II
Unlike many of the other contributors to the Belgian literary renascence, Georges Eekhoud combines with a passionate love of his native land a broadly cosmopolitan culture. His contact with English literature has been especially significant as an influence upon his art. Of the Victorians, Dickens and De Quincey have profoundly impressed him; Dickens because of his humanitarian motive, De Quincey because of his hatred of the middle class and his sympathy with the criminal and the downtrodden. But Eekhoud's most effective service to English literature has been done as an interpreter and translator of Elizabethan writers. His "Au Siècle le Shakespeare," a striking volume of criticism, has done much to make popular in Belgium the writings of the Elizabethan masters. In addition to this book he has published translations into French of Beaumont and Fletcher's "Philaster" and Marlowe's "Edward II." His single original play, "Perkin Warbeck," is a tragedy founded upon the career of the Flemish pretender to the throne of England; and when the Great War beat down upon Belgium he was preparing for the press a volume of "Etudes Élisabéthi-
