The Project Gutenberg EBook of Books and Characters, by Lytton Strachey

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Title: Books and Characters
French and English

Author: Lytton Strachey

Release Date: May 30, 2004 [EBook #12478]

Language: English with French

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BOOKS & CHARACTERS

FRENCH & ENGLISH

_By_

LYTTON STRACHEY

LONDON

First published May 1922

TO JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

_The following papers are reprinted by kind permission of the Editors
of the Independent Review, the New Quarterly, the Athenaeum, and the
Edinburgh Review._

_The 'Dialogue' is now printed for the first time, from a manuscript,
apparently in the handwriting of Voltaire and belonging to his English
period_.

CONTENTS

RACINE 3
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 27
SHAKESPEARE'S FINAL PERIOD 41
THE LIVES OF THE POETS 59
MADAME DU DEFFAND 67
VOLTAIRE AND ENGLAND 93
A DIALOGUE 115
VOLTAIRE'S TRAGEDIES 121
VOLTAIRE AND FREDERICK THE GREAT 137
THE ROUSSEAU AFFAIR 165
THE POETRY OF BLAKE 179
THE LAST ELIZABETHAN 193
HENRI BEYLE 219
LADY HESTER STANHOPE 241
MR. CREEVEY 253
INDEX 261

RACINE

When Ingres painted his vast 'Apotheosis of Homer,' he represented,
grouped round the central throne, all the great poets of the ancient and
modern worlds, with a single exception--Shakespeare. After some
persuasion, he relented so far as to introduce into his picture a _part_
of that offensive personage; and English visitors at the Louvre can now
see, to their disgust or their amusement, the truncated image of rather
less than half of the author of _King Lear_ just appearing at the
extreme edge of the enormous canvas. French taste, let us hope, has
changed since the days of Ingres; Shakespeare would doubtless now be
adv