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422 the fame of its own great poet from transalpine rivalry ; and France, the home of traditional taste and refined tone, long believed it had sufficiently honoured the great Briton when it called him a genial barbarian, and made as little mockery as might be of his strange roughness. Meantime the political revolution which animated this country also developed a literary one, which, as regards Terrorism, perhaps surpasses the first; and when it came. Shakespeare was lifted on the shield. Of course, just as in their attempts at political changes, the French are seldom quite honourable in their literary revolutions in the one as in the other they praise and exalt a hero, not for his true innate worth, but on account of the momentary advantage which their cause may gain by such exalting and glorifying, and so it happens that they to-day praise what they to-morrow cast down, or the contrary. For ten years Shakespeare has been for the party of the present literary revolution a subject of the blindest adoration. But whether he has had among these men of the Movement a truly scientific recognition, or even a proper comprehension, is the great question. The French are too truly the children of their mother, they have taken in social falsehoods with their mothers' milk too much to absolutely give their taste or even full intelligence to the poet who breathes the truth of nature in every word.