ical law. They
were shocked by his freedom of speech. When Louis the Fourteenth's
librarian placed on the shelves of the Royal Library in Paris a copy
of the Second Folio of his works which had been published in London in
1632, he noted in his catalogue that Shakespeare "has a rather fine
imagination; he thinks naturally; but these fine qualities are
obscured by the filth he introduces into his comedies." An increasing
mass of pedestrian literature was imported into France from England
through the middle and late years of the seventeenth century. Yet
Shakespeare had to wait for a fair hearing there till the eighteenth
century.

Then it was very gradually that Shakespeare's pre-eminence was
realised by French critics. It is to Voltaire that Frenchmen owe a
full knowledge of Shakespeare. Voltaire's method of teaching
Shakespeare to his countrymen was characteristically cynical. He
studied him closely when he visited England as a young man. At that
period of his career he not merely praised him with discerning
caution, but he paid him the flattery of imitation. Voltaire's tragedy
of _Brutus_ betrays an intimate acquaintance with Shakespeare's
_Julius Caesar_. His _Eryphile_ was the product of many perusals of
_Hamlet_. His _Zaire_ is a pale reflection of _Othello_. But when
Voltaire's countrymen showed a tendency to better Voltaire's
instruction, and one Frenchman conferred on Shakespeare the title of
"the god of the theatre," Voltaire resented the situation that he had
himself created. He was at the height of his own fame, and he felt
that his reputation as the first of French writers for the stage was
in jeopardy.

The last years of Voltaire's life were therefore consecrated to an
endeavour to dethrone the idol which his own hands had set up.
Voltaire traded on the patriotic prejudices of his hearers, but his
efforts to depreciate Shakespeare were very partially successful. Few
writers of power were ready to second the soured critic, and after
Voltaire's death the Shakespeare cult in France, of which he was the
unwilling inaugurator, spread far and wide.

In the nineteenth century Shakespeare was admitted without demur into
the French "pantheon of literary gods." Classicists and romanticists
vied in doing him honour. The classical painter Ingres introduced his
portrait into his famous picture of "Homer's Cortege" (now in the
Louvre). The romanticist Victor Hugo recognised only three men as
memorable in the history o