'We conquered France, but felt our Captive's charms :
Her Arts victorious triumphed o'er our Arms:
Britain to soft refinements less a foe,
Wit grew polite and Numbers learned to flow.
Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine.
Though still some traces of our rustic vein
And splay-foot verse remained, and will remain.
Late, very late, correctness grew our care,
When the tired Nation breathed from civil war,
Exact Racine and Corneille's noble fire

Showed us that France had something to admire.'

Voltaire returned from exile with two special pieces of information for his countrymen. The first was that the divided Britons had produced a philosopher who had read nature and nature's laws in quite another fashion from the doctors of the Sorbonne and the Academy: the second was that the savages who had prevailed at Blenheim and Ramillies, contrary to all the rules of civilized warfare, had also produced a dramatic poet, who though ignorant as dirt' of the ceremonial law of the stage, flashed occasionally most authentic fire. Here was worshipful intelligence for the classics of Versailles! Voltaire, indeed, introduced his new acquaintance much as Brummel might have presented a country gentleman at Carlton House. My friend here,' he says, "is "un peu sauvage;❞ excuse the liberty I have taken in bringing him with me; but he is a person of great worth and good property, and in a little while will get rid of his rustic breeding.' Great credit is due to Voltaire, however, even for this qualified introduction. He had been educated in a rigid school of taste; he had grown up a Pharisee of the Pharisees in his belief that Racine was the alpha and omega of dramatic art. Those,' says Mr. Knight, 'who speak of Voltaire as an ignorant and tasteless calumniator of Shakspeare, forget that his hostility was based upon a system of art which he conceived, and rightly so, was opposed to the system of Shakspeare.' They forget, also, that, but for Voltaire, Shakspeare's writings would have remained for at least another half century sealed hermetically to France, and therefore probably to Europe also. At the time he introduced the English poet's name to the saloons of Paris, the English language was almost as rare an accomplishment in France as Chinese is at present. His 'Lettres sur les Anglais,' joined to other harbingers of the coming Anglo-manie,' led to the study of our language and literature. The author of 'Zaire,' however, had unintentionally overshot his mark. He prided himself on his own sagacity in discovering the rude islander's merits, much as

6

Stephano prided himself on finding Caliban. But Voltaire had no intention that this delicate monster' should be set up in high places, or stand even on the lower step of his own dramatic throne. So, although he wrote in 1735 to the Abbé Desfontaines that France is not the only country where tragedies are written and our taste, or rather our custom, of bringing nothing on the stage but long conversations on love, does not delight other nations. In general our stage is devoid of action, and deficient on subjects of exalted interest. . . . Had you but seen the piece of Shakspeare (" Julius Cæsar") played, as I have seen it, and pretty nearly as I have translated it, our declarations of love and our confidantes would seem miserable in comparison'-he adopted a very different tone a few years afterwards. In 1776 Le Tourneur translated Shakspeare, put on his subscription list the names of royal personages, and was audacious enough to call Shakspeare le dieu du Théâtre.' Henceforward, the fashion of Voltaire's countenance was changed. Even in the noonday of his admiration he had written, Shakspeare is 'le Corneille de Londres, grand fou d'ailleurs, et remettant plus à Gilles qu'à Corneille; mais il a des morceaux admirables.' Now, after he had received this thrust in tierce, he raved against Le Tourneur, Shakspeare, and even himself. The translator was 'un misérable, un faquin.'

'Have you read two volumes by that creature in which he wishes us to accept Shakspeare as the model of tragedy? He calls him the god of the stage! Do you not feel an intense hatred to this "impudent imbecil ?" The hideous part of it is, that the monster has followers in France; and, comble d'horreur, I it was who first mentioned Shakspeare; I it was who showed France the pearls I had found on this dunghill! Little did I think that I should one day help to trample on the crowns of Racine and Corneille, and to ornament with them the brows of a barbaric player.'

The Voltaire correspondence at the time teems with equally virulent passages; nor was his wrath confined to private channels. He appealed to the Academy, and in terms so violent, that he was compelled to qualify them before they reached the delicate ears of the Forty. He wrote a pamphlet under the assumed name of Jérome Carré, in which he contrasted, unfavourably to Shakspeare, Hamlet with the Orphan du tendre Otwai. Letters, academical address, pamphlets, and all that Voltaire wrote upon the subject after Le Tourneur's high crime and misdemeanour, deal liberally in cursing and bitterness of heart, and might all have the same motto prefixed

'Eheu, quid volui misero mihi? floribus austrum
Perditus, et liquidis immisi fontibus apros.'

It was easier to bring Shakspeare into good society than to expel him from it. The Gilles and Pierrot of St. Germain's Fair,' though he never properly took root in France, abides in it to this hour an object of wonder, if not of favour. His dramas have led the French to examine critically the foundations of their own. The clinamen to Shakspeare, indeed, began long after Voltaire had bootlessly exclaimed, ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error,' and it came from a quarter, in French apprehensions, almost as ignominious to a polite nation, as Shakspeare's dunghill itself.

A certain Père Bouhours had asked with much approbation in France, si un Allemand peut avoir d'esprit,' and though he wrote much besides, this pithy question has been the salt of his name. Now the change in the spirit of French criticism on Shakspeare proceeded from this problematically witty Germany. It was inaugurated by Madame de Stael. By rendering German literature fashionable in France she broke down the old classical fence and made an opening for Shakspeare. She considered Racine the first of dramatic poets, but she admired the genius of the great Englishman, however wild and irregular it was in her conception. So paradoxical a writer as Madame de Stael, naturally provoked controversy, and the Romanticists of the Lessing and Schlegel school defended themselves from her shafts behind the broad buckler of Shakspeare. His name was spread abroad by this debate, and fresh translations of his plays were called for even in Paris.

Could Voltaire have foreseen that the first of French statesmen in the nineteenth century would revise Le Tourneur's translation, and affix to it a philosophical essay on the Life and Genius of Shakspeare,' he would perhaps have been beyond the reach of hellebore tribus Anticyris caput insanabile.' Could he have known that nearly at the same time one of the best of French critics would have maintained the coherence of the plot of Hamlet, he might have exulted in the fulfilment of his own prediction that he had seen the end of the reign of reason and good taste, and that he should die leaving France barbarian.' Yet in 1822 M. Guizot, in his excellent biography of the poet, disavowed the narrow criticism of his countrymen, and proclaimed that the art of Shakspeare was no less authentic than the art of Racine, while M. de Barante abandoned classic rules altogether, at least in relation to Christian as distinguished from ethnic literature. Even now the acting copies of Hamlet exclude Fortinbras and his Norwegians from the stage, though the practical prince is the proper counterpoise to the speculative one. Again, Garrick, among other alterations of the play,

cut out the scene with the grave-diggers, nor was it replaced by Bannister until the autocrat David slept with his fathers. But M. de Barante sets the ancient régime at defiance, and says that the meeting of Hamlet with that army which was on its march

To gain a little patch of ground

That hath in it no profit but the name,'

and the gravediggers' scene, too obviously enter into the general plan of the piece, are in too strict harmony with the unity of impression which Shakspeare has sought, to oblige our insisting on their propriety, and to show that they are not bizarreries or barbarisms, but the consequences of a whole dramatic system.' M. Guizot is no less catholic in his judgment. If the romantic system has its beauties, it has necessarily its art and its rules. Everything which men acknowledge as beautiful in art, owes its effect to certain combinations, of which our reason can always detect the secret, when our emotions have attested its power. The science or the employment of these combinations--constitutes what we call art.'

But the unkindest cut to Voltaire came from another hand. M. Villemain has not been inoculated with the German theory of an absolutely faultless Shakspeare, and is a loyal disciple of the classic school. Yet in his Cours de Littérature' he contrasts Voltaire with Shakspeare, and awards to the latter, not only superiority in passion, but also in taste. The whirligig of time has brought its revenges: the oracle of Ferney is dumb: and though there is still much in French criticisms on Shakspeare, that, like the play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe,' 'will never please' his own countrymen, there is also much in them from which we may derive wholesome instruction.

In Germany, Shakspeare may be said to have been planted in virgin soil. From the shores of the Baltic to the sources of the Danube, native literature had suffered a long collapse between the days of the Minnesingers and the appearance of Lessing and Klopstock. Luther's German writings, although they created a language, affected literature but slightly, while the wit and eloquence of Erasmus and Von Hutten were conveyed in a learned tongue. Germany,' says Fuller, in his 'History of the Holy War,' was like a great bell long in raising, but when raised, it made more noise than all the rest.' Something similar may be said of German literature. It awoke from its long

slumbers full of energy, hope, and ambition. The southern dialects of Europe had too long exercised lordship. France had too long cabined, cribbed, and confined, by its artificial rules and its cold correct demeanour, the more generous Teu

tonic mind. Again, Arminius should arise against the Latin Cæsars and assert the genius of the north. One ally alone was meet for the Cheruscans-the unfettered and diversified literature of England, and at the summit of that literature stood the most catholic of writers-William Shakspeare. On him and on his associates was no mark of the Gaulish chain: even Ben Jonson, though more an ancient Roman than an Englishman, had never bowed the knee to any foreign Baal.

Here, then, was the panoply of Achilles fresh from Vulcan's staithy. To translate, to analyze, to expound the Shakspearian drama, became the darling employment of the greatest German writers: and even the poet's countrymen acknowledged that, in comparison with Lessing, Wieland, Tieck, Goethe, and the Schlegels, their own commentators were but Nature's journeymen. The spirit of German criticism awakened new echoes in England, and produced in Coleridge, and mediately in Lamb and Hazlitt, a succession of commentators as superior to Steevens, Farmer, and Malone, as a blade of Damascus steel is to a common reaping-hook.

To Germany, then, Europe owes much of its relish for Shakspeare. On the other hand, it has derived from the same source much that is obscure, fantastic, and bewildering-theories inconsistent with sense or likelihood: interpretations that darken, and fancies that lead astray. Second only, if not fully equal to his imaginative powers was Shakspeare's good sense. Even in dealing with the supernatural world he is never extravagant: his ghosts harrow us with fear and wonder: his witches affect us with uncertain terrors, or lay on our souls the burden of inextricable destiny: but they are not impossible creations. We do not know the laws of the invisible world, nor the parentage of the weird sisters: yet we can imagine causes why spirits may revisit the scenes of their joys or sorrows in the flesh, and conceive that fate or crime may employ such instruments as tried Macbeth's ambition and Banquo's virtue. Of this predominating good sense the Germans take little account. It is, with few exceptions, their object to prove Shakspeare of imagination all compact: a philosopher profound as Hegel: a dreamer of dreams, as if the island of Laputa or the cloud-city of Aristophanes, and not the living world, had been the object of his contemplation.

Ulrici, in his celebrated work, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art,' is perhaps the best exponent of these errors of the German school of critics. Schlegel erred in laying down abstract principles for the composition and conduct of the drama, which he did not apply, perhaps, because they proved quite inapplicable to the particular cases of Shakspeare's plays. Schiller and Gervinus