Sardou.
Complementary tendencies are visible across the Channel. The French
stage often offers as cordial a reception to plays of English
manufacture as is offered in London to the plays derived from France.
No histrionic event attracts higher interest in Paris than the
assumption by a great actor or actress of a Shakespearean role for the
first time; and French dramatic critics have been known to generate
such heat in debates over the right conception of a Shakespearean
character that their differences have required adjustment at the
sword's point.
Of greater interest is it to note that in all the cultivated centres
of France a new and unparalleled energy is devoted to-day to the study
of English literature of both the present and the past. The research
recently expended on the topic by French scholars has not been
excelled in Germany, and has rarely been equalled in England. Critical
biographies of James Thomson (of _The Seasons_), of Burns, of Young,
and of Wordsworth have come of late from the pens of French professors
of English literature, and their volumes breathe a minute accuracy and
a fulness of sympathetic knowledge which are certainly not habitual to
English professors of English literature.
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