252 PHILOLOGY 



and no foreigners have looked at English so steadily and 

 so discerningly as have the French. 



BELJAME, who till 1906 held in the University of Paris 

 the chair of English which is now occupied by Legouis, 

 began a new era in French criticism of English by the 

 publication in 1881 of his "Le Public et les hommes de 

 lettres en Angleterre au xvm e siecle." Other works deal- 

 ing with a period or a movement have followed, for exam- 

 ple: CAZAMIAN, "Le Romantisme social en Angleterre," 

 1904; BASTTDE, " John Locke, ses theories politiques et leur 

 influence en Angleterre," 1906; GUYOT, "Le Socialisme 

 et 1'evolution de PAngleterre contemporaine," 1913. 



For the most part, however, French scholarship has 

 turned to the study of individual authors. The first of 

 these studies in date is STAFFER'S "Laurence Sterne," 

 1870, and perhaps the most charming is ANGELLIER'S 

 "Robert Burns," 1893. Only a few others can be men- 

 tioned merely as examples : FEUILLERAT (a scholar who is 

 also known for his studies of English theatrical com- 

 panies), " John Lyly," 1910; DELATTRE, " Robert Herrick," 

 1911; MOREL, "James Thomson," 1895; LEGOUIS, "La 

 Jeunesse de W. Wordsworth," 1896; DEROCQUIGNY, 

 "Charles Lamb," 1904; LAUVRIERE, "Edgar A. Poe," 

 1904; and DHALEINE, "Nathaniel Hawthorne, sa vie et 

 ses oeuvres," 1905. These are books of an average 

 length of five hundred pages, which represent from five 

 to ten years' toil for the French ' 'doctorat es lettres. ' ' They 

 display the most painstaking research combined with un- 

 usual skill in expression. In each of them the effort is 

 to study the author's life as throwing light on his writings, 

 and his writings, in turn, as illuminating his character. 



HEDGCOCK'S "David Garrick and his French friends," 

 1912, is an expansion of his thesis which was written at 

 Paris. MASSECK'S "Richard Jefferies: Etude d'une per- 

 sonnalite," 1913, is a good example of a thesis for the new 



