Louis Cazamian, Émile Legouis: A History of English Literature

Some little while ago a number of English professors in our various universities and university colleges discovered a common indebtedness to Émile Legouis (no honorifics can improve a name now so eminent) and a common impulse to thank him; an impulse, that is, of personal gratitude, warming and colouring the respect due to the achievement of a great scholar.
Viewed dispassionately, of course, that achievement were monumental enough; the purpose of a life time-he was born in 186i-carved out by long and delicate labour; a large purpose, yet simple, definite, practical-to attract young Frenchmen in the great university of Paris to the study of English literature, to widen their knowledge, quicken their understanding of it, and through the immense authority of the Sorbonne to disseminate that understanding through educated France. Now so massive is our literature that the mere task of grappling with it must, for a foreigner, have been enormous, let be the task of seeing and presenting it in right proportion of parts. With what devotion he and his younger confrére, M. Cazamian, have laboured, and with what skill attained, the following pages bear witness.