but his "Legende of Goode Women" might, so far as its subject-matter is
concerned, have been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian
Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faerie Queene"
numbers St. George and King Arthur among its heroes; but its scene is laid
in Faerie Lande, if it be laid anywhere, and it is a barefaced moral
allegory throughout. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, the elimination
of which from English literature would undeniably be a serious loss to it;
yet, of these plays twenty-three have entirely foreign scenes and
characters. Milton, as a political writer, was English; but his "Paradise
Lost and Regained," his "Samson," his "Ode on the Nativity," his "Comus,"
bear no reference to the land of his birth. Dryden's best-known work to-
day is his "Alexander's Feast." Pope has come down to us as the translator
of Homer. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are the great quartet
of English novelists of the last century; but Smollett, in his preface to
"Roderick Random," after an admiring allusion to the "Gil Blas" of Le
Sage, goes on to say: "The following sheets I have modelled on his plan";
and Sterne was always talking and thinking about Cervantes, and comparing
himself to the great Spaniard: "I think there is more laughable humor,
with an equal degree of Cervantic satire, if not more, than in the last,"
he writes of one of his chapters, to "my witty widow, Mrs. F." Many even
of Walter Scott's romances are un-English in their elements; and the fame
of Shelley, Keats, and Byron rests entirely upon their "foreign" work.
Coleridge's poetry and philosophy bear no technical stamp of nationality;
and, to come down to later times, Carlyle was profoundly imbued with
Germanism, while the "Romola" of George Eliot and the "Cloister and the
Hearth" of Charles Reade are by many considered to be the best of their
works. In the above enumeration innumerable instances in point are, of
course, omitted; but enough have been given, perhaps, to show that
imaginative writers have not generally been disowned by their country on
the ground that they have availed themselves, in their writings, of other