and so remote that they never come into collision.  Mr. Bailey, with the utmost sang-froid, sweeps on one side the whole of the literary tradition of France.  It is as if a French critic were to assert that Shakespeare, the Elizabethans, and the romantic poets of the nineteenth century were all negligible, and that England’s really valuable contribution to the poetry of the world was to be found among the writings of Dryden and Pope.  M. Lemaitre, on the other hand, seems sublimely unconscious that any such views as Mr. Bailey’s could possibly exist.  Nothing shows more clearly Racine’s supreme dominion over his countrymen than the fact that M. Lemaitre never questions it for a moment, and tacitly assumes on every page of his book that his only duty is to illustrate and amplify a greatness already recognised by all.  Indeed, after reading M. Lemaitre’s book, one begins to understand more clearly why it is that English critics find it difficult to appreciate to the full the literature of France.  It is no paradox to say that that country is as insular as our own.  When we find so eminent a critic as M. Lemaitre observing that Racine ’a vraiment “acheve” et porte a son point supreme de perfection la tragedie, cette etonnante forme d’art, et qui est bien de chez nous:  car on la trouve peu chez les Anglais,’ is it surprising that we should hastily jump to the conclusion that the canons and the principles of a criticism of this kind will not repay, and perhaps do not deserve, any careful consideration?  Certainly they are not calculated to spare the susceptibilities of Englishmen.  And, after all, this is only natural; a French critic addresses a French audience; like a Rabbi in a synagogue, he has no need to argue and no wish to convert.  Perhaps, too, whether he willed or no, he could do very little to the purpose; for the difficulties which beset an Englishman in his endeavours to appreciate a writer such as Racine are precisely of the kind which a Frenchman is least able either to dispel or even to understand.  The object of this essay is, first, to face these difficulties, with the aid of Mr. Bailey’s paper, which sums up in an able and interesting way the average English view of the matter; and, in the second place, to communicate to the English reader a sense of the true significance and the immense value of Racine’s work.  Whether the attempt succeed or fail, some important general questions of literary doctrine will have been discussed; and, in addition, at least an effort will have been made to vindicate a great reputation.  For, to a lover of Racine, the fact that English critics of Mr. Bailey’s calibre can write of him as they do, brings a feeling not only of entire disagreement, but of almost personal distress.  Strange as it may seem to those who have been accustomed to think of that great artist merely as a type of the frigid pomposity of an antiquated age, his music, to ears that are attuned to hear it, comes fraught with a poignancy of loveliness whose peculiar quality is shared