Nothing but good can come of a comparative study of English and French literature. The political intercourse of the two countries has involved them in an endless series of broils. But between the literatures of the two countries friendly relations have subsisted for over five centuries. In the literary sphere the interchange of neighbourly civilities has known no interruption. The same literary forms have not appealed to the tastes of the two nations; but differences of aesthetic temperament have not prevented the literature of the one from levying substantial loans on the literature of the other, and that with a freedom and a frequency which were calculated to breed discontent between any but the most cordial of allies. While the literary geniuses of the two nations have pursued independent ideals, they have viewed as welcome courtesies the willingness and readiness of the one to borrow sustenance of the other on the road. It is unlikely that any full or formal balance-sheet of such lendings and borrowings will ever be forthcoming, for it is felt instinctively by literary accountants and their clients on both shores of the English Channel that the debts on the one side keep a steady pace with the debts on the other, and there is no balance to be collected. No recondite research is needed to establish this general view of the situation. It is well known how the poetic career of Chaucer, the earliest of great English poets, was begun under French masters. The greatest poem of mediaeval France, the _Roman de la Rose_, was turned into English by his youthful pen, and the chief French poet of the day, Eustace Deschamps, held out to him the hand of fellowship in the enthusiastic _balade_, in which he apostrophised "le grand translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucer." Following Chaucer's example, the great poets of Elizabeth's reign and of James the First's reign most liberally and most literally assimilated the verse of their French contemporaries, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Desportes.[42] Early in the seventeenth century, Frenchmen returned the compliment by naturalising in French translations the prose romances of Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Greene, the philosophical essays of Bacon, and the ethical and theological writings of Bishop Joseph Hall. From the accession of Charles the Second until that of George the Third, the English drama framed itself on French models, and Pope, who long filled the throne of a literary dictator in England, acknowledged discipleship to Boileau. A little later the literary philosophers of France--Rousseau and the Encyclopedistes--drew their nutrition from the writings of Hobbes and Locke. French novel-readers of the eighteenth century found their chief joy in the tearful emotions excited by the sentimentalities of Richardson and Sterne. French novel-writers one hundred and thirty years ago had small chance of recognition if they disdained to traffic in the