THF PROGRESSIVE FRENCH READER; SUITED TO THE GRADUAL ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNER GENERALLY AND ESPECIALLY ADAPTED TO THE NEW MITHOD. WITH Notes and a Lexicon. BY NORMAN PINNEY, A. M., LATE PROFESSOR OF LANGUAGES IN TRINITY COLLEG NEW YORK: MASON BROTHERS, 108 & 110 DUANE STREET, HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY GIFT OF GEORGE ARTHUR PLIMPTON ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1819. By F. H. BROOKS, the Clerk's office of the District Court of Connecticut. Stéréotypé par RICHARD H. HOBBS, HARTFORD, CONN. . PREFACE. ALTHOUGH the New Method of learning to write and speak the French language has now been for some time in general favor, yet no Reader has heretofore appeared on a corresponding plan. The learner has been obliged either to complete the whole method before beginning to read a French book, or else to read what he cannot grammatically understand. By the former of these courses, he is exercised on the grammar alone until a great part of the French language has been acquired. This requires, frequently, a long time, and teachers and learners have commonly preferred the latter course. When the pupii has been through a few lessons of the Method, he has been usually required to translate into English, books prepared with little or no reference to his degree of advancement. Moods and tenses of the verbs and grammatical principles, which are taught, perhaps, at the end of the Method, occur on the first pages of his Reader, and he is practiced in giving their equivalents in English, months and months before he has been taught what they are. To attempt rectifying this, by teaching him the paradigms of the verbs and furnishing him with literal translations, is but an imperfect remedy, unsatisfactory to judicious teachers, and unfavorable to correct scholarship. The present Reader I have attempted to adapt fully to the New Method. It is designed to be taken up, when the learner has completed the twenty-sixth lesson of the Practical French Teacher. The first selection is of such a kind that no grammatical knowledge is required, for its full understanding, which the pupil has not already been taught; and the same may be said of all the other lessons, if the Teacher and the Reader be studied on regularly together. The number placed at the beginning of each lesson in the Reader, shows what lesson of the Teacher it is designed to follow, and when read in that connection, the learner will all along find himself prepared with grammatical knowledge for his lesson in reading. When the feminine gender has been introduced in the Teacher, it will be found also in the Reader; where a past tense is admitted in the former will be also in the latter, and so with all the grammar. In this way, the learner is prepared to understand fully what he reads, his course is gradual and easy, while his reading may serve to exercise and confirm his knowledge of principles. The following work, although adapted particularly to the Practical French Teacher, can be employed, also, with any grammar on the New Method; and, indeed, its gradual, progressive character, gives it a value, it is believed, for learners generally, whatever may be the grammatical system with which it is studied. N. B.-The references in the notes are to the lessons and pages of the Practical French Grammar. The new selections given in this edition, have been chosen for the same qualities which were regarded in all the others. It has been my endeavor to select pieces which should be well written, and should possess some interest in themselves, while they favor a taste for what is pure, healthful, and vigorous in literature. The following pages will be found free, not only from the crimes and immoralities which shock us in so many of the modern French fictions, but from the morbid passion of such novels as Corinne, and such extravagance in sentiment and description as are contained in Notre Dame de Paris. The biographical sketches of the authors, at the end of the selections, contain matter valuable to the learner; and I would recommend that pupils be required to study these sketches, and to give an account of each author, as they read his selections. MOBILE, 1853. N. PINNEY. |