ncies are visible across the Channel. The French
stage often offers as cordial a reception to plays of English
manufacture as is offered in London to the plays derived from France.
No histrionic event attracts higher interest in Paris than the
assumption by a great actor or actress of a Shakespearean role for the
first time; and French dramatic critics have been known to generate
such heat in debates over the right conception of a Shakespearean
character that their differences have required adjustment at the
sword's point.

Of greater interest is it to note that in all the cultivated centres
of France a new and unparalleled energy is devoted to-day to the study
of English literature of both the present and the past. The research
recently expended on the topic by French scholars has not been
excelled in Germany, and has rarely been equalled in England. Critical
biographies of James Thomson (of _The Seasons_), of Burns, of Young,
and of Wordsworth have come of late from the pens of French professors
of English literature, and their volumes breathe a minute accuracy and
a fulness of sympathetic knowledge which are certainly not habitual to
English professors of English literature. This scholarly movement in
France shows signs of rapid extension. Each summer vacation sees an
increase in the number of French visitors to the British Museum
reading-room, who are making recondite researches into English
literary history. The new zeal of Frenchmen for English studies claims
the most cordial acknowledgment of English scholars, and it is
appropriate that the most coveted lectureship on English literature in
an English University--the Clark lectureship at Trinity College,
Cambridge--should have been bestowed last year on the learned
professor of English at the Sorbonne, M. Beljame, author of _Le Public
et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au XVIIIe Siecle_. M.
Beljame's unexpected death (on September 17, 1906), shortly after his
work at Cambridge was completed, is a loss alike to English and French
letters.

II

In view of the growth of the French interest in English literary
history, it was to be expected that serious efforts should be made in
France to determine the character and dimensions of the influence
exerted on French literature by the greatest of all English men of
letters--by Shakespeare. That work has been undertaken by M.
Jusserand. In 1898 he gave to the world the results of his
investigation in his native la