"It is one of our misfortunes not to be a nation of centaurs, my lord," answered Voltaire lightly and in English, which he spoke admirably, although he dropped into his own language occasionally. "I envy you English gentlemen your superb capacity for outdoor sports and your noble independence of intellectual amusements. Of course I except your lordship from the category of average Englishmen, who devote their days to killing birds and beasts, and their evenings to the study of blood and murder tragedies by their favourite Shakespeare."
"0, don't be too hard upon our sturdy British taste, my dear friend. We read Shakespeare occasionally, I admit, but we very seldom act his plays. That pretty foolish comedy, As You Like It, has never been represented since the author's death; and I protest there are some love-making scenes in it that would not disgrace Dryden or Wycherley."
"Do you know, Monsieur de Voltaire, that I delight in Shakespeare?" said Lady Judith, who sat on a sofa by the fire, fanning herself with a superb listlessness, and leaning down now and then to caress her favourite pug.
"From the moment Lady Judith admires him he is sacred," said the Frenchman gaily; "but you must confess that there is a crudeness about his tragedies, an extravagance of blood and wounds and sudden death, which can hardly stand comparison with such calm and polished compositions as Phèdre or Le Cid."
"I place Shakespeare infinitely higher than Racine or Corneille, and I consider his tragedies sublime," replied Judith, with the air of a woman who has the privilege of being positive even when she is talking nonsense.
"What, that refined and delicate Roman story, for instance—Titus Andronicus, and Lavinia with her bleeding stumps, and the profligate blackamoor?"
"0, we give you Lavinia and her stumps," cried Bolingbroke, laughing. "We repudiate Titus Andronicus. It is the work of an earlier playwright, to which Shakespeare only gave a few fine touches; and those flashes of genius have made the whole play pass for inspired."
"0, if you are going to repudiate everything coarse and brutal which passes for Shakespeare, and claim only the finer touches for his, you may succeed in establishing him as a great poet. Would that we might all be judged as leniently by future critics! What say you, Mr. Topsparkle? You are a man of cosmopolitan tastes, and have doubtless compared your native playwrights with those of other nations, from Æschylus downwards."
"I care not a jot for the whole mass of English literature," answered Topsparkle, snapping his taper fingers with an airy gesture; "and as for Shakespeare, I have never soiled my fingers by turning his pages. My mental stamina is not robust enough to cope with his monstrosities."
"And yet you revel in foreign coarseness; you devour Boccaccio and Rabelais," said his wife, with a scornful glance at the pinched painted face and frail figure airing itself before the wide old hearth, set off by a gray and silver brocade suit with scarlet shoulder-knots.