Finally, we are proud of our poets and poetry.  Now poetry is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man, that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth.  It is no small thing, therefore, to succeed eminently in poetry.  And so much is required for duly estimating success here, that about poetry it is perhaps hardest to arrive at a sure general verdict, and takes longest.  Meanwhile, our own conviction of the superiority of our national poets is not decisive, is almost certain to be mingled, as we see constantly in English eulogy of Shakespeare, with much of provincial infatuation.  And we know what was the opinion current amongst our neighbors the French—­people of taste, acuteness, and quick literary tact—­not a hundred years ago, about our great poets.  The old Biographie Universelle[350] notices the pretension of the English to a place for their poets among the chief poets of the world, and says that this is a pretension which to no one but an Englishman can ever seem admissible.  And the scornful, disparaging things said by foreigners about Shakespeare and Milton, and about our national over-estimate of them, have been often quoted, and will be in every one’s remembrance.

A great change has taken place, and Shakespeare is now generally recognized, even in France, as one of the greatest of poets.  Yes, some anti-Gallican cynic will say, the French rank him with Corneille and with Victor Hugo!  But let me have the pleasure of quoting a sentence about Shakespeare, which I met with by accident not long ago in the Correspondant, a French review which not a dozen English people, I suppose, look at.  The writer is praising Shakespeare’s prose.  With Shakespeare, he says, “prose comes in whenever the subject, being more familiar, is unsuited to the majestic English iambic.”  And he goes on:  “Shakespeare is the king of poetic rhythm and style, as well as the king of the realm of thought:  along with his dazzling prose, Shakespeare has succeeded in giving us the most varied, the most harmonious verse which has ever sounded upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks.”  M. Henry Cochin,[351] the writer of this sentence, deserves our gratitude for it; it would not be easy to praise Shakespeare, in a single sentence, more justly.  And when a foreigner and a Frenchman writes thus of Shakespeare, and when Goethe says of Milton, in whom there was so much to repel Goethe rather than to attract him, that “nothing has been ever done so entirely in the sense of the Greeks as Samson Agonistes,” and that “Milton is in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all reverence,” then we understand what constitutes a European recognition of poets and poetry as contradistinguished from a merely national recognition, and that in favor both of Milton and of Shakespeare the judgment of the high court of appeal has finally gone.