tionable, and our music non-existent. We are proud
of our men of science. And here it turns out that the world is with us;
we find that in the judgment of other people, too, Newton among the
dead, and Mr. Darwin among the living, hold as high a place as they hold
in our national opinion.

Finally, we are proud of our poets and poetry. Now poetry is nothing
less than the most perfect speech of man, that in which he comes nearest
to being able to utter the truth. It is no small thing, therefore, to
succeed eminently in poetry. And so much is required for duly estimating
success here, that about poetry it is perhaps hardest to arrive at a
sure general verdict, and takes longest. Meanwhile, our own conviction
of the superiority of our national poets is not decisive, is almost
certain to be mingled, as we see constantly in English eulogy of
Shakespeare, with much of provincial infatuation. And we know what was
the opinion current amongst our neighbors the French--people of taste,
acuteness, and quick literary tact--not a hundred years ago, about our
great poets. The old _Biographie Universelle_[350] notices the
pretension of the English to a place for their poets among the chief
poets of the world, and says that this is a pretension which to no one
but an Englishman can ever seem admissible. And the scornful,
disparaging things said by foreigners about Shakespeare and Milton, and
about our national over-estimate of them, have been often quoted, and
will be in every one's remembrance.

A great change has taken place, and Shakespeare is now generally
recognized, even in France, as one of the greatest of poets. Yes, some
anti-Gallican cynic will say, the French rank him with Corneille and
with Victor Hugo! But let me have the pleasure of quoting a sentence
about Shakespeare, which I met with by accident not long ago in the
_Correspondant_, a French review which not a dozen English people, I
suppose, look at. The writer is praising Shakespeare's prose. With
Shakespeare, he says, "prose comes in whenever the subject, being more
familiar, is unsuited to the majestic English iambic." And he goes on:
"Shakespeare is the king of poetic rhythm and style, as well as the king
of the realm of thought: along with his dazzling prose, Shakespeare has
succeeded in giving us the most varied, the most harmonious verse which
has ever sounded upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks." M.
Henry Cochin,[351] the writer of this sentence, d