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426 Next to Victor Hugo I must mention Dumas ; and he also has to a certain degree promoted an appreciation of Shakespeare in France. If the former by extravagance in ugliness accustomed the French, to seek in the drama not merely a beautiful garb for passion, Dumas so influenced them that they took great pleasure in the natural expression of it. But this passion passed with him for the highest ideal, and in his poems it took the place of poetry. The natural result was that he had all the more effect on the stage. He familiarised the public in this sphere, and in the representation of passions, with the boldest conceptions of Shakespeare, and he who had once found pleasure in Henri III. and Richard Darlington, could no longer complain of want of taste in Othello and Richard III. The accusation of plagiarism which was urged against him was as foolish as it was unjust. It cannot be denied that Dumas has here and there in his passionate scenes taken something from Shakespeare, but our Schiller had done this more boldly without incurring the least reproach. And as for Shakespeare himself how much was he indebted to his predecessors ! Yes, and it happened even to him that a sour-souled pamphleteer once assailed him with the charge that "the best of his dramas were taken from earlier writers." Shakespeare,