The study of English literature abroad was somewhat limited in range, but it had an almost incalculable effect. That German criticism would have been made anyhow is certain enough; but in actual fact it would be impossible to find any actual influences in its making more powerful than the influence of Milton upon the Zürichers, and the influence of Shakespeare upon Lessing, and all men of letters after him. These two great (if not exactly twin) brethren, from the date of their introduction by that strongest of ushers Voltaire, exercised, as we have seen, in France an influence constantly (at any rate in the case of Shakespeare) increasing, though rejected again and again with horror and contumely by those who seemed to be pillars. Of older English writers few except Bacon and Locke had much influence abroad—and what they exercised was not literary. But the writers of the eighteenth century were extremely powerful. Callières very nearly lived to see the time when France herself, forgetting all about the trinity of _nations polies_, respectfully read, and even sedulously imitated, the people to whom he had thoughtfully given permission to write in Latin in order that they might have some literary chance. Nor was this a mere passing _engouement_: nor was it limited to the great Queen Anne men, Addison, Pope, and Swift, who were themselves (at least the first two) in many ways germane to French taste, and had borrowed much from France. Thomson, an innovator and sower of revolution in his own country, was warmly welcomed in France: about Richardson the whole Continent went mad. Sterne excited the strongest interest both in France and Germany. The odd French taste for the lugubrious sententiousness of Young was rather later, and so was the well-known and slightly ludicrous adoration of _Ossian_. But throughout the century, until the French Revolution, English literature was not merely the subject of respectful study and imitation in Germany but of quite lively interest in France, of an interest almost startling when it is contrasted with the supercilious blindness (for a man who cannot use his eyes may use his eyebrows) of the age of Boileau.[336] [Sidenote: _The study of French at home and abroad._]