Of greater interest is it to note that in all the cultivated centres of France a new and unparalleled energy is devoted to-day to the study of English literature of both the present and the past. The research recently expended on the topic by French scholars has not been excelled in Germany, and has rarely been equalled in England. Critical biographies of James Thomson (of _The Seasons_), of Burns, of Young, and of Wordsworth have come of late from the pens of French professors of English literature, and their volumes breathe a minute accuracy and a fulness of sympathetic knowledge which are certainly not habitual to English professors of English literature. This scholarly movement in France shows signs of rapid extension. Each summer vacation sees an increase in the number of French visitors to the British Museum reading-room, who are making recondite researches into English literary history. The new zeal of Frenchmen for English studies claims the most cordial acknowledgment of English scholars, and it is appropriate that the most coveted lectureship on English literature in an English University--the Clark lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge--should have been bestowed last year on the learned professor of English at the Sorbonne, M. Beljame, author of _Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au XVIIIe Siecle_. M. Beljame's unexpected death (on September 17, 1906), shortly after his work at Cambridge was completed, is a loss alike to English and French letters. II In view of the growth of the French interest in English literary history, it was to be expected that serious efforts should be made in France to determine the character and dimensions of the influence exerted on French literature by the greatest of all English men of letters--by Shakespeare. That work has been undertaken by M. Jusserand. In 1898 he gave to the world the results of his investigation in his native language. Subsequently, with a welcome consideration for the linguistic incapacities of Shakespeare's countrymen, he repeated his conclusions in their tongue.[43] The English translation is embellished with many pictorial illustrations of historic interest and value. [Footnote 43: _Shakespeare in France under the Ancien Regime_, by J.J. Jusserand. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1899.] Among French writers on English literature, M. Jusserand is the most voluminous and the most widely informed. His career differs in an important particular from that of his countrymen who pursue the same field of study. He is not by profession a teacher or writer: he is a diplomatist, and now holds the high office of French ambassador to the United States of America. M. Jusserand has treated in his books of almost all periods of English literary history, and he has been long engaged on an exhaustive _Literary History of the English People_, of which the two volumes already published bring the narrative as far as the close of the Civil Wars.