simply tall in
with a movement already begun and steadily ad
vancing; and better than all, would at the same
time u clock to their use a rich storehouse of lit
erature and learning. Let them give up dabbling
in strange compounds which like those of organic
chemistry, often change and vary under one's