They shed a flood of welcome light on
that interchange of literary information and ideas which is a constant
feature in the literary history of the two countries.
Many will read here for the first time of the great poet Ronsard's
visits to this country; of the distinguished company of English actors
which delighted the court of Henry IV. of France; and of Ben Jonson's
discreditable drunken exploits in the French capital when he went
thither as tutor to Sir Walter Ralegh's son. To these episodes might
well be added the pleasant personal intercourse of Francis Bacon's
brother, Anthony, with the great French essayist Montaigne, when the
Englishman was sojourning at Bordeaux in 1583. Montaigne's Essays
achieved hardly less fame in Elizabethan England than in France. Both
Shakespeare and Bacon gave proof of indebtedness to them.
By some freak of fortune Shakespeare's fame was slow in crossing the
English Channel. The French dramatists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries lived and died in the paradoxical faith that the
British drama reached its apogee in the achievement of the Scottish
Latinist, George Buchanan, who was reckoned in France "prince of the
poets of our day.
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