This kind of success is of importance only so far as it affects the wealth or the independence of a nation. Otherwise, success abroad is merely a subject of national vanity of a very empty kind. It is not the same with nations as with individuals. Personal celebrity is really a legitimate object of ambition for a wise man, because it makes life pleasanter to him in various very practical ways, and especially by bringing him into contact with people interested in his own pursuits. There is no national reward of that kind. It matters nothing to the English people whether their authors and artists have a continental celebrity or not. We shall understand the subject better by considering, at first, the case of England separately, and her celebrity in France, for different achievements of genius and industry. Certainly, if English genius is visible in anything it is in poetry, yet no Englishman who knew the French would attach the slightest weight to their opinion on the English poets. They often know the language well enough to read prose of a clear and simple kind; I quite believe that some Frenchmen of cultivated taste may appreciate Addison’s prose, or Goldsmith’s prose, and a few, a very few, may perhaps enjoy some verses of Byron or Pope; but English blank verse is usually quite beyond French appreciation as to its technical qualities, and so indeed are the more delicate and subtle cadences of English rhymed metres such as those which occur, for example, in the “Lotos-Eaters.” I should think it highly improbable that there are ten Frenchmen with ear enough to seize upon the very different qualities that artists so different as Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can give to a metre, blank verse, which _appears_ to be identical in the three cases, or who would know the difference between the heroic couplet as employed by Pope and the same measure in the hands of William Morris. There is the Spenserian stanza, too, as its inventor used it, and as it has been used by Thomson and Byron. Try to explain these differences, which in reality are enormous, to a Frenchman. Try to explain to him anything about the musical qualities of the English language. He will laugh at you for your “patriotism”; it being a received opinion in France that English never is and never can be musical. There is Vice-Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, for example, probably the most cultivated officer in the French navy, an Academician, a scholar, a charming and very instructive writer, altogether a man who would do honour to any nation. Of course he knows English, and he certainly has no narrow prejudice against Englishmen, yet in his touching reminiscence of Lieutenant Gore, in the last _Figaro Illustré_, I find the following passage. He is telling about an evening on board a French ship of war near Rhodes, spent in Gore’s society after a separation. [Sidenote: Anecdote of Lieutenant Gore.]