nguage. Subsequently, with a welcome
consideration for the linguistic incapacities of Shakespeare's
countrymen, he repeated his conclusions in their tongue.[43] The
English translation is embellished with many pictorial illustrations
of historic interest and value.

[Footnote 43: _Shakespeare in France under the Ancien Regime_, by J.J.
Jusserand. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1899.]

Among French writers on English literature, M. Jusserand is the most
voluminous and the most widely informed. His career differs in an
important particular from that of his countrymen who pursue the same
field of study. He is not by profession a teacher or writer: he is a
diplomatist, and now holds the high office of French ambassador to the
United States of America. M. Jusserand has treated in his books of
almost all periods of English literary history, and he has been long
engaged on an exhaustive _Literary History of the English People_, of
which the two volumes already published bring the narrative as far as
the close of the Civil Wars.

M. Jusserand enjoys the rare, although among modern Frenchmen by no
means unexampled, faculty of writing with almost equal ease and
felicity in both French and English. His walk in life gives him a
singularly catholic outlook. His learning is profound, but he is not
overburdened by it, and he preserves his native gaiety of style even
when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times
discursive, but he is never tedious; and he shows no trace of that
philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision
which the detailed study of literary history has been known to breed
in English and German investigators. While M. Jusserand betrays all
the critical independence of his compatriot M. Taine, his habit of
careful and laborious research illustrates with peculiar vividness the
progress which English scholarship has made in France since M. Taine
completed his sparkling survey of English literature in 1864.

M. Jusserand handles the theme of _Shakespeare in France under the
Ancien Regime_ with all the lightness of touch and wealth of minute
detail to which he has accustomed his readers. Nowhere have so many
facts been brought together in order to illustrate the literary
intercourse of Frenchmen and Englishmen between the sixteenth and the
nineteenth centuries. It is true that his opening chapters have little
concern with Shakespeare, but their intrinsic interest and novelty
atone for