All the more
honour, undoubtedly, to Shakespeare, that he would borrow nothing else:
but assuredly, also, all the more honour to Rabelais, that he had enough
of this to lend.
It is less creditable to England than honourable to France that a
Frenchman should have been the first of Shakespearean students to
discover and to prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is not a
consecutive work of the same epoch. Until the appearance of Francois-
Victor Hugo's incomparable translation, with its elaborate and admirable
commentary, it seems to have been the universal and certainly a most
natural habit of English criticism to take the three as they usually
appear together, in the order of historical chronology, and by tacit
implication to assume that they were composed in such order. I should
take some shame to myself but that I feel more of grateful pride than of
natural shame in the avowal that I at all events owe the first revelation
of the truth now so clear and apparent in this matter, to the son of the
common lord and master of all poets born in his age--be they liege
subjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious as I grieve to find one at
least of my elders and betters, whenever I perceive--as too often I
cannot choose but perceive--that the voice is the voice of Arnold, but
the hand is the hand of Sainte-Beuve.
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