and it was called to take a far more important place in the
history of France, and to exercise far more influence upon the fate of
the French father-land, than it had been granted to the communes to
acquire during their short and incoherent existence.

It may astonish many who study the records of French history from the
eleventh to the fourteenth century, not to find anywhere the words third
estate; and a desire may arise to know whether those inquirers of our day
who have devoted themselves professedly to this particular study, have
been more successful in discovering that grand term at the time when it
seems that we ought to expect to meet with it. The question was,
therefore, submitted to a learned member of the _Academie des
Inscriptions et Belles-lettres,_ M. Littre, in fact, whose _Dictionnaire
etymologique de la Langur Francaise_ is consulted with respect by the
whole literary world, and to a young magistrate, M. Picot, to whom the
_Acacdemie des Sciences morales et politiques_ but lately assigned the
first prize for his great work on the question it had propounded, as to
the history and influence of states-general in France; and here are
inserted, textually, the answers given by two gentlemen of so much
enlightenment and authority upon such a subject.

M. Littre, writing on the 3d of October, 1871, says, "I do not find, in
my account of the word, third estate before the sixteenth century. I
quote these two instances of it: 'As to the third order called third
estate . . .' (_La Noue, Discours,_ p. 541); and 'clerks and deputies
for the third estate, same for the estate of labor (laborers).'
(_Coustumier general,_ t. i. p. 335.) In the fifteenth century, or at
the end of the fourteenth, in the poems of Eustace Deschamps, I have--

'_Prince, dost thou yearn for good old times again?
In good old ways the Three Estates restrain._'

"At date of fourteenth century, in Du Cange, we read under the word
status, '_Per tres status concilii generalis Praelatorum, Baronum,
nobilium et universitatum comitatum._' According to these documents, I
think it is in the fourteenth century that they began to call the three
orders _tres status_, and that it was only in the sixteenth century that
they began to speak in French of the _tiers estat_ (third estate). But I
cannot give this conclusion as final, seeing that it is supported only by
the documents I consulted for my dictionary."

M. Picot replied on