begun under French masters.
The greatest poem of mediaeval France, the _Roman de la Rose_,
was turned into English by his youthful pen, and the chief French
poet of the day, Eustace Deschamps, held out to him the hand of
fellowship in the enthusiastic _balade_, in which he apostrophised
"le grand translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucer." Following Chaucer's
example, the great poets of Elizabeth's reign and of James the
First's reign most liberally and most literally assimilated the
verse of their French contemporaries, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and
Desportes.[42] Early in the seventeenth century, Frenchmen returned
the compliment by naturalising in French translations the prose
romances of Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Greene, the philosophical
essays of Bacon, and the ethical and theological writings of Bishop
Joseph Hall. From the accession of Charles the Second until that
of George the Third, the English drama framed itself on French
models, and Pope, who long filled the throne of a literary dictator
in England, acknowledged discipleship to Boileau. A little later the
literary philosophers of France--Rousseau and the Encyclopedistes--drew
their nutrition from the writings of Hobbes and Locke. French
novel-readers of the eighteenth century found their chief joy in the
tearful emotions excited by the sentimentalities of Richardson and
Sterne. French novel-writers one hundred and thirty years ago had
small chance of recognition if they disdained to traffic in the
lachrymose wares which the English novelists had brought into fashion.

[Footnote 42: In the Introduction to a collection of Elizabethan
Sonnets, published in Messrs Constable's re-issue of Arber's _English
Garner_ (1904), the present writer has shown that numerous sonnets,
which Elizabethan writers issued as original poems, were literal
translations from the French of Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Desportes.
Numerous loans of like character were levied silently on Italian
authors.]

At the present moment the cultured Englishman finds his most palatable
fiction in the publications of Paris. Within recent memory the English
playgoer viewed with impatience any theatrical programme which lacked
a Parisian flavour. The late Sir Henry Irving, who, during the past
generation, sought to sustain the best traditions of the English
drama, produced in his last years two original plays, _Robespierre_
and _Dante_, by the _doyen_ of living French dramatists, M. Sardou.
Complementary tende