lachrymose wares which the English novelists had brought into fashion. [Footnote 42: In the Introduction to a collection of Elizabethan Sonnets, published in Messrs Constable's re-issue of Arber's _English Garner_ (1904), the present writer has shown that numerous sonnets, which Elizabethan writers issued as original poems, were literal translations from the French of Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Desportes. Numerous loans of like character were levied silently on Italian authors.] At the present moment the cultured Englishman finds his most palatable fiction in the publications of Paris. Within recent memory the English playgoer viewed with impatience any theatrical programme which lacked a Parisian flavour. The late Sir Henry Irving, who, during the past generation, sought to sustain the best traditions of the English drama, produced in his last years two original plays, _Robespierre_ and _Dante_, by the _doyen_ of living French dramatists, M. Sardou. Complementary tendencies are visible across the Channel. The French stage often offers as cordial a reception to plays of English manufacture as is offered in London to the plays derived from France. No histrionic event attracts higher interest in Paris than the assumption by a great actor or actress of a Shakespearean role for the first time; and French dramatic critics have been known to generate such heat in debates over the right conception of a Shakespearean character that their differences have required adjustment at the sword's point.