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.
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