When the Methodists’ Upper Canada Academy, which had opened at Cobourg in 1836, had its royal charter extended in 1841 by the Province of Canada and became Victoria College, with university powers, it was natural for French to be carried forward into the college course. In fact, the first principal, Egerton Ryerson, wrote to the provincial secretary in December 1842 deploring the lack of any teacher of French or German languages in the college. “This deficiency is a great disadvantage to the institution, and a serious loss to many of the pupils, who are desirous of studying – especially the French language – and the study of which (independently of its being regarded as a valuable literary accomplishment) is, I think very important to all Canadian youths who are likely to take a part in the public affairs of United Canada.”³⁷ Presumably this statement expresses




Ryerson’s real feelings on the subject, in spite of the intemperate fulminations we have already quoted from the bitter debate over the University Question in 1860, when he led the crusade to pulverize Daniel Wilson’s defence of the status given modern languages in the curriculum of University College. We should note that even in Ryerson’s diatribe, the value of tutors helping students with the elements of a language was admitted, and the use of tutors in that capacity was apparently the practice at Victoria halfway through the fifties.³⁸

In 1856 an appointment was made at Victoria College that Wilson and John Langton could well have used to embarrass Ryerson, who after all was still a member of the Victoria Senate. In the 1856-57 Victoria Gazette (a transitional title between Catalogue and Calendar), one of the five professors of the college who, with three tutors, taught thirty-three students in arts, was “Elijah P. Harris,





m.a., Professor of Modern Languages.” It is soon evident, however, that modern languages remained as marginal as before. Although Harris is given the same title in the Gazette for the next two or three years, we know from other sources that he was at Göttingen between 1857 and 1859 studying chemistry and physics, and from 1860 on he appears in the Gazette/Calendar, as “Elijah P. Harris, Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry, and Modern Languages.” The eloquence of the comma is manifest if we note that the study of French, consisting of “Fasquelle’s Grammar and Reader, and Télémaque,” was limited to the first term of the freshman year for an average student, while “Students of the Sophomore year and last term of the Freshman Year are allowed to take French as an extra study, provided their general standing be sufficiently high.”³⁹ Although in 1861-62, the second-year French bonus for students with high enough standing was increased, offering





“Racine” (probably a single play), it is obvious that French required no specialization for the teacher and offered none to the student. The situation is clarified by a general statement in the 1862-63 calendar (32) about the college curriculum:

N.B. – The Curriculum is constructed on the principle of encouraging a well-balanced and varied culture, and not with the view of stimulating extraordinary proficiency in particular departments. It will be seen in another part of the Calendar that there are a few prizes awarded to special excellence, but all candidates for honors are required to pursue the same course, and the estimate of merit will be based on an aggregate of all the subjects of the curriculum, including pass-work as well as honor-work. For pass-men the course is also uniform, with the exception of the two terms in which the option is allowed of French or





Mathematics.

In the following year, 1865-66, Monsieur d’Andilly has given way to a recent Victoria graduate, “Alfred H. Reynar, b.a., instructor in the French Language.” Silver medallist in 1862, tutor in Classics for two years, and on the way to being ordained as a minister, Reynar’s performance as a teacher of French was obviously equal to expectations, for in the calendar for 1866-67 an appointment to a new chair reads: “Rev. Alfred H. Reynar, b.a., Professor of Modern Languages and English Literature.” The college had sent him to study for two years in Berlin, Leipzig, and Paris before he began in 1868 his teaching programme in French, German, and English.⁴⁰ From that year on, calendars show a good quality
and range in the necessarily restricted programme in French, as well as in German and English. In French we find plays by Corneille and Molière and Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs, together with Guizot’s Histoire de la civilisation and




Demogeot’s Histoire de la littérature française. In 1873 Honour students in French were offered as senior first-term elective Brachet’s Grammaire historique de la langue française, four years before any Old French appeared in the curriculum at University College, and from 1878 there was a regular fourth-year Honour presentation of Racine and Hugo.

Credit for the expanded French programme at Victoria in the 1880s should no doubt be shared with three of Reynar’s colleagues, one of whom was S.C. Smoke, ba, listed in the Victoria calendar (1879-81) as tutor in French, as well as tutor (then adjunct professor) of Classics. Better remembered are Andrew James Bell and Lewis Emerson Horning, both of whom were appointed in 1887 and went on to distinguished careers in Classics and German respectively, but earlier worked with Reynar in French. It was Reynar, head of Modern Languages and





dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1888 on, who led Victoria College into federation, before devoting himself to English rhetoric and church history. He left a reputation that was well defined in this tribute at the time of his death in 1921 by his younger colleague A.J. Bell:

I was assisting Dr. Wilson in Classics, but I was also a colleague of Dr. Reynar’s in French and German. I soon found that, as he felt life, so he felt language to be a very fine and noble thing. His aim was to know language at its best, to enjoy to the full the best of Molière and Racine, the best of Goethe and Schiller, the best of Tennyson and Browning ... Only in the union of word and idea which give shape to the highest thought and in the unions of word with word that give expression to the brightest wit and humor, did he feel any great interest.⁴¹