Such defiant transgressions of the true Shakespearean canon as those of which Ducis and Dumas stand convicted may well rouse the suspicion that the critical incense they burn at Shakespeare's shrine is offered with the tongue in the cheek. But that suspicion is not justified. Ducis and Dumas worship Shakespeare with a whole heart. Their misapprehensions of his tragic conceptions are due, involuntarily, to native temperament. In point of fact, Ducis and Dumas see Shakespeare through a distorting medium. The two Frenchmen were fully conscious of Shakespeare's towering greatness. They perceived intuitively that Shakespeare's tragedies transcended all other dramatic achievement. But their aesthetic sense, which, as far as the drama was concerned, was steeped in the classical spirit, set many of the essential features of Shakespeare's genius outside the focus of their vision. To a Frenchman a tragedy of classical rank connotes "correctness," an absence of tumult, some observance of the classical law of unity of time, place, and action. The perpetration of crime in face of the audience outraged all classical conventions. Ducis and Dumas recognised involuntarily that certain characteristics of the Shakespearean drama could not live in the classical atmosphere of their own theatre. Excision, expansion, reduction was inevitable before Shakespeare could breathe the air of the French stage. The grotesque perversions of Ducis and Dumas were thus not the fruit of mere waywardness, or carelessness, or dishonesty; they admit of philosophical explanation. By Englishmen they may be viewed with equanimity, if not with satisfaction. They offer strong proof of the irrepressible strength or catholicity of the appeal that Shakespeare's genius makes to the mind and heart of humanity. His spirit survived the French efforts at mutilation. The Gallicised or classicised contortions of his mighty work did not destroy its saving virtue. There is ground for congratulation that Ducis's and Dumas's perversions of Shakespeare excited among Frenchmen almost as devoted an homage as the dramatist's work in its native purity and perfection claims of men whose souls are free of the fetters of classical tradition. IV