23 JULY 1932, Page 3

A Great Ambassador As a devoted student of English life

and letters and as an interpreter between France and the English-speaking peoples, M. Jusserand, who died on Monday, will be widely and deeply regretted. After long service in the French Foreign Office, he went as Ambassador to Washington in 1903 and remained there till 1925. It is safe to say that no foreign diplomat, not even Lord Bryce, enjoyed greater popularity in America than M. Jusserand, and his exceptional knowledge of men and affairs was unquestionably of immense service to the Allies in the critical years of the War. He helped, indirectly but none the less surely, to promote good relations between America and England by his scholarly and attractive books on English literature, of which he was a lifelong student. On Chaucer and Shakespeare, Fielding and Smollett, he wrote with rare knowledge and distinction. And there is no more accurate or delightful picture of bygone England than M. Jusserand presented in his English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages. It is to be noted, too, that M. Jussemnd's example led many younger French scholars to study English literature, to the profit of both peoples.