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George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor (ed. George Hillard), Chapter 6: (search)
nk from maintaining the supremacy of English literature in defiance of them all . . . . The affair ended by a challenge, given and accepted, to stake Shakespeare and Milton against the whole body of French poetry. The French party was to begin by reading the best passages in their language, taking none but of the very first order, and I undertook to reply passage by passage, and page by page, taking only my two favorites. All the morning the ladies were in council with Voltaire, Racine, Corneille,—in short, a whole library. In the evening they covered the table with books till there was not room to put down a pin-cushion, and were a little abashed to find I took from my pocket nothing but your little Paradise Lost, which alone exhausted their three great authors. In short, in four evenings they had no more passages of the first order of poetry to offer, and I had still Shakespeare's best plays in reserve, so that I prevailed on putting the vote, by four to two, without counting m