Then it was very gradually that Shakespeare's pre-eminence was realised by French critics. It is to Voltaire that Frenchmen owe a full knowledge of Shakespeare. Voltaire's method of teaching Shakespeare to his countrymen was characteristically cynical. He studied him closely when he visited England as a young man. At that period of his career he not merely praised him with discerning caution, but he paid him the flattery of imitation. Voltaire's tragedy of _Brutus_ betrays an intimate acquaintance with Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_. His _Eryphile_ was the product of many perusals of _Hamlet_. His _Zaire_ is a pale reflection of _Othello_. But when Voltaire's countrymen showed a tendency to better Voltaire's instruction, and one Frenchman conferred on Shakespeare the title of "the god of the theatre," Voltaire resented the situation that he had himself created. He was at the height of his own fame, and he felt that his reputation as the first of French writers for the stage was in jeopardy. The last years of Voltaire's life were therefore consecrated to an endeavour to dethrone the idol which his own hands had set up. Voltaire traded on the patriotic prejudices of his hearers, but his efforts to depreciate Shakespeare were very partially successful. Few writers of power were ready to second the soured critic, and after Voltaire's death the Shakespeare cult in France, of which he was the unwilling inaugurator, spread far and wide. In the nineteenth century Shakespeare was admitted without demur into the French "pantheon of literary gods." Classicists and romanticists vied in doing him honour. The classical painter Ingres introduced his portrait into his famous picture of "Homer's Cortege" (now in the Louvre). The romanticist Victor Hugo recognised only three men as memorable in the history of humanity, and Shakespeare was one of the three; Moses and Homer were the other two. Alfred de Musset became a dramatist under Shakespeare's spell. To George Sand everything in literature seemed tame by the side of Shakespeare's poetry. The prince of romancers, the elder Dumas, set the English dramatist next to God in the cosmic system; "after God," wrote Dumas, "Shakespeare has created most." III It would be easy to multiply eulogies of Shakespeare from French lips in the vein of Victor Hugo and Dumas--eulogies besides which the enthusiasm of many English critics appears cold and constrained. So unfaltering a note of admiration sounds gratefully in the ears of Shakespeare's countrymen. Yet on closer investigation there seems a rift within the lute. When one turns to the French versions of Shakespeare, for which the chief of Shakespeare's French encomiasts have made themselves responsible, an Englishman is inclined to moderate his exultation in the French panegyrics.