From “Sketches of English Literature.”

THE INVASION of French taste, begun in the reign of Charles II., was completed under William and Queen Anne. The great aristocracy, which was raising itself up, assumed the noble and imposing character of the great monarchy, its neighbor and its rival. English literature, till then almost unknown in France, crossed the Strait. Addison saw Boileau in 1701, and presented him with a copy of his Latin poems. Voltaire, obliged to seek refuge in England, on account of his quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, dedicated the “Henriade” to Queen Anne, and spoiled his genius by the philosophic ideas of Collins, Chubb, Tindal, Wolston, Toland, and Bolingbroke. He made us acquainted with Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Shaftesbury, Swift, and exhibited them to France as men of a new species, discovered by him in a new world. Racine the younger translated “Paradise Lost,” and Rollin took notice of that poem in his “Traité des Études.”

  On the accession of William III. to the British crown, the writers of London and Paris enlisted themselves in a quarrel of princes and warriors. Boileau celebrated the Passage of the Rhine; Prior replies that the sovereign of Parnassus employs the nine muses to sing that Louis has not passed the Rhine—which was the truth. Philips translated Corneille’s “Pompée,” and Roscommon wrote the prologue to it. Addison celebrated the victories of Marlborough, and paid homage to “Athalie”; Pope published his “Essay on Criticism,” for which “L’Art Poétique” furnished the model. He gives nearly the same rules as Horace and Boileau, but all at once, recollecting his dignity, he proudly exclaims:—

  The French poet’s “L’Art Poétique” was translated; Dryden revised the text, and merely substituted the names of English writers in place of those of French writers. He renders the hatez-vous lentement, “gently make haste.”

  “The Rape of the Lock” was suggested by “Le Lutrin,” and the “Dunciad” is an imitation of the Satires by the friend of Racine. Butler translated one of these satires.

  The literary age of Queen Anne is a last reflection of the age of Louis XIV. And as if the great king had been destined to encounter William incessantly and to make conquests, when he could no longer invade England with his men at arms, he penetrated into it with his men of letters: the genius of Albion, which our soldiers could not subdue, yielded to our poets.