their irrelevance. They shed a flood of welcome light on
that interchange of literary information and ideas which is a constant
feature in the literary history of the two countries.

Many will read here for the first time of the great poet Ronsard's
visits to this country; of the distinguished company of English actors
which delighted the court of Henry IV. of France; and of Ben Jonson's
discreditable drunken exploits in the French capital when he went
thither as tutor to Sir Walter Ralegh's son. To these episodes might
well be added the pleasant personal intercourse of Francis Bacon's
brother, Anthony, with the great French essayist Montaigne, when the
Englishman was sojourning at Bordeaux in 1583. Montaigne's Essays
achieved hardly less fame in Elizabethan England than in France. Both
Shakespeare and Bacon gave proof of indebtedness to them.

By some freak of fortune Shakespeare's fame was slow in crossing the
English Channel. The French dramatists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries lived and died in the paradoxical faith that the
British drama reached its apogee in the achievement of the Scottish
Latinist, George Buchanan, who was reckoned in France "prince of the
poets of our day." In Buchanan's classical tragedies Montaigne played
a part, while he was a student at Bordeaux. His tragedy of _Jephtha_
achieved exceptional fame in sixteenth century France; three Frenchmen
of literary repute rendered it independently into their own language,
and each rendering went through several editions. Another delusion
which French men of letters cherished, not only during Shakespeare's
lifetime, but through three or four generations after his death, was
that Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and the father of Lord
Chancellor Bacon were the greatest authors which England had begotten
or was likely to beget. French enthusiasm for the suggestive irony of
More's Latin romance of _Utopia_ outran that of his fellow-countrymen.
A French translation anticipated the earliest rendering of the work in
the author's native tongue. No less than two independent French
versions of Sir Philip Sidney's voluminous fiction of _Arcadia_ were
circulating in France one hundred and twenty years before the like
honour was paid to any work of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's work first arrived in France towards the close of the
seventeenth century. Frenchmen were staggered by its originality. They
perceived the dramatist's colossal breaches of class