CORNEILLE.

57

his duty to write for the stage, he brought out pieceafter piece, in which he mistook involved intrigue forinterest, crime on stilts for heroism, and declamationfor passion. His tragedies fell coldly on the public ear;and, as he could not understand why this should be,he always alleges some trivial circumstance as the cause ofhis ill success ; for, having laboured as sedulously as inhis early plays, he was insensible to the fact, that aridthough pompous dialogues were substituted for sublimeeloquence. Boileau’s epigram on these unfortunate tes-timonies of decayed genius is well known : — when thewits of Paris repeated after him

“ J’ai vu l’Agesilas : .

Helas!

Mais apr&s Attila,

Hola!”

Corneille might well regret that he had not perse-vered in the silence to which he condemned himselfwhen Pertharite failed.

A young rival also sprung up — a rival whose grace-ful diction, whose impassioned tenderness, and elegantcorrectness, are the delight of French critics to this day.Yet, though Yoltaire and others have set Racine farabove Corneille, and though Saint Evremond wrote at thetime that the advanced age of Corneille no longer alarmedhim, since the French drama would not die with him, theyounger poet’s superiority was by no means universallyacknowledged in his own time. Corneille had a partywho still adhered to their early favourite, and calledRacine ’s elegance feebleness, compared with the roughsublimity of the father of the art. “ Racine writesagreeably,” says madame de Sevigne, in a letter to herdaughter ; “ but there is nothing absolutely beautiful,nothirg sublime — none of those tirades of Corneille which thrill. We must never compare him with Ra-cine ; but be aware of the difference. We must excuseCornalle’s bad verses in favour of those divine andsublime beauties which fill us with transport — these aretraits of genius which are quite inimitable. Despreaux