SECT. I.

_Racine--Minor French Tragedians--Molière--Regnard, and other Comic

Writers._

|Italian and Spanish drama.|

1. Few tragedies or dramatic works of any kind are now recorded by

historians of Italian literature; those of Delfino, afterwards

patriarch of Aquileia, which are esteemed among the best, were

possibly written before the middle of the century, and were not

published till after its termination. The Corradino of Caraccio, in

1694, was also valued at the time.[998] Nor can Spain arrest us

longer; the school of Calderon in national comedy extended no doubt

beyond the death of Philip IV., in 1665, and many of his own religious

pieces are of as late a date; nor were names wholly wanting, which are

said to merit remembrance, in the feeble reign of Charles II., but

they must be left for such as make a particular study of Spanish

literature.[999] We are called to a nobler stage.

[998] The following stanzas on an erring conscience will

sufficiently prove this:--

Tyranne vitæ, fax temeraria,

Infide dux, ignobile vinculum,

Sidus dolosum, ænigma præsens,

Ingenui labyrinthe voti,

Assensus errans, invalidæ potens

Mentis propago, quam vetuit Deus

Nasci, sed ortæ principatum

Attribuit, regimenque sanctum, &c.

[999] Bouterwek.

|Racine’s first tragedies.|

2. Corneille belongs in his glory to the earlier period of this

century, though his inferior tragedies, more numerous than the better,

would fall within the later. Fontenelle, indeed, as a devoted admirer,

attributes considerable merit to those which the general voice

both of critics and of the public had condemned.[1000] Meantime,

another luminary arose on the opposite side of the horizon. The first

tragedy of Jean Racine, Les Frères Ennemis, was represented in 1664,

when he was twenty-five years of age. It is so far below his great

works, as to be scarcely mentioned, yet does not want indications of

the genius they were to display. Alexandre, in 1665, raised the young

poet to more distinction. It is said that he showed this tragedy to

Corneille, who praised his versification, but advised him to avoid a

path which he was not fitted to tread. It is acknowledged by the

advocates of Racine that the characters are feebly drawn, and that the

conqueror of Asia sinks to the level of a hero in one of those

romances of gallantry which had vitiated the taste of France.

[1000] Hist. du Théâtre François, in Œuvres de Fontenelle,

iii., 111. St. Evremond also despised the French public for not

admiring the Sophonisbe of Corneille, which he had made too Roman

for their taste.

|Andromaque.|

3. The glory of Racine commenced with the representation of his

Andromaque in 1667, which was not printed till the end of the

following year. He was now at once compared with Corneille, and the

scales have been oscillating ever since. Criticism, satire, epigrams,

were unsparingly launched against the rising poet. But his rival

pursued the worst policy by obstinately writing bad tragedies. The

public naturally compare the present with the present, and forget the

past. When he gave them Pertharite, they were dispensed from looking

back to Cinna. It is acknowledged even by Fontenelle that, during the

height of Racine’s fame, the world placed him at least on an equality

with his predecessor; a decision from which that critic, the relation

and friend of Corneille, appeals to what he takes to be the verdict of

a later age.

4. The Andromaque was sufficient to show that Racine had more skill in

the management of a plot, in the display of emotion, in power over the

sympathy of the spectator, at least where the gentler feelings are

concerned, in beauty and grace of style, in all except nobleness of

character, strength of thought, and impetuosity of language. He took

his fable from Euripides, but changed it according to the requisitions

of the French theatre and of French manners. Some of these changes are

for the better, as the substitution of Astyanax for an unknown

Molossus of the Greek tragedian, the supposed son of Andromache by

Pyrrhus. “Most of those,” says Racine himself very justly, “who have

heard of Andromache, know her only as the widow of Hector and the

mother of Astyanax. They cannot reconcile themselves to her loving

another husband and another son.” And he has finely improved this

happy idea of preserving Astyanax, by making the Greeks, jealous of

his name, send an embassy by Orestes to demand his life; at once

deepening the interest and developing the plot.

5. The female characters, Andromache and Hermione are drawn with all

Racine’s delicate perception of ideal beauty; the one, indeed,

prepared for his hand by those great masters in whose school he had

disciplined his own gifts of nature, Homer, Euripides, Virgil; the

other more original and more full of dramatic effect. It was, as we

are told, the fine acting of Mademoiselle de Champmelé in this part,

generally reckoned one of the most difficult on the French stage,

which secured the success of the play. Racine, after the first

representation, threw himself at her feet in a transport of gratitude,

which was soon changed to love. It is more easy to censure some of the

other characters. Pyrrhus is bold, haughty, passionate, the true son

of Achilles, except where he appears as the lover of Andromache. It is

inconceivable and truly ridiculous that a Greek of the heroic age, and

such a Greek as Pyrrhus is represented by those whose imagination has

given him existence, should feel the respectful passion towards his

captive which we might reasonably expect in the romances of chivalry,

or should express it in the tone of conventional gallantry that suited

the court of Versailles. But Orestes is far worse; love-mad, and yet

talking in gallant conceits, cold and polite, he discredits the poet,

the tragedy, and the son of Agamemnon himself. It is better to kill

one’s mother than to utter such trash. In hinting that the previous

madness of Orestes was for the sake of Hermione, Racine has presumed

too much on the ignorance, and too much on the bad taste, of his

audience. But far more injudicious is his fantastic remorse and the

supposed vision of the Furies in the last scene. It is astonishing

that Racine should have challenged comparison with one of the most

celebrated scenes of Euripides in circumstances that deprived him of

the possibility of rendering his own effective. For the style of the

Andromaque, it abounds with grace and beauty; but there are, to my

apprehension, more insipid and feeble lines, and a more effeminate

tone, than in his later tragedies.

|Britannicus.|

6. Britannicus appeared in 1669; and in this admirable play Racine

first showed that he did not depend on the tone of gallantry usual

among his courtly hearers, nor on the languid sympathies that it

excites. Terror and pity, the twin spirits of tragedy, to whom

Aristotle has assigned the great moral office of purifying the

passions, are called forth in their shadowy forms to sustain the

consummate beauties of his diction. His subject was original and

happy; with that historic truth which usage required, and that

poetical probability which fills up the outline of historic truth

without disguising it. What can be more entirely dramatic, what more

terrible in the sense that Aristotle means (that is, the spectator’s

sympathy with the dangers of the innocent), than the absolute master

of the world, like the veiled prophet of Khorasan, throwing off the

appearances of virtue, and standing out at once in the maturity of

enormous guilt! A presaging gloom, like that which other poets have

sought by the hackneyed artifices of superstition, hangs over the

scenes of this tragedy, and deepens at its close. We sympathise by

turns with the guilty alarms of Agrippina, the virtuous consternation

of Burrhus, the virgin modesty of Junia, the unsuspecting

ingenuousness of Britannicus. Few tragedies on the French stage, or

indeed on any stage, save those of Shakspeare, display so great a

variety of contrasted characters. None, indeed, are ineffective,

except the confidante of Agrippina; for Narcissus is very far from

being the mere confidant of Nero; he is, as in history, his preceptor

in crime; and his cold villainy is well contrasted with the fierce

passion of the despot. The criticisms of Fontenelle and others on

small incidents in the plot, such as the concealment of Nero behind a

curtain, that he may hear the dialogue between Junia and Britannicus,

which is certainly more fit for comedy, ought not to weigh against

such excellence as we find in all the more essential requisites of a

tragic drama. Racine had much improved his language since Andromaque;

the conventional phraseology about flames and fine eyes, though not

wholly relinquished, is less frequent; and if he has not here reached,

as he never did, the peculiar impetuosity of Corneille, nor given to

his Romans the grandeur of his predecessor’s conception, he is full of

lines wherein, as every word is effective, there can hardly be any

deficiency of vigour. It is the vigour indeed of Virgil, not of Lucan.

7. In one passage, Racine has, I think, excelled Shakspeare. They have

both taken the same idea from Plutarch. The lines of Shakspeare are in

Antony and Cleopatra:

Thy demon, that’s the spirit that keeps thee, is

Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,

Where Cæsar’s is not; but near him, thy angel

Becomes a fear, as being o’erpowered.

These are, to my apprehension, not very forcible, and obscure even to

those who know, what many do not, that by “a fear” he meant a common

goblin, a supernatural being of a more plebeian rank than a demon or

angel. The single verse of Racine is magnificent:

Mon génie étonné tremble devant le sien.

|Berenice.|

8. Berenice, the next tragedy of Racine, is a surprising proof of what

can be done by a great master; but it must be admitted that it wants

many of the essential qualities that are required in the drama. It

might almost be compared with Timon of Athens, by the absence of fable

and movement. For nobleness and delicacy of sentiment, for grace of

style, it deserves every praise; but is rather tedious in the closet,

and must be far more so on the stage. This is the only tragedy of

Racine, unless, perhaps, we except Athalie, in which the story

presents an evident moral; but no poet is more uniformly moral in his

sentiments. Corneille, to whom the want of dramatic fable was never

any great objection, attempted the subject of Berenice about the same

time with far inferior success. It required what he could not give,

the picture of two hearts struggling against a noble and a blameless

love.

|Bajazet.|

9. It was unfortunate for Racine that he did not more frequently break

through the prejudices of the French theatre in favour of classical

subjects. A field was open of almost boundless extent, the mediæval

history of Europe, and especially of France herself. His predecessor

had been too successful in the Cid to leave it doubtful whether an

audience would approve such an innovation at the hands of a favoured

tragedian. Racine, however, did not venture on a step, which, in the

next century, Voltaire turned so much to account, and which made the

fortune of some inferior tragedies. But, considering the distance of

place equivalent, for the ends of the drama, to that of time, he

founded on an event in the Turkish history not more than thirty years

before his next tragedy, that of Bajazet. Most part, indeed, of the

fable is due to his own invention. Bajazet is reckoned to fall below

most of his other tragedies in beauty of style; but the fable is well

connected; there is a great deal of movement, and an unintermitting

interest is sustained by Bajazet and Atalide, two of the noblest

characters that Racine has drawn. Atalide has not the ingenuous

simplicity of Junie, but displays a more dramatic flow of sentiment,

and not less dignity or tenderness of soul. The character of Roxane is

conceived with truth and spirit; nor is the resemblance some have

found in it to that of Hermione greater than belongs to forms of the

same type. Acomat, the vizir, is more a favourite with the French

critics; but in such parts Racine does not rise to the level of

Corneille. No poet is less exposed to the imputation of bombastic

exaggeration; yet, in the two lines with which Acomat concludes the

fourth act, there seems almost an approach to burlesque; and one can

hardly say that they would have been out of place in Tom Thumb:

Mourons, moi, cher Osmin, comme un vizir, et toi,

Comme le favori d’un homme tel que moi.

|Mithridate.|

10. The next tragedy was Mithridate; and in this Racine has been

thought to have wrestled against Corneille on his own ground, the

display of the unconquerable mind of a hero. We find in the part of

Mithridate, a great depth of thought in compressed and energetic

language. But, unlike the masculine characters of Corneille, he is not

merely sententious. Racine introduces no one for the sake of the

speeches he has to utter. In Mithridates he took what history has

delivered to us, blending with it no improbable fiction according to

the manners of the East. His love for Monime has nothing in it

extraordinary, or unlike what we might expect from the king of Pontus;

it is a fierce, a jealous, a vindictive love; the necessities of the

French language alone, and the usages of the French theatre, could

make it appear feeble. His two sons are naturally less effective; but

the loveliness of Monime yields to no female character of Racine.

There is something not quite satisfactory in the stratagems which

Mithridates employs to draw from her a confession of her love for his

son. They are not uncongenial to the historic character, but,

according to our chivalrous standard of heroism, seem derogatory to

the poetical.

|Iphigénie.|

11. Iphigénie followed in 1674. In this Racine had again to contend

with Euripides in one of his most celebrated tragedies. He had even,

in the character of Achilles, to contend, not with Homer himself, yet

with the Homeric associations familiar to every classical scholar. The

love, in fact, of Achilles, and his politeness towards Clytemnestra,

are not exempt from a tone of gallantry a little repugnant to our

conception of his manners. Yet the Achilles of Homer is neither

incapable of love nor of courtesy, so that there is no essential

repugnance to his character. That of Iphigenia in Euripides has been

censured by Aristotle as inconsistent: her extreme distress at the

first prospect of death being followed by an unusual display of

courage. Hurd has taken upon him the defence of the Greek tragedian,

and observes, after Brumoy, that the Iphigénie of Racine being

modelled rather after the comment of Aristotle than the example of

Euripides, is so much the worse.[1001] But his apology is too subtle,

and requires too long reflection, for the ordinary spectator; and

though Shakspeare might have managed the transition of feeling with

some of his wonderful knowledge of human nature, it is certainly

presented too crudely by Euripides, and much in the style which I have

elsewhere observed to be too usual with our old dramatists. The

Iphigénie of Racine is not a character, like those of Shakspeare, and

of him perhaps alone, which nothing less than intense meditation can

develop to the reader, but one which a good actress might compass and

a common spectator understand. Racine, like most other tragedians,

wrote for the stage; Shakspeare aimed at a point beyond it, and

sometimes too much lost sight of what it required.

[1001] Hurd’s Commentary on Horace, vol. i., p. 115.

12. Several critics have censured the part of Eriphile. Yet

Fontenelle, prejudiced as he was against Racine, admits that it is

necessary for the catastrophe, though he cavils, I think, against her

appearance in the earlier part of the play, laying down a rule, by

which our own tragedians would not have chosen to be tried, and which

seems far too rigid, that the necessity of the secondary characters

should be perceived from their first appearance.[1002] The question

for Racine was in what manner he should manage the catastrophe. The

_fabulous truth_, the actual sacrifice of Iphigénia, was so revolting

to the mind, that even Euripides thought himself obliged to depart

from it. But this he effected by a contrivance impossible on the

French stage, and which would have changed Racine’s tragedy to a

common melodrame. It appears to me that he very happily substituted

the character of Eriphile, who, as Fontenelle well says, is the hind

of the fable; and whose impetuous and somewhat disorderly passions

both furnish a contrast to the ideal nobleness of Iphigénia throughout

the tragedy, and reconcile us to her own fate at the close.

[1002] Réflexions sur la Poétique. Œuvres de Fontenelle,

vol. iii., p. 149.

|Phèdre.|

13. Once more, in Phèdre, did the great disciple of Euripides attempt

to surpass his master. In both tragedies the character of Phædra

herself throws into shade all the others, but with this important

difference, that in Euripides her death occurs about the middle of the

piece, while she continues in Racine till the conclusion. The French

poet has borrowed much from the Greek, more perhaps than in any former

drama, but has surely heightened the interest, and produced a more

splendid work of genius. I have never read the particular criticism in

which Schlegel has endeavoured to elevate the Hippolytus above the

Phèdre. Many, even among French critics, have objected to the love of

Hippolytus for Aricia, by which Racine has deviated from the

mythological tradition. But we are hardly tied to all the circumstance

of fable; and the cold young huntsman loses nothing in the eyes of a

modern reader by a virtuous attachment. This tragedy is said to be

more open to verbal criticism than the Iphigenie; but in poetical

beauty I do not know that Racine has ever surpassed it. The

description of the death of Hippolytus is perhaps his masterpiece. It

is true that, according to the practice of our own stage, long

descriptions, especially in elaborate language, are out of use; but it

is not, at least, for the advocates of Euripides to blame them.

|Esther.|

|Athalie.|

14. The Phèdre was represented in 1677; and after this its illustrious

author seemed to renounce the stage. His increasing attachment to the

Jansenists made it almost impossible, with any consistency, to promote

an amusement they anathematised. But he was induced, after many years,

in 1689, by Madame de Maintenon, to write Esther for the purpose of

representation by the young ladies whose education she protected at

St. Cyr. Esther, though very much praised for beauty of language, is

admitted to possess little merit as a drama. Much indeed could not be

expected in the circumstances. It was acted at St. Cyr; Louis

applauded, and it is said that the Prince de Condé wept. The greatest

praise of Esther is that it encouraged its author to write Athalie.

Once more restored to dramatic conceptions, his genius revived from

sleep with no loss of the vigour of yesterday. He was even more in

Athalie than in Iphigénie and Britannicus. This great work, published

in 1691, with a royal prohibition to represent it on any theatre,

stands by general consent at the head of all the tragedies of Racine,

for the grandeur, simplicity, and interest of the fable, for dramatic

terror, for theatrical effect, for clear and judicious management, for

bold and forcible, rather than subtle, delineation of character, for

sublime sentiment and imagery. It equals, if it does not, as I should

incline to think, surpass, all the rest in the perfection of style,

and is far more free from every defect, especially from feeble

politeness and gallantry, which of course the subject could not admit.

It has been said that he gave himself the preference to Phèdre; but it

is more extraordinary that not only his enemies, of whom there were

many, but the public itself was for some years incapable of

discovering the merit of Athalie. Boileau declared it to be a

masterpiece, and one can only be astonished that any could have

thought differently from Boileau. It doubtless gained much in general

esteem when it came to be represented by good actors; for no tragedy

in the French language is more peculiarly fitted for the stage.

15. The chorus which he had previously introduced in Esther was a very

bold innovation (for the revival of what is forgotten must always be

classed as innovation), and it required all the skill of Racine to

prevent its appearing in our eyes an impertinent excrescence. But

though we do not, perhaps, wholly reconcile ourselves to some, of the

songs, which too much suggest, by association, the Italian opera, the

chorus of Athalie enhances the interest as well as the splendour of

the tragedy. It was indeed more full of action and scenic pomp than

any he had written, and probably than any other which up to that time

had been represented in France. The part of Athalie predominates, but

not so as to eclipse the rest. The high-priest Joad is drawn with a

stern zeal admirably dramatic, and without which the idolatrous queen

would have trampled down all before her during the conduct of the

fable, whatever justice might have ensued at the last. We feel this

want of an adequate resistance to triumphant crime in the Rodogune of

Corneille. No character appears superfluous or feeble; while the plot

has all the simplicity of the Greek stage, it has all the movement and

continual excitation of the modern.

|Racine’s female characters.|

16. The female characters of Racine are of the greatest beauty; they

have the ideal grace and harmony of ancient sculpture, and bear

somewhat of the same analogy to those of Shakspeare which that art

does to painting. Andromache, Monimia, Iphigénie, we may add Junia,

have a dignity and faultlessness neither unnatural nor insipid,

because they are only the ennobling and purifying of human passions.

They are the forms of possible excellence, not from individual models,

nor likely perhaps to delight every reader, for the same reason that

more eyes are pleased by Titian than by Raphael. But it is a very

narrow criticism which excludes either school from our admiration,

which disparages Racine out of idolatry of Shakspeare. The latter, it

is unnecessary for me to say, stands out of reach of all competition.

But it is not on this account that we are to give up an author so

admirable as Racine.

|Racine compared with Corneille.|

17. The chief faults of Racine may partly be ascribed to the influence

of national taste, though we must confess that Corneille has avoided

them. Though love with him is always tragic and connected with the

heroic passions, never appearing singly, as in several of our own

dramatists, yet it is sometimes unsuitable to the character, and still

more frequently feeble and courtier-like in the expression. In this he

complied too much with the times; but we must believe that he did not

entirely feel that he was wrong. Corneille had, even while Racine was

in his glory, a strenuous band of supporters. Fontenelle, writing in

the next century, declares that time has established a decision in

which most seem to concur, that the first place is due to the elder

poet, the second to the younger; every one making the interval between

them a little greater or less according to his taste.[1003] But

Voltaire, La Harpe, and in general, I apprehend, the later French

critics, have given the preference to Racine. I presume to join my

suffrage to theirs. Racine appears to me the superior tragedian; and I

must add that I think him next to Shakspeare among all the moderns.

The comparison with Euripides is so natural that it can hardly be

avoided. Certainly no tragedy of the Greek poet is so skilful or so

perfect as Athalie or Britannicus. The tedious scenes during which the

action is stagnant, the impertinencies of useless, often perverse

morality, the extinction, by bad management, of the sympathy that had

been raised in the earlier part of a play, the foolish alternation of

repartees in a series of single lines, will never be found in Racine.

But, when we look only at the highest excellencies of Euripides, there

is, perhaps, a depth of pathos and an intensity of dramatic effect

which Racine himself has not attained. The difference between the

energy and sweetness of the two languages is so important in the

comparison, that I shall give even this preference with some

hesitation.

[1003] P. 118.

|Beauty of his style.|

18. The style of Racine is exquisite. Perhaps he is second only to

Virgil among all poets. But I will give the praise of this in the

words of a native critic. “His expression is always so happy and so

natural, that it seems as if no other could have been found; and every

word is placed in such a manner that we cannot fancy any other place

to have suited it as well. The structure of his style is such that

nothing could be displaced, nothing added, nothing retrenched; it is

one unalterable whole. Even his incorrectnesses are often but

sacrifices required by good taste, nor would anything be more

difficult than to write over again a line of Racine. No one has

enriched the language with a greater number of turns of phrase; no one

is bold with more felicity and discretion, or figurative with more

grace and propriety; no one has handled with more command an idiom

often rebellious, or with more skill an instrument always difficult;

no one has better understood that delicacy of style which must not be

mistaken for feebleness, and is, in fact, but that air of ease which

conceals from the reader the labour of the work and the artifices of

the composition; or better managed the variety of cadences, the

resources of rhythm, the association and deduction of ideas. In short,

if we consider that his perfection in these respects may be opposed to

that of Virgil, and that he spoke a language less flexible, less

poetical, and less harmonious, we shall readily believe that

Racine is, of all mankind, the one to whom nature has given the

greatest talent for versification.”[1004]

[1004] La Harpe, Eloge de Racine, as quoted by himself

in Cours de Littérature, vol. vi.

|Thomas Corneille--his Ariane.|

19. Thomas, the younger and far inferior brother of Pierre Corneille,

was yet, by the fertility of his pen, by the success of some of his

tragedies, and by a certain reputation which two of them have

acquired, the next name, but at a vast interval, to Racine. Voltaire

says he would have enjoyed a great reputation but for that of his

brother--one of those pointed sayings which seem to mean something,

but are devoid of meaning. Thomas Corneille is never compared with his

brother; and probably his brother has been rather serviceable to his

name with posterity than otherwise. He wrote with more purity,

according to the French critics, than his brother, and it must be

owned that, in his Ariane, he has given to love a tone more passionate

and natural than the manly scenes of the older tragedian ever present.

This is esteemed his best work, but it depends wholly on the principal

character, whose tenderness and injuries excite our sympathy, and from

whose lips many lines of great beauty flow. It may be compared with

the Berenice of Racine, represented but a short time before; there is

enough of resemblance in the fables to provoke comparison. That of

Thomas Corneille is more tragic, less destitute of theatrical

movement, and consequently better chosen; but such relative praise is

of little value, where none can be given, in this respect, to the

object of comparison. We feel that the prose romance is the proper

sphere for the display of an affection, neither untrue to nature, nor

unworthy to move the heart, but wanting the majesty of the tragic

muse. An effeminacy uncongenial to tragedy belongs to this play; and

the termination, where the heroine faints away instead of dying, is

somewhat insipid. The only other tragedy of the younger Corneille that

can be mentioned is the Earl of Essex. In this he has taken greater

liberties with history than his critics approve; and though love does

not so much predominate as in Ariane, it seems to engross, in a style

rather too romantic, both the hero and his sovereign.

|Manlius of La Fosse.|

20. Neither of these tragedies, perhaps, deserves to be put on a level

with the Manlius of La Fosse, to which La Harpe accords the preference

above all of the seventeenth century after those of Corneille and

Racine. It is just to observe what is not denied, that the author has

borrowed the greater part of his story from the Venice Preserved of

Otway. The French critics maintain that he has far excelled his

original. It is possible that we might hesitate to own this

superiority; but several blemishes have been removed, and the conduct

is perhaps more noble, or at least more fitted to the French stage.

But when we take from La Fosse what belongs to another--characters

strongly marked, sympathies powerfully contrasted, a development of

the plot probable and interesting, what will remain that is purely his

own? There will remain a vigorous tone of language, a considerable

power of description, and a skill in adapting, we may add with

justice, in improving, what he found in a foreign language. We must

pass over some other tragedies which have obtained less honour in

their native land, those of Duché, Quinault, and Campistron.

|Molière.|

21. Molière is, perhaps, of all French writers, the one whom his

country has most uniformly admired, and in whom her critics are most

unwilling to acknowledge faults; though the observations of Schlegel

on the defects of Molière, and especially on his large debts to older

comedy, are not altogether without foundation. Molière began with

L’Etourdi in 1653, and his pieces followed rapidly till his death in

1673. About one half are in verse; I shall select a few without regard

to order of time, and first one written in prose, L’Avare.

|L’Avare.|

22. Plautus first exposed upon the stage the wretchedness of avarice,

the punishment of a selfish love of gold, not only in the life of pain

it has cost to acquire it, but in the terrors that it brings, in the

disordered state of mind, which is haunted, as by some mysterious

guilt, by the consciousness of secret wealth. The character of Euclio

in the Aulularia is dramatic, and, as far as we know, original; the

moral effect requires, perhaps, some touches beyond absolute

probability, but it must be confessed that a few passages are

over-charged. Molière borrowed L’Avare from this comedy; and I am not

at present aware that the subject, though so well adapted for the

stage, had been chosen by any intermediate dramatist. He is indebted

not merely for the scheme of his play, but for many strokes of humour,

to Plautus. But this takes off little from the merit of this

excellent comedy. The plot is expanded without incongruous or

improbable circumstances; new characters are well combined with that

of Harpagon, and his own is at once more diverting and less

extravagant than that of Euclio. The penuriousness of the latter,

though by no means without example, leaves no room for any other

object than the concealed treasure, in which his thoughts are

concentred. But Molière had conceived a more complicated action.

Harpagon does not absolutely starve the rats; he possesses horses,

though he feeds them ill; he has servants, though he grudges them

clothes; he even contemplates a marriage supper at his own expense,

though he intends to have a bad one. He has evidently been compelled

to make some sacrifices to the usages of mankind, and is at once a

more common and a more theatrical character than Euclio. In other

respects, they are much alike; their avarice has reached that point

where it is without pride; the dread of losing their wealth has

overpowered the desire of being thought to possess it; and though this

is a more natural incident in the manners of Greece than in those of

France, yet the concealment of treasure, even in the time of Molière,

was sufficiently frequent for dramatic probability. A general tone of

selfishness, the usual source and necessary consequence of avarice,

conspires with the latter quality to render Harpagon odious; and there

wants but a little more poetical justice in the conclusion, which

leaves the casket in his possession.

23. Hurd has censured Molière without much justice. “For the picture

of the avaricious man, Plautus and Molière have presented us with a

fantastic, unpleasing draught of the passion of avarice.” It may be

answered to this, that Harpagon’s character is, as has been said

above, not so mere a delineation of the passion as that of Euclio. But

as a more general vindication of Molière, it should be kept in mind,

that every exhibition of a predominant passion within the compass of

the five acts of a play must be coloured beyond the truth of nature,

or it will not have time to produce its effect. This is one great

advantage that romance possesses over the drama.

|L’Ecole des Femmes.|

24. L’Ecole des Femmes is among the most diverting comedies of

Molière. Yet it has, in a remarkable degree, what seems inartificial

to our own taste, and contravenes a good general precept of Horace;

the action passes almost wholly in recital. But this is so well

connected with the development of the plot and characters, and

produces such amusing scenes, that no spectator, at least on the

French theatre, would be sensible of any languor. Arnolphe is an

excellent modification of the type which Molière loved to reproduce;

the selfish and morose cynic, whose pretended hatred of the vices of

the world springs from an absorbing regard to his own gratification.

He has made him as malignant as censorious; he delights in tales of

scandal; he is pleased that Horace should be successful in gallantry,

because it degrades others. The half-witted and ill-bred child, of

whom he becomes the dupe, as well as the two idiot servants, are

delineated with equal vivacity. In this comedy we find the spirited

versification, full of grace and humour, in which no one has rivalled

Molière, and which has never been attempted on the English stage. It

was probably its merit which raised a host of petty detractors, on

whom the author revenged himself in his admirable piece of satire, La

Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes. The affected pedantry of the Hôtel

Rambouillet seems to be ridiculed in this retaliation; nothing, in

fact, could be more unlike than the style of Molière to their own.

|Le Misanthrope.|

25. He gave another proof of contempt for the false taste of some

Parisian circles in the Misanthrope; though the criticism of Alceste

on the wretched sonnet forms but a subordinate portion of that famous

comedy. It is generally placed next to Tartuffe among the works of

Molière. Alceste is again the cynic, but more honourable and less

openly selfish, and with more of a real disdain of vice in his

misanthropy. Rousseau, upon this account, and many others after him,

have treated the play as a vindication of insincerity against truth,

and as making virtue itself ridiculous on the stage. This charge,

however, seems uncandid; neither the rudeness of Alceste, nor the

misanthropy from which it springs, are to be called virtues; and we

may observe that he displays no positively good quality beyond

sincerity, unless his ungrounded and improbable love for a coquette is

to pass for such. It is true that the politeness of Philinthe, with

whom the Misanthrope is contrasted, borders a little too closely upon

flattery; but no oblique end is in his view; he flatters to give

pleasure; and, if we do not much esteem his character, we are not

solicitous for his punishment. The dialogue of the Misanthrope

is uniformly of the highest style; the female, and, indeed, all the

characters, are excellently conceived and sustained; and if this

comedy fails of anything at present, it is through the difference of

manners, and, perhaps, in representation, through the want of animated

action on the stage.

|Les Femmes Savantes.|

26. In Les Femmes Savantes, there is a more evident personality in the

characters, and a more malicious exposure of absurdity than in the

Misanthrope; but the ridicule falling on a less numerous class is not

so well calculated to be appreciated by posterity. It is, however,

both in reading and representation, a more amusing comedy: in no one

instance has Molière delineated such variety of manners, or displayed

so much of his inimitable gaiety and power of fascinating the audience

with very little plot, by the mere exhibition of human follies. The

satire falls deservedly on pretenders to taste and literature, for

whom Molière always testifies a bitterness of scorn in which we

perceive some resentment of their criticisms. The shorter piece,

entitled Les Précieuses Ridicules, is another shaft directed at the

literary ladies of Paris. They had provoked a dangerous enemy; but the

good taste of the next age might be ascribed in great measure to his

unmerciful exposure of affectation and pedantry.

|Tartuffe.|

27. It was not easy, so late as the age of Molière, for the dramatist

to find any untrodden field in the follies and vices of mankind. But

one had been reserved for him in Tartuffe--religious hypocrisy. We

should have expected the original draft of such a character on the

English stage; nor had our old writers been forgetful of their

inveterate enemies, the Puritans, who gave such full scope for their

satire. But, choosing rather the easy path of ridicule, they fell upon

the starch dresses and quaint language of the fanatical party; and

where they exhibited these in conjunction with hypocrisy, made the

latter more ludicrous than hateful. The Luke of Massinger is deeply

and villainously dissembling, but does not wear so conspicuous a garb

of religious sanctity as Tartuffe. The comedy of Molière is not only

original in this character, but is a new creation in dramatic poetry.

It has been doubted by some critics, whether the depth of guilt it

exhibits, the serious hatred it inspires, are not beyond the strict

province of comedy. But this seems rather a technical cavil. If

subjects such as the Tartuffe are not fit for comedy, they are, at

least, fit for dramatic representation, and some new phrase must be

invented to describe their class.

28. A different kind of objection is still sometimes made to this

play, that it brings religion itself into suspicion. And this would,

no doubt, have been the case, if the contemporaries of Molière in

England had dealt with the subject. But the boundaries between the

reality and its false appearances are so well guarded in this comedy,

that no reasonable ground of exception can be thought to remain. No

better advice can be given to those who take umbrage at the Tartuffe

than to read it again. For there may be good reason to suspect that

they are themselves among those for whose benefit it was intended; the

Tartuffes, happily, may be comparatively few; but, while the Orgons

and Pernelles are numerous, they will not want their harvest. Molière

did not invent the prototypes of his hypocrite; they were abundant at

Paris in his time.

29. The interest of this play continually increases, and the fifth act

is almost crowded by a rapidity of events, not so usual on the French

stage as our own. Tartuffe himself is a masterpiece of skill. Perhaps,

in the cavils of La Bruyère, there may be some justice; but the

essayist has forgotten that no character can be rendered entirely

effective to an audience without a little exaggeration of its

attributes. Nothing can be more happily conceived than the credulity

of the honest Orgon, and his more doting mother; it is that which we

sometimes witness, incurable except by the evidence of the senses, and

fighting every inch of ground against that. In such a subject there

was not much opportunity for the comic talent of Molière; yet, in some

well known passages, he has enlivened it as far as was possible. The

Tartuffe will generally be esteemed the greatest effort of this

author’s genius; the Misanthrope, the Femmes Savantes, and the Ecole

des Femmes will follow in various order, according to our tastes.

These are by far the best of his comedies in verse. Among those in

prose we may give the first place to L’Avare, and the next either to

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, or to George Dandin.

|Bourgeois Gentilhomme.--George Dandin.|

30. These two plays have the same objects of moral satire; on the one

hand, the absurd vanity of plebeians in seeking the alliance or

acquaintance of the nobility, on the other, the pride and meanness of

the nobility themselves. They are both abundantly diverting; but the

sallies of humour are, I think, more frequent in the first three acts

of the former. The last two acts are improbable and less amusing. The

shorter pieces of Molière border very much upon farce; he permits

himself more vulgarity of character, more grossness in language and

incident, but his farces are seldom absurd, and never dull.

|Character of Molière.|

31. The French have claimed for Molière, and few, perhaps, have

disputed the pretension, a superiority over all earlier and later

writers of comedy. He certainly leaves Plautus, the original model of

the school to which he belonged, at a vast distance. The grace and

gentlemanly elegance of Terence he has not equalled; but in the more

appropriate merits of comedy, just and forcible delineation of

character, skilful contrivance of circumstances, and humorous

dialogue, we must award him the prize. The Italian and Spanish

dramatists are quite unworthy to be named in comparison; and if the

French theatre has, in later times, as is certainly the case, produced

some excellent comedies, we have, I believe, no reason to contradict

the suffrage of the nation itself, that they owe almost as much to

what they have caught from this great model, as to the natural genius

of their authors. But it is not for us to abandon the rights of

Shakspeare. In all things most essential to comedy, we cannot

acknowledge his inferiority to Molière. He had far more invention of

characters, and an equal vivacity and force in their delineation. His

humour was, at least, as abundant and natural, his wit incomparably

more brilliant; in fact, Molière hardly exhibits this quality at all.

The Merry Wives of Windsor, almost the only pure comedy of Shakspeare,

is surely not disadvantageously compared with George Dandin or Le

Bourgeois Gentilhomme, or even with L’Ecole des Femmes. For the

Tartuffe or the Misanthrope it is vain to seek a proper counterpart in

Shakspeare; they belong to a different state of manners. But the

powers of Molière are directed with greater skill to their object;

none of his energy is wasted; the spectator is not interrupted by the

serious scenes of tragi-comedy, nor his attention drawn aside by

poetical episodes. Of Shakspeare, we may justly say that he had the

greater genius, but, perhaps, of Molière, that he has written the best

comedies. We cannot, at least, put any later dramatist in competition

with him. Fletcher and Jonson, Wycherley and Congreve, Farquhar and

Sheridan, with great excellencies of their own, fall short of his

merit as well as his fame. Yet in humorous conception, our admirable

play, the Provoked Husband, the best parts of which are due to

Vanbrugh, seems to be equal to anything he has left. His spirited and

easy versification stands, of course, untouched by any English

rivalry; we may have been wise in rejecting verse from our stage, but

we have certainly given the French a right to claim all the honour

that belongs to it.

|Les Plaideurs of Racine.|

32. Racine once only attempted comedy. His wit was quick and

sarcastic, and in epigram he did not spare his enemies. In his

Plaideurs there is more of humour and stage-effect than of wit. The

ridicule falls, happily, on the pedantry of lawyers and the folly of

suitors; but the technical language is lost, in great measure, upon

the audience. This comedy, if it be not rather a farce, is taken from

The Wasps of Aristophanes; and that Rabelais of antiquity supplied an

extravagance, very improbably introduced into the third act of Les

Plaideurs, the trial of the dog. Far from improving the humour, which

had been amusingly kept up during the first two acts, this degenerates

into nonsense.

|Regnard--Le Joueur.|

33. Regnard is always placed next to Molière among the comic writers

of France in this, and perhaps in any age. The plays, indeed, which

entitle him to such a rank, are but few. Of these the best is

acknowledged to be Le Joueur. Regnard, taught by his own experience,

has here admirably delineated the character of an inveterate gamester;

without parade of morality, few comedies are more usefully moral. We

have not the struggling virtues of a Charles Surface, which the

dramatist may feign that he may reward at the fifth act; Regnard has

better painted the selfish ungrateful being, who, though not incapable

of love, pawns his mistress’s picture, the instant after she has given

it to him, that he may return to the dice-box. Her just abandonment,

and his own disgrace, terminate the comedy with a moral dignity which

the stage does not always maintain, and which, in the first acts, the

spectator does not expect. The other characters seem to me various,

spirited, and humorous; the valet of Valére the gamester is one of the

best of that numerous class, to whom comedy has owed so much; but the

pretended Marquis, though diverting, talks too much like a genuine

coxcomb of the world. Molière did this better in Les Précieuses

Ridicules. Regnard is in this play full of those gay sallies which

cannot be read without laughter; the incidents follow rapidly; there

is more movement than in some of the best of Molière’s comedies, and

the speeches are not so prolix.

|His other plays.|

34. Next to Le Joueur, among Regnard’s comedies, it has been usual to

place Le Légataire, not by any means inferior to the first in humour

and vivacity, but with less force of character, and more of the common

tricks of the stage. The moral, instead of being excellent, is of the

worst kind, being the success and dramatic reward of a gross fraud,

the forgery of a will by the hero of the piece and his servant. This

servant is, however, a very comical rogue, and we should not, perhaps,

wish to see him sent to the galleys. A similar censure might be passed

on the comedy of Regnard, which stands third in reputation: Les

Menechmes. The subject, as explained by the title, is old--twin-brothers,

whose undistinguishable features are the source of endless confusion;

but what neither Plautus nor Shakspeare have thought of, one avails

himself of the likeness to receive a large sum of money due to the

other, and is thought very generous at the close of the play when he

restores a moiety. Of the plays founded on this diverting

exaggeration, Regnard’s is perhaps the best; he has more variety of

incident than Plautus; and, by leaving out the second pair of twins,

the Dromio servants, which renders the Comedy of Errors almost too

inextricably confused for the spectator or reader, as well as by

making one of the brothers aware of the mistake, and a party in the

deception, he has given an unity of plot instead of a series of

incoherent blunders.

|Quinault. Boursault.|

35. The Mère Coquette of Quinault appears a comedy of great merit.

Without the fine traits of nature which we find in those of Molière,

without the sallies of humour which enliven those of Regnard, with a

versification, perhaps, not very forcible, it pleases us by a fable at

once novel, as far as I know, and natural, by the interesting

characters of the lovers, by the decency and tone of good company,

which are never lost in the manners, the incidents, or the language.

Boursault, whose tragedies are little esteemed, displayed some

originality in Le Mercure Galant. The idea is one which has not

unfrequently been imitated on the English as well as French stage, but

it is rather adapted to the shorter drama, than to a regular comedy of

five acts. The Mercure Galant was a famous magazine of light,

periodical amusements such as was then new in France, which had a

great sale, and is described in a few lines by one of the characters

in this piece.[1005] Boursault places his hero, by the editor’s

consent, as a temporary substitute, in the office of this publication,

and brings, in a series of detached scenes, a variety of applicants

for his notice. A comedy of this kind is like a compound animal; a few

chief characters must give unity to the whole, but the effect is

produced by the successive personages who pass over the stage, display

their humour in a single scene, and disappear. Boursault has been in

some instances successful; but such pieces generally owe too much to

temporary sources of amusement.

[1005]

Le Mercure est une bonne chose:

On y trouve de tout, fable, histoire, vers, prose,

Sieges, combats, procés, mort, mariage, amour,

Nouvelles de province, et nouvelles de cour--

Jamais livre à mon gré ne fut plus nécessaire.

Act I., scene 2.

The Mercure Galant was established in 1672 by one Visé; it was

intended to fill the same place as a critical record of polite

literature, which the Journal des Sçavans did in learning and

science.

|Dancourt.|

36. Dancourt, as Voltaire has said, holds the same rank relatively to

Molière in farce, that Regnard does in the higher comedy. He came a

little after the former, and when the prejudice that had been created

against comedies in prose by the great success of the other kind had

begun to subside. The Chevalier à la Mode is the only play of Dancourt

that I know; it is much above farce, and, if length be a distinctive

criterion, it exceeds most comedies. This would be very slight praise,

if we could not add that the reader does not find it one page too

long, that the ridicule is poignant and happy, the incidents well

contrived, the comic situations amusing, the characters clearly

marked. La Harpe, who treats Dancourt with a sort of contempt, does

not so much as mention this play. It is a satire on the pretensions of

a class then rising, the rich financiers, which long supplied

materials, through dramatic caricature, to public malignity and the

envy of a less opulent aristocracy.

|Brueys.|

37. The life of Brueys is rather singular. Born of a noble Huguenot

family, he was early devoted to protestant theology, and even presumed

to enter the lists against Bossuet. But that champion of the faith was

like one of those knights in romance, who first unhorse their rash

antagonists, and then make them work as slaves. Brueys was soon

converted, and betook himself to write against his former errors. He

afterwards became an ecclesiastic. Thus far there is nothing much out

of the common course in his history. But, grown weary of living alone,

and having some natural turn to comedy, he began, rather late, to

write for the stage, with the assistance, or perhaps only under the

name, of a certain Palaprat. The plays of Brueys had some success; but

he was not in a position to delineate recent manners, and in the only

comedy with which I am acquainted, Le Muet, he has borrowed the

leading part of his story from Terence. The language seems deficient

in vivacity, which, when there is no great naturalness or originality

of character, cannot be dispensed with.

|Operas of Quinault.|

38. The French opera, after some ineffectual attempts by Mazarin to

naturalise an Italian company, was successfully established by Lulli

in 1672. It is the prerogative of music in the melo-drama, to render

poetry its dependent ally; but the airs of Lulli have been forgotten,

and the verses of his coadjutor Quinault remain. He is not only the

earliest, but, by general consent, the unrivalled poet of French

music. Boileau, indeed, treated him with undeserved scorn, but,

probably, through dislike of the tone he was obliged to preserve,

which in the eyes of so stern a judge, and one so insensible to love,

appeared languid and effeminate. Quinault, nevertheless, was not

incapable of vigorous and impressive poetry; a lyric grandeur

distinguishes some of his songs; he seems to possess great felicity of

adorning every subject with appropriate imagery and sentiment; his

versification has a smoothness and charm of melody, which has made

some say that the lines were already music before they came to the

composer’s hands; his fables, whether taken from mythology or modern

romance, display invention and skill. Voltaire, La Harpe, Schlegel,

and the author of the life of Quinault in the Biographie Universelle,

but, most of all, the testimony of the public, have compensated for

the severity of Boileau. The Armide is Quinault’s latest, and also his

finest opera.

SECT. II.

ON THE ENGLISH DRAMA.

_State of the Stage after the Restoration--Tragedies of Dryden,

Otway, Southern--Comedies of Congreve and others._

|Revival of the English theatre.|

38. The troubles of twenty years, and much more the fanatical

antipathy to stage-plays which the predominant party affected,

silenced the muse of the buskin, and broke the continuity of those

works of the elder dramatists, which had given a tone to public

sentiment as to the drama from the middle of Elizabeth’s reign.

Davenant had, by a sort of connivance, opened a small house for the

representation of plays, though not avowedly so called, near the

Charter House in 1656. He obtained a patent after the Restoration. By

this time another generation had arisen, and the scale of taste was to

be adjusted anew. The fondness for the theatre revived with increased

avidity; more splendid decoration, actors probably, especially

Betterton, of greater powers, and above all, the attraction of female

performers, who had never been admitted on the older stage, conspired

with the keen appetite that long restraint produced, and with the

general gaiety, or rather dissoluteness, of manners. Yet the multitude

of places for such amusement was not as great as under the first

Stuarts. Two houses only were opened by royal patents, granting them

an exclusive privilege, one by what was called the King’s Company, in

Drury Lane, another by the Duke of York’s Company, in Lincoln’s Inn

Fields. Betterton, who was called the English Roscius, till Garrick

claimed that title, was sent to Paris by Charles II., that, taking a

view of the French stage, he might better judge of what would

contribute to the improvement of our own. It has been said, and

probably with truth, that he introduced moveable scenes, instead of

the fixed tapestry that had been hung across the stage; but this

improvement he could not have borrowed from France. The king not only

countenanced the theatre by his patronage, but by so much personal

notice of the chief actors, and so much interest in all the affairs of

the theatre as elevated their condition.

|Change of public taste.|

39. An actor of great talents is the best friend of the great

dramatists; his own genius demands theirs for its support and display;

and a fine performer would as soon waste the powers of his hand on

feeble music, as a man like Betterton or Garrick represent what is

insipid or in bad taste. We know that the former, and some of his

contemporaries, were celebrated in the great parts of our early stage,

in those of Shakspeare and Fletcher. But the change of public taste is

sometimes irresistible by those who, as, in Johnson’s antithesis, they

“live to please, must please to live.” Neither tragedy nor comedy was

maintained at its proper level; and as the world is apt to demand

novelty on the stage, the general tone of dramatic representation in

this period, whatever credit it may have done to the performers,

reflects little, in comparison with our golden age, upon those who

wrote for them.

|Its causes.|

40. It is observed by Scott, that the French theatre, which was now

thought to be in perfection, guided the criticism of Charles’s court,

and afforded the pattern of those tragedies which continued in fashion

for twenty years after the Restoration, and which were called rhyming

or heroic plays. Though there is a general justice in this remark, I

am not aware that the inflated tone of these plays is imitated from

any French tragedy; certainly, there was a nobler model in the best

works of Corneille. But Scott is more right in deriving the unnatural

and pedantic dialogue which prevailed through these performances from

the romances of Scudery and Calprenède. These were, about the era

of the Restoration, almost as popular among the indolent gentry as in

France; and it was to be expected that a style would gain ground in

tragedy, which is not so widely removed from what tragedy requires,

but that an ordinary audience would fail to perceive the difference.

There is but a narrow line between the sublime and the tumid; the man

of business or of pleasure who frequents the theatre must have

accustomed himself to make such large allowances, to put himself into

a slate of mind so totally different from his every-day habits, that a

little extraordinary deviation from nature, far from shocking him,

will rather show like a further advance towards excellence. Hotspur

and Almanzor, Richard and Aurungzebe, seem cast in the same mould;

beings who can never occur in the common walks of life, but whom the

tragedian has, by a tacit convention with the audience, acquired a

right of feigning like his ghosts and witches.

|Heroic tragedies of Dryden.|

41. The first tragedies of Dryden were what was called heroic, and

written in rhyme; an innovation which, of course, must be ascribed to

the influence of the French theatre. They have occasionally much

vigour of sentiment and much beautiful poetry, with a versification

sweet even to lusciousness. The “Conquest of Grenada” is, on account

of its extravagance, the most celebrated of the plays; but it is

inferior to the “Indian Emperor,” from which it would be easy to

select passages of perfect elegance. It is singular that although the

rhythm of dramatic verse is commonly permitted to be the most lax of

any, Dryden has in this play availed himself of none of his wonted

privileges. He regularly closes the sense with the couplet, and falls

into a smoothness of cadence which, though exquisitely mellifluous, is

perhaps too uniform. In the Conquest of Grenada the versification is

rather more broken.

|His later tragedies.|

|Don Sebastian.|

42. Dryden may probably have been fond of this species of tragedy on

account of his own facility in rhyming, and his habit of condensing

his sense. Rhyme, indeed, can only be rejected in our language from

the tragic scene, because blank verse affords wider scope for the

emotions it ought to excite; but for the tumid rhapsodies which the

personages of his heroic plays utter there can be no excuse. He

adhered to this tone, however, till the change in public taste, and

especially the ridicule thrown on his own plays by the Rehearsal,

drove him to adopt a very different, though not altogether faultless

style of tragedy. His principal works of this latter class are All for

Love, in 1678, the Spanish Friar, commonly referred to 1682, and Don

Sebastian, in 1690. Upon these the dramatic fame of Dryden is built;

while the rants of Almanzor and Maximin are never mentioned but in

ridicule. The chief excellence of the first appears to consist in the

beauty of the language, that of the second in the interest of the

story, and that of the third in the highly finished character of

Dorax. Dorax is the best of Dryden’s tragic characters, and perhaps

the only one in which he has applied his great knowledge of the human

mind to actual delineation. It is highly dramatic, because formed of

those complex passions which may readily lead either to virtue or to

vice, and which the poet can manage so as to surprise the spectator

without transgressing consistency. The Zanga of Young, a part of some

theatrical effect, has been compounded of this character and of that

of Iago. But Don Sebastian is as imperfect as all plays must be in

which a single personage is thrown forward in too strong relief for

the rest. The language is full of that rant which characterised

Dryden’s earlier tragedies, and to which a natural predilection seems,

after some interval, to have brought him back. Sebastian himself may

seem to have been intended as a contrast to Muley Moloch; but if the

author had any rule to distinguish the blustering of the hero from

that of the tyrant, he has not left the use of it in his reader’s

hands. The plot of this tragedy is ill conducted, especially in the

fifth act. Perhaps the delicacy of the present age may have been too

fastidious in excluding altogether from the drama this class of

stories; because they may often excite great interest, give scope to

impassioned poetry, and are admirably calculated for the αναγνωρισις

[anagnôrisis], or discovery, which is so much dwelt upon by the

critics; nor can the story of Œdipus, which has furnished one of the

finest and most artful tragedies ever written, be well thought an

improper subject even for representation. But they require, of all

others, to be dexterously managed; they may make the main distress of

a tragedy, but not an episode in it. Our feelings revolt at seeing, as

in Don Sebastian, an incestuous passion brought forward as the

make-weight of a plot, to eke out a fifth act, and to dispose of those

characters whose fortune the main story has not quite wound up.

|Spanish Friar.|

43. The Spanish Friar has been praised for what Johnson calls the

“happy coincidence and coalition of the two plots.” It is difficult to

understand what can be meant by a compliment which seems either

ironical or ignorant. Nothing can be more remote from the truth. The

artifice of combining two distinct stories on the stage is, we may

suppose, either to interweave the incidents of one into those of the

other, or at least so to connect some characters with each intrigue,

as to make the spectator fancy them less distinct than they are. Thus,

in the Merchant of Venice, the courtship of Bassanio and Portia is

happily connected with the main plot of Antonio and Shylock by two

circumstances; it is to set Bassanio forward in his suit that the

fatal bond is first given; and it is by Portia’s address that its

forfeiture is explained away. The same play affords an instance of

another kind of underplot, that of Lorenzo and Jessica, which is more

episodical, and might perhaps be removed without any material loss to

the fable; though even this serves to account for, we do not say to

palliate, the vindictive exasperation of the Jew. But to which of

these do the comic scenes in the Spanish Friar bear most resemblance?

Certainly to the latter. They consist entirely of an intrigue which

Lorenzo, a young officer, carries on with a rich usurer’s wife; but

there is not, even by accident, any relation between his adventures

and the love and murder which go forward in the palace. The Spanish

Friar, so far as it is a comedy, is reckoned the best performance of

Dryden in that line. Father Dominic is very amusing, and has been

copied very freely by succeeding dramatists, especially in the Duenna.

But Dryden has no great abundance of wit in this or any of his

comedies. His jests are practical, and he seems to have written more

for the eye than the ear. It may be noted as a proof of this, that his

stage directions are unusually full. In point of diction, the Spanish

Friar in its tragic scenes, and All for Love, are certainly the best

plays of Dryden. They are the least infected with his great fault,

bombast, and should indeed be read over and over by those who would

learn the true tone of English tragedy. In dignity, in animation, in

striking images and figures, there are few or none that excel them;

the power indeed of impressing sympathy, or commanding tears, was

seldom placed by nature within the reach of Dryden.

|Otway.|

44. The Orphan of Otway, and his Venice Preserved, will generally be

reckoned the best tragedies of this period. They have both a deep

pathos, springing from the intense and unmerited distress of women;

both, especially the latter, have a dramatic eloquence, rapid and

flowing, with less of turgid extravagance than we find in Otway’s

contemporaries, and sometimes with very graceful poetry. The story of

the Orphan is domestic, and evidently borrowed from some French novel,

though I do not at present remember where I have read it; it was once

popular on the stage, and gave scope for good acting, but is

unpleasing to the delicacy of our own age. Venice Preserved is more

frequently represented than any tragedy after those of Shakspeare; the

plot is highly dramatic in conception and conduct; even what seems,

when we read it, a defect, the shifting of our wishes, or perhaps

rather of our ill-wishes, between two parties, the senate and the

conspirators, who are redeemed by no virtue, does not, as is shown by

experience, interfere with the spectator’s interest. Pierre indeed is

one of those villains for whom it is easy to excite the sympathy of

the half-principled and the inconsiderate. But the great attraction is

in the character of Belvidera; and when that part is represented by

such as we remember to have seen, no tragedy is honoured by such a

tribute, not of tears alone, but of more agony than many would seek to

endure. The versification of Otway, like that of most in this period,

runs almost to an excess into the line of eleven syllables, sometimes

also into the sdrucciolo form, or twelve syllables with a dactylic

close. These give a considerable animation to tragic verse.

|Southern.|

|Lee.|

|Congreve.|

45. Southern’s Fatal Discovery, latterly represented by the name of

Isabella, is almost as familiar to the lovers of our theatre as Venice

Preserved itself; and, for the same reason, that whenever an actress

of great tragic powers arises, the part of Isabella is as fitted to

exhibit them as that of Belvidera. The choice and conduct of the story

are, however, Southern’s chief merits; for there is little vigour in

the language, though it is natural and free from the usual faults of

his age. A similar character may be given to his other tragedy,

Oroonoko, in which Southern deserves the praise of having, first of

any English writer, denounced the traffic in slaves, and the cruelties

of their West Indian bondage. The moral feeling is high in this

tragedy; and it has sometimes been acted with a certain success; but

the execution is not that of a superior dramatist. Of Lee nothing need

be said, but that he is, in spite of his proverbial extravagance, a

man of poetical mind and some dramatic skill. But he has violated

historic truth in Theodosius without gaining much by invention. The

Mourning Bride of Congreve is written in prolix declamation, with no

power over the passions. Johnson is well known to have praised a few

lines in this tragedy as among the finest descriptions in the

language; while others, by a sort of contrariety, have spoken of them

as worth nothing. Truth is in its usual middle path; many better

passages may be found, but they are well written and impressive.[1006]

[1006] Mourning Bride, act II., scene 3. Johnson’s Life

of Congreve.

|Comedies of Chas. II.’s reign.|

46. In the early English comedy, we find a large intermixture of

obscenity in the lower characters, nor always confined to them, with

no infrequent scenes of licentious incident and language. But these

are invariably so brought forward as to manifest the dramatist’s scorn

of vice, and to excite no other sentiment in a spectator of even an

ordinary degree of moral purity. In the plays that appeared after the

Restoration, and that from the beginning, a different tone was

assumed. Vice was in her full career on the stage, unchecked by

reproof, unshamed by contrast, and, for the most part, unpunished by

mortification at the close. Nor are these less coarse in expression,

or less impudent in their delineation of low debauchery, than those of

the preceding period. It may be observed, on the contrary, that they

rarely exhibit the manners of truly polished life, according to any

notions we can frame of them, and are, in this respect, much below

those of Fletcher, Massinger, and Shirley. It might not be easy,

perhaps, to find a scene in any comedy of Charles II.’s reign where

one character has the behaviour of a gentleman, in the sense we attach

to the word. Yet the authors of these were themselves in the world,

and sometimes men of family and considerable station. The cause must

be found in the state of society itself, debased as well as corrupted,

partly by the example of the court, partly by the practice of living

in taverns, which became much more inveterate after the Restoration

than before. The contrast with the manners of Paris, as far as the

stage is their mirror, does not tell to our advantage. These plays, as

it may be expected, do not aim at the higher glories of comic writing;

they display no knowledge of nature, nor often rise to any other

conception of character than is gained by a caricature of some known

class, or, perhaps, of some remarkable individual. Nor do they in

general deserve much credit as comedies of intrigue; the plot is

seldom invented with much care for its development; and if scenes

follow one another in a series of diverting incidents, if the

entanglements are such as produce laughter, above all, if the

personages keep up a well-sustained battle of repartee, the purpose is

sufficiently answered. It is in this that they often excel; some of

them have considerable humour in the representation of character,

though this may not be very original, and a good deal of wit in their

dialogue.

|Wycherley.|

47. Wycherley is remembered for two comedies, the Plain Dealer, and

the Country Wife, the latter represented with some change, in modern

times, under the name of the Country Girl. The former has been

frequently said to be taken from the Misanthrope of Molière; but this,

like many current assertions, seems to have little, if any,

foundation. Manly, the Plain Dealer, is, like Alceste, a speaker of

truth; but the idea is, at least, one which it was easy to conceive

without plagiarism, and there is not the slightest resemblance in any

circumstance or scene of the two comedies. We cannot say the same of

the Country Wife; it was evidently suggested by L’Ecole des Femmes;

the character of Arnolphe has been copied; but even here, the whole

conduct of the piece of Wycherley is his own. It is more artificial

than that of Molière, wherein too much passes in description; the part

of Agnes is rendered still more poignant; and among the comedies of

Charles’s reign, I am not sure that it is surpassed by any.

|Improvement after the Revolution.|

48. Shadwell and Etherege, and the famous Afra Behn, have endeavoured

to make the stage as grossly immoral as their talents permitted; but

the two former are not destitute of humour. At the death of Charles it

had reached the lowest point; after the Revolution it became not much

more a school of virtue, but rather a better one of polished manners

than before; and certainly drew to its service some men of comic

genius, whose names are now not only very familiar to our ears, as the

boasts of our theatre, but whose works have not all ceased to enliven

its walls.

|Congreve.|

49. Congreve, by the Old Bachelor, written, as some have said, at

twenty-one years of age, but, in fact, not quite so soon, and

represented in 1693, placed himself at once in a rank which he has

always retained. Though not, I think, the first, he is undeniably

among the first names. The Old Bachelor was quickly followed by the

Double Dealer, and that by Love for Love, in which he reached the

summit of his reputation. The last of his four comedies, the Way of

the World, is said to have been coldly received; for which it is hard

to assign any substantial cause, unless it be some want of sequence in

the plot. The peculiar excellence of Congreve is his wit, incessantly

sparkling from the lips of almost every character, but, on this

account, it is accompanied by want of nature and simplicity. Nature,

indeed, and simplicity do not belong, as proper attributes, to that

comedy which, itself the creature of an artificial society, has for

its proper business to exaggerate the affectation and hollowness of

the world. A critical code, which should require the comedy of polite

life to be natural, would make it intolerable. But there are limits of

deviation from likeness which even caricature must not transgress; and

the type of truth should always regulate the playful aberrations of an

inventive pencil. The manners of Congreve’s comedies are not, to us,

at least, like those of reality; I am not sure that we have any cause

to suppose that they much better represent the times in which they

appeared. His characters, with an exception or two, are heartless and

vicious; which, on being attacked by Collier, he justified, probably

by an afterthought, on the authority of Aristotle’s definition of

comedy; that it is μιμησις φανλοτερων [mimêsis phauloterôn], an

imitation of what is the worst in human nature.[1007] But it must be

acknowledged that, more than any preceding writer among us, he kept up

the tone of a gentleman; his men of the world are profligate, but not

coarse; he rarely, like Shadwell, or even Dryden, caters for the

populace of the theatre by such indecencies as they must understand;

he gave, in fact, a tone of refinement to the public taste, which it

never lost, and which, in its progression, has banished his own

comedies from the stage.

[1007] Congreve’s Amendments of Mr. Collier’s false citations.

|Love for Love.|

50. Love for Love is generally reputed the best of these. Congreve has

never any great success in the conception or management of his plot;

but in this comedy there is least to censure; several of the

characters are exceedingly humorous; the incidents are numerous and

not complex; the wit is often admirable. Angelica and Miss Prue, Ben

and Tattle, have been repeatedly imitated; but they have, I think, a

considerable degree of dramatic originality in themselves. Johnson has

observed that Ben the sailor is not reckoned over natural, but he is

very diverting. Possibly he may be quite as natural a portrait of a

mere sailor, as that to which we have become used in modern comedy.

|His other comedies.|

51. The Way of the World I should, perhaps, incline to place next to

this; the coquetry of Millamant, not without some touches of

delicacy, and affection, the impertinent coxcombry of Petulant and

Witwood, the mixture of wit and ridiculous vanity in Lady Wishfort,

are amusing to the reader. Congreve has here made more use than, as

far as I remember, had been common in England, of the all-important

soubrette, on whom so much depends in French comedy. The manners of

France happily enabled her dramatists to improve what they had

borrowed with signal success from the ancient stage, the witty and

artful servant, faithful to his master while he deceives every one

besides, by adding this female attendant, not less versed in every

artifice, nor less quick in repartee. Mincing and Foible, in this play

of Congreve, are good specimens of the class; but, speaking with some

hesitation, I do not think they will be found, at least, not so

naturally drawn, in the comedies of Charles’s time. Many would,

perhaps, not without cause, prefer the Old Bachelor; which abounds

with wit, but seems rather deficient in originality of character and

circumstance. The Double Dealer is entitled to the same praise of wit,

and some of the characters, though rather exaggerated, are amusing;

but the plot is so entangled towards the conclusion, that I have found

it difficult, even in reading, to comprehend it.

|Farquhar. Vanbrugh.|

52. Congreve is not superior to Farquhar and Vanbrugh, if we might

compare the whole of their works. Never has he equalled in vivacity,

in originality of contrivance, or in clear and rapid development of

intrigue, the Beau’s Stratagem of the one, and much less the admirable

delineation of the Wronghead family in the Provoked Husband of the

other. But these were of the eighteenth century. Farquhar’s Trip to

the Jubilee, though once a popular comedy, is not distinguished by

more than an easy flow of wit, and perhaps a little novelty in some of

the characters; it is indeed written in much superior language to the

plays anterior to the Revolution. But the Relapse, and the Provoked

Wife of Vanbrugh have attained a considerable reputation. In the

former, the character of Amanda is interesting; especially in the

momentary wavering, and quick recovery of her virtue. This is the

first homage that the theatre had paid, since the Restoration, to

female chastity; and notwithstanding the vicious tone of the other

characters, in which Vanbrugh has gone as great lengths as any of his

contemporaries, we perceive the beginnings of a reaction in public

spirit, which gradually reformed and elevated the moral standard of

the stage.[1008] The Provoked Wife, though it cannot be said to give

any proofs of this sort of improvement, has some merit as a comedy; it

is witty and animated, as Vanbrugh usually was; the character of Sir

John Brute may not have been too great a caricature of real manners,

such as survived from the debased reign of Charles; and the endeavour

to expose the grossness of the older generation was itself an evidence

that a better polish had been given to social life.

[1008] This purification of English comedy has sometimes been

attributed to the effects of a famous essay by Collier on the

immorality of the English stage. But if public opinion had not

been prepared to go along, in a considerable degree, with

Collier, his animadversions could have produced little change. In

point of fact, the subsequent improvement was but slow, and, for

some years, rather shown in avoiding coarse indecencies than in

much elevation of sentiment. Steele’s Conscious Lovers is the

first comedy which can be called moral; Cibber, in those parts of

the Provoked Husband that he wrote, carried this farther, and the

stage afterwards grew more and more refined, till it became

languid and sentimental.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE, FROM 1650 to 1700.

SECT. I.

_Italy--High Refinement of French Language--Fontenelle--St. Evremond--

Sevigné--Bouhours and Rapin--Miscellaneous Writers--English Style--and

Criticism--Dryden._

|Low state of literature in Italy.|

1. If Italy could furnish no long list of conspicuous names in this

department of literature to our last period, she is far more deficient

in the present. The Prose Florentine of Dati, a collection of what

seemed the best specimens of Italian eloquence in this century, served

chiefly to prove its mediocrity, nor has that editor, by his

own panegyric on Louis XIV. or any other of his writings, been able to

redeem its name.[1009] The sermons of Segneri have already been

mentioned; the eulogies bestowed on them seem to be founded, in some

measure, on the surrounding barrenness. The letters of Magalotti, and

still more of Redi, themselves philosophers, and generally writing on

philosophy, seem to do more credit than anything else to this

period.[1010]

[1009] Salfi, xiv. 25. Tiraboschi, xi, 412.

[1010] Salfi, xiv. 17. Corniani, viii. 71.

|Crescimbeni.|

2. Crescimbeni, the founder of the Arcadian Society, has made an

honourable name by his exertions to purify the national taste, as well

as by his diligence in preserving the memory of better ages than his

own. His History of National Poetry is a laborious and useful work, to

which I have sometimes been indebted. His treatise on the beauty of

that poetry is only known to me through Salfi. It is written in

dialogue, the speakers being Arcadians. Anxious to extirpate the

school of the Marinists, without falling back altogether into that of

Petrarch, he set up Costanzo as a model of poetry. Most of his

precepts, Salfi observes, are very trivial at present; but at the

epoch of its appearance, it was of great service towards the reform of

Italian literature.[1011]

[1011] Salfi, xiii. 450.

|Age of Louis XIV. in France.|

3. This period, the second part of the seventeenth century,

comprehends the most considerable, and in every sense the most

important and distinguished portion of what was once called the great

age in France, the reign of Louis XIV. In this period the literature

of France was adorned by its most brilliant writers; since,

notwithstanding the genius and popularity of some who followed, we

generally find a still higher place awarded by men of fine taste to

Bossuet and Pascal than to Voltaire and Montesquieu. The language was

written with a care that might have fettered the powers of ordinary

men, but rendered those of such as we have mentioned more resplendent.

The laws of taste and grammar, like those of nature, were held

immutable; it was the province of human genius to deal with them, as

it does with nature, by a skilful employment, not by a preposterous

and ineffectual rebellion against their control. Purity and

perspicuity, simplicity and ease, were conditions of good writing; it

was never thought that an author, especially in prose, might

transgress the recognised idiom of his mother tongue, or invent words

unknown to it, for the sake of effect or novelty; or, if in some rare

occurrence so bold a course might be forgiven, these exceptions were

but as miracles in religion, which would cease to strike us, or be no

miracles at all, but for the regularity of the laws to which they bear

witness even while they violate them. We have not thought it necessary

to defer the praise which some great French writers have deserved on

the score of their language for this chapter. Bossuet, Malebranche,

Arnauld, and Pascal, have already been commemorated; and it is

sufficient to point out two causes in perpetual operation during this

period which ennobled and preserved in purity the literature of

France; one, the salutary influence of the Academy, the other, that

emulation between the Jesuits and Jansenists for public esteem, which

was better displayed in their politer writings, than in the abstruse

and endless controversy of the five propositions. A few remain to be

mentioned, and as the subject of this chapter, in order to avoid

frequent subdivisions, is miscellaneous, the reader must expect to

find that we do not, in every instance, confine ourselves to what he

may consider as polite letters.

|Fontenelle--his character.|

4. Fontenelle, by the variety of his talents, by their application to

the pursuits most congenial to the intellectual character of his

contemporaries, and by that extraordinary longevity which made those

contemporaries not less than three generations of mankind, may be

reckoned the best representative of French literature. Born in 1657,

and dying within a few days of a complete century, in 1757, he enjoyed

the most protracted life of any among the modern learned; and that a

life in the full sunshine of Parisian literature, without care and

without disease. In nothing was Fontenelle a great writer; his mental

and moral disposition resembled each other; equable, without the

capacity of performing, and hardly of conceiving, anything truly

elevated, but not less exempt from the fruits of passion, from

paradox, unreasonableness, and prejudice. His best productions are,

perhaps, the eulogies on the deceased members of the Academy of

Sciences, which he pronounced during almost forty years, but these

nearly all belong to the eighteenth century; they are just and candid,

with sufficient, though not very profound, knowledge of the exact

sciences, and a style pure and flowing, which his good sense had freed

from some early affectation, and his cold temper as well as

sound understanding restrained from extravagance. In his first works

we have symptoms of an infirmity belonging more frequently to age than

to youth; but Fontenelle was never young in passion. He affects the

tone of somewhat pedantic and frigid gallantry which seems to have

survived the society of the Hôtel Rambouillet who had countenanced it,

and which borders too nearly on the language which Molière and his

disciples had well exposed in their coxcombs on the stage.

|His Dialogues of the Dead.|

5. The Dialogues of the Dead, published, I think, in 1685, are

condemned by some critics for their false taste and perpetual strain

at something unexpected, and paradoxical. The leading idea is, of

course, borrowed from Lucian; but Fontenelle has aimed at greater

poignancy by contrast; the ghosts in his dialogues are exactly those

who had least in common with each other in life, and the general

object is to bring, by some happy analogy which had not occurred to

the reader, or by some ingenious defence of what he had been

accustomed to despise, the prominences and depressions of historic

characters to a level. This is what is always well received in the

kind of society for which Fontenelle wrote; but if much is mere

sophistry in his dialogues, if the general tone is little above that

of the world, there is also, what we often find in the world, some

acuteness and novelty, and some things put in a light which it may be

worth while not to neglect.

|Those of Fenelon.|

6. Fenelon, not many years afterwards, copied the scheme, though not

the style, of Fontenelle in his own Dialogues of the Dead, written for

the use of his pupil the Duke of Burgundy. Some of these dialogues are

not truly of the dead; the characters speak as if on earth, and with

earthly designs. They have certainly more solid sense and a more

elevated morality than those of Fontenelle, to which La Harpe has

preferred them. The noble zeal of Fenelon not to spare the vices of

kings, in writing for the heir of one so imperious and so open to the

censure of reflecting minds, shines throughout these dialogues; but

designed as they were for a boy, they naturally appear in some places

rather superficial.

|Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds.|

7. Fontenelle succeeded better in his famous dialogues on the

Plurality of Worlds, Les Mondes; in which, if the conception is not

wholly original, he has at least developed it with so much spirit and

vivacity, that it would show as bad taste to censure his work, as to

reckon it a model for imitation. It is one of those happy ideas which

have been privileged monopolies of the first inventor; and it will be

found accordingly that all attempts to copy this whimsical union of

gallantry with science have been insipid almost to a ridiculous

degree. Fontenelle throws so much gaiety and wit into his compliments

to the lady whom he initiates in his theory, that we do not confound

them with the nonsense of coxcombs; and she is herself so spirited,

unaffected, and clever, that no philosopher could be ashamed of

gallantry towards so deserving an object. The fascinating paradox, as

then it seemed, though our children are now taught to lisp it, that

the moon, the planets, the fixed stars, are full of inhabitants, is

presented with no more show of science than was indispensable, but

with a varying liveliness that, if we may judge by the consequences,

has served to convince as well as amuse. The plurality of worlds had

been suggested by Wilkins, and probably by some Cartesians in France;

but it was first rendered a popular tenet by this agreeable little

book of Fontenelle, which had a great circulation in Europe. The

ingenuity with which he obviates the difficulties he is compelled to

acknowledge, is worthy of praise; and a good deal of the popular

truths of physical astronomy is found in these dialogues.

|His History of Oracles.|

8. The History of Oracles, which Fontenelle published in 1687, is

worthy of observation as a sign of the change that was working in

literature. In the provinces of erudition and of polite letters, long

so independent, perhaps even so hostile, some tendency towards a

coalition began to appear. The men of the world, especially after they

had acquired a free temper of thinking in religion, and become

accustomed to talk about philosophy, desired to know something of the

questions which the learned disputed; but they demanded this knowledge

by a short and easy road, with no great sacrifice of their leisure or

attention. Fontenelle, in the History of Oracles, as in the dialogues

on the Plurality of Worlds, prepared a repast for their taste. A dull

work of a learned Dutch physician, Van Dale, had taken up the subject

of the ancient oracles, and explained them by human imposture instead

of that of the devil, which had been the more orthodox hypothesis. A

certain degree of paradox, or want of orthodoxy, already gave a zest

to a book in France; and Fontenelle’s lively manner, with more

learning than good society at Paris possessed, and about as much as it

could endure, united to a clear and acute line of argument, created a

popularity for his History of Oracles, which we cannot reckon

altogether unmerited.[1012]

[1012] I have not compared, or indeed read, Van Dale’s work; but

I rather suspect that some of the reasoning, not the learning, of

Fontenelle is original.

|St. Evremond.|

9. The works of St. Evremond were collected after his death in 1705;

but many had been printed before, and he evidently belongs to the

latter half of the seventeenth century. The fame of St. Evremond as a

brilliant star, during a long life, in the polished aristocracy of

France and England, gave for a time a considerable lustre to his

writings, the greater part of which are such effusions as the daily

intercourse of good company called forth. In verse or in prose, he is

the gallant friend, rather than lover, of ladies who, secure probably

of love in some other quarter, were proud of the friendship of a wit.

He never, to do him justice, mistakes his character which as his age

was not a little advanced might have incurred ridicule. Hortense

Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, is his heroine; but we take little

interest in compliments to a woman neither respected in her life, nor

remembered since. Nothing can be more trifling than the general

character of the writings of St. Evremond; but sometimes he rises to

literary criticism, or even civil history; and on such topics he is

clear, unaffected, cold, without imagination or sensibility; a type of

the frigid being, whom an aristocratic and highly polished society is

apt to produce. The chief merit of St. Evremond is in his style and

manner; he has less wit than Voiture who contributed to form him, or

than Voltaire whom he contributed to form; but he shows neither the

effort of the former, nor the restlessness of the latter. Voltaire,

however, when he is most quiet, as in the earliest and best of his

historical works, seems to bear a considerable resemblance to St.

Evremond, and there can be no doubt that he was familiar with the

latter’s writings.

|Madame de Sevigné.|

10. A woman has the glory of being full as conspicuous in the graces

of style as any writer of this famous age. It is evident that this was

Madame de Sevigné. Her letters, indeed, were not published till the

eighteenth century, but they were written in the mid-day of Louis’s

reign. Their ease and freedom from affectation are more striking, by

contrast with the two epistolary styles which had been most admired in

France, that of Balzac, which is laboriously tumid, and that of

Voiture, which becomes insipid by dint of affectation. Everyone

perceives that in the letters of a mother to her daughter, the public,

in a strict sense, is not thought of; and yet the habit of speaking

and writing what men of wit and taste would desire to hear and read,

gives a certain mannerism, I will not say air of effort, even to the

letters of Madame de Sevigné. The abandonment of the heart to its

casual impulses is not so genuine as in some that have since been

published. It is, at least, clear that it is possible to become

affected in copying her unaffected style; and some of Walpole’s

letters bear witness to this. Her wit and talent of painting by single

touches are very eminent; scarcely any collection of letters, which

contain so little that can interest a distant age, are read with such

pleasure; if they have any general fault, it is a little monotony and

excess of affection towards her daughter, which is reported to have

wearied its object, and, in contrast with this, a little want of

sensibility towards all beyond her immediate friends, and a readiness

to find something ludicrous in the dangers and sufferings of

others.[1013]

[1013] The proofs of this are numerous enough in her letters. In

one of them she mentions that a lady of her acquaintance, having

been bitten by a mad dog, had gone to be dipped in the sea, and

amuses herself by taking off the provincial accent with which she

will express herself on the first plunge. She makes a jest of La

Voisin’s execution; and though that person was as little entitled

to sympathy as anyone, yet, when a woman is burned alive, it is

not usual for another woman to turn it into drollery.

Madame de Sevigné’s taste has been arraigned for slighting

Racine; and she has been charged with the unfortunate prediction;

Il passera comme le café. But it is denied that these words can

be found, though few like to give up so diverting a

miscalculation of futurity. In her time, Corneille’s party was so

well supported, and he deserved so much gratitude and reverence,

that we cannot much wonder at her being carried a little too far

against his rival. Who has ever seen a woman just towards the

rivals of her friends, though many are just towards their own?

|The French Academy.|

11. The French Academy had been so judicious, both in the choice of

its members, and in the general tenor of its proceedings, that it

stood very high in public esteem, and a voluntary deference was

commonly shown to its authority. The favour of Louis XIV., when he

grew to manhood, was accorded as amply as that of Richelieu.

The Academy was received by the king, when they approached him

publicly, with the same ceremonies as the superior courts of justice.

This body had, almost from its commencement, undertaken a national

dictionary, which should carry the language to its utmost perfection,

and trace a road to the highest eloquence that depended on purity and

choice of words; more than this could not be given by man. The work

proceeded very slowly; and dictionaries were published in the

meantime, one by Richelet in 1680, another by Furetiére. The former

seems to be little more than a glossary of technical, or otherwise

doubtful words;[1014] but the latter, though pretending to contain

only terms of art and science, was found, by its definitions and by

the authorities it quoted, to interfere so much with the project of

the academicians, who had armed themselves with an exclusive

privilege, that they not only expelled Furetiére from their body, on

the allegation that he had availed himself of materials intrusted to

him by the Academy for its own dictionary, but instituted a long

process at law to hinder his publication. This was in 1685, and the

dictionary of Furetiére only appeared after his death, at Amsterdam,

in 1690.[1015] Whatever may have been the delinquency, moral or legal,

of this compiler, his dictionary is praised by Goujet as a rich

treasure, in which almost everything is found that we can desire for a

sound knowledge of the language. It has been frequently reprinted, and

continued long in esteem. But the dictionary of the Academy, which was

published in 1694, claimed an authority to which that of a private man

could not pretend. Yet the first edition seems to have rather

disappointed the public expectation. Many objected to the want of

quotations, and to the observance of an orthography that had become

obsolete. The Academy undertook a revision of its work in 1700; and,

finally, profiting by the public opinion on which it endeavoured to

act, rendered this dictionary the most received standard of the French

language.[1016]

[1014] Goujet, Baillet, n. 762.

[1015] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Académie (continuation par Olivet),

p. 47. Goujet, Bibliothèque Française, i., 232, et post. Biogr.

Univers., art. Furetiére.

[1016] Pelisson, p. 69. Goujet, p. 261.

|French Grammars.|

12. The Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée of Lancelot, in which Arnauld

took a considerable share, is rather a treatise on the philosophy of

all language than one peculiar to the French. “The best critics,” says

Baillet, “acknowledge that there is nothing written by either the

ancient or the modern grammarians, with so much justness and

solidity.”[1017] Vigneul-Marville bestows upon it an almost equal

eulogy.[1018] Lancelot was copied in a great degree by Lami, in his

Rhetoric or Art of Speaking, with little of value that is

original.[1019] Vaugelas retained his place as the founder of sound,

grammatical criticism, though his judgments have not been uniformly

confirmed by the next generation. His remarks were edited with notes

by Thomas Corneille, who had the reputation of an excellent

grammarian.[1020] The observations of Ménage on the French language,

in 1675 and 1676, are said to have the fault of reposing too much on

obsolete authorities, even those of the sixteenth century, which had

long been proscribed by a politer age.[1021] Notwithstanding the zeal

of the Academy, no critical laws could arrest the revolutions of

speech. Changes came in with the lapse of time, and were sanctioned by

the imperious rule of custom. In a book on grammar, published as early

as 1688, Balzac and Voiture, even Patru and the Port-Royal writers,

are called semi-moderns;[1022] so many new phrases had since made

their way into composition, so many of theirs had acquired a certain

air of antiquity.

[1017] Jugemens des Sçavans, n. 606. Goujet copies Baillet’s

words.

[1018] Mélanges de Littérature, i., 124.

[1019] Goujet, i., 56. Gibert, p. 351.

[1020] Goujet, 146. Biogr. Univ.

[1021] Id. 153.

[1022] Bibliothèque Universelle, xv., 351. Perrault makes a

similar remark on Patru.

|Bouhours’ Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.|

13. The genius of the French language, as it was estimated in this

age, by those who aspired to the character of good critics, may be

learned from one of the dialogues in a work of Bouhours, Les

Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène. Bouhours was a Jesuit, who affected a

polite and lively tone, according to the fashion of his time, so as to

warrant some degree of ridicule; but a man of taste and judgment,

whom, though La Harpe speaks of him with some disdain, his

contemporaries quoted with respect. The first and the most

interesting, at present, of these conversations, which are feigned to

take place between two gentlemen of literary taste, turns on the

French language.[1023] This he presumes to be the best of all

modern; deriding the Spanish for its pomp, the Italian for its finical

effeminacy.[1024] The French has the secret of uniting brevity with

clearness, and with purity, and politeness. The Greek and Latin are

obscure where they are concise. The Spanish is always diffuse. The

Spanish is a turbid torrent, often over-spreading the country with

great noise; the Italian a gentle rivulet, occasionally given to

inundate its meadows; the French, a noble river, enriching the

adjacent lands, but with an equal, majestic course of waters that

never quits its level.[1025] Spanish, again, he compares to an

insolent beauty, that holds her head high, and takes pleasure in

splendid dress; Italian, to a painted coquette, always attired to

please; French, to a modest and agreeable lady, who, if you may call

her a prude, has nothing uncivil or repulsive in her prudery. Latin is

the common mother; but while Italian has the sort of likeness to Latin

which an ape bears to a man, in French we have the dignity,

politeness, purity, and good sense of the Augustan age. The French

have rejected almost all the diminutives once in use, and do not, like

the Italians, admit the right of framing others. This language does

not tolerate rhyming sounds in prose, nor even any kind of assonance,

as amertume and fortune, near together. It rejects very bold

metaphors, as the zenith of virtue, the apogée of glory; and it is

remarkable that its poetry is almost as hostile to metaphor as its

prose.[1026] “We have very few words merely poetical, and the language

of our poets is not very different from that of the world. Whatever be

the cause, it is certain that a figurative style is neither good among

us in verse nor in prose.” This is evidently much exaggerated, and, in

contradiction to the known examples, at least, of dramatic poetry. All

affectation and labour, he proceeds to say, are equally repugnant to a

good French style. “If we would speak the language well, we should not

try to speak it too well. It detests excess of ornament; it would

almost desire that words should be as it were naked; their dress must

be no more than necessity and decency require. Its simplicity is

averse to compound words; those adjectives which are formed by such a

juncture of two, have long been exiled both from prose and verse. Our

own pronunciation,” he affirms, “is the most natural and pleasing of

any. The Chinese and other Asiatics sing; the Germans rattle

(rallent); the Spaniards spout; the Italians sigh; the English

whistle; the French alone can properly be said to speak; which arises,

in fact, from our not accenting any syllable before the penultimate.

The French language is best adapted to express the tenderest

sentiments of the heart; for which reason our songs are so impassioned

and pathetic, while those of Italy and Spain are full of nonsense.

Other languages may address the imagination, but ours alone speaks to

the heart, which never understands what is said in them.”[1027] This

is literally amusing; and with equal patriotism, Bouhours in another

place has proposed the question, whether a German can, by the nature

of things, possess any wit.

[1023] Bouhours points out several innovations which had lately

come into use. He dislikes _avoir des ménagemens_, or _avoir de

la considération_, and thinks these phrases would not last; in

which he was mistaken. _Tour de visage_ and _tour d’esprit_ were

new: the words _fonds_, _mésures_, _amitiés_, _compte_, and many

more were used in new senses. Thus also _assez_ and _trop_; as

the phrase, _je ne suis pas trop de votre avis_. It seems, on

reflection, that some of the expressions he animadverts upon,

must have been affected while they were new, being in opposition

to the correct meaning of words; and it is always curious, in

other languages as well as our own, to observe the comparatively

recent _nobility_ of many things quite established by present

usage. Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène p. 95.

[1024] P. 52 (edit. 1671).

[1025] P. 77.

[1026] P. 60.

[1027] P. 68.

|Attacked by Barbier d’Aucour.|

14. Bouhours, not deficient, as we may perceive, in self-confidence

and proneness to censure, presumed to turn into ridicule the writers

of Port-Royal, at that time of such distinguished reputation as

threatened to eclipse the credit which the Jesuits had always

preserved in polite letters. He alludes to their long periods and the

exaggerated phrases of invective which they poured forth in

controversy.[1028] But the Jansenist party was well able to defend

itself. Barbier d’Aucour retaliated on the vain Jesuit by his

Sentimens de Cleanthe sur les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.

It seems to be the general opinion of French critics that he has well

exposed the weak parts of his adversary, his affected air of the

world, the occasional frivolity and feebleness of his observations;

yet there seems something morose in the censures of the supposed

Cleanthe, which renders this book less agreeable than that on which it

animadverts.

[1028] P. 150. Vigneul-Marville observes that the Port-Royal

writers formed their style originally on that of Balzac (vol. i.,

p. 107); and that M. d’Andilly, brother of Antony Arnauld,

affected at one time a grand and copious manner like the

Spaniards, as being more serious and imposing, especially in

devotional writings; but afterwards finding the French were

impatient of this style, that party abandoned it for one more

concise, which it is by no means less difficult to write well, p.

139. Baillet seems to refer their love of long periods to the

famous advocate Le Maistre, who had employed them in his

pleadings, not only as giving more dignity, but also because the

public taste at that time favoured them. Jugemens des Sçavans,

n. 953.

|La Manière de Bien Penser.|

15. Another work of criticism by Bouhours La Manière de Bien Penser,

which is also in dialogue, contains much that shows acuteness and

delicacy of discrimination; though his taste was deficient in warmth

and sensibility, which renders him somewhat too strict and fastidious

in his judgments. He is an unsparing enemy of obscurity, exaggeration

and nonsense, and laughs at the hyperbolical language of Balzac, while

he has rather over-praised Voiture.[1029] The affected inflated

thoughts, of which the Italian and Spanish writers afford him many

examples, Bouhours justly condemns, and by the correctness of his

judgment may deserve, on the whole, a respectable place in the second

order of critics.

[1029] Voiture, he says, always takes a tone of raillery when he

exaggerates. Le faux devient vrai à la faveur de l’ironie, p. 29.

But we can hardly think that Balzac was not gravely ironical in

some of the strange hyperboles which Bouhours quotes from him.

In the fourth dialogue, Bouhours has many just observations on

the necessity of clearness. An obscurity arising from allusion to

things now unknown, such as we find in the ancients, is no fault

but a misfortune; but this is no excuse for one which may be

avoided, and arises from the writer’s indistinctness of

conception or language. Cela n’est pas intelligible, dit

Philinthe (after hearing a foolish rhapsody extracted from a

funeral sermon on Louis XIII.). Non, répondit Eudoxe, ce n’est

pas tout-à-fait de galimatias, ce n’est que du phébus. Vous

mettez donc, dit Philinthe, de la différence entre le galimatias

et le phébus? Oui, repartit Eudoxe, le galimatias renferme une

obscurité profonde, et n’a de soi-même nul sens raisonnable. Le

phébus n’est pas si obscur, et a un brillant qui signfie, ou

semble signifier quelque chose; le soleil y entre d’ordinaire, et

c’est peut-être ce qui a donné lieu en notre langue au nom de

phébus. Ce n’est pas que quelquefois le phébus ne devienne

obscur, jusqu’à n’être pas entendu; mais alors le galimatias s’en

joint; ce ne sont que brillans et que ténèbres de tous côtes,

p. 342.

|Rapin’s Reflections on Eloquence and Poetry.|

16. The Réflexions sur l’Eloquence et sur la Poësie of Rapin, another

Jesuit, whose Latin poem on Gardens has already been praised, are

judicious, though perhaps rather too diffuse; his criticism is what

would appear severe in our times; but it was that of a man formed by

the ancients, and who lived also in the best and most critical age of

France. The reflections on poetry are avowedly founded on Aristotle,

but with much that is new, and with examples from modern poets to

confirm and illustrate it. The practice at this time in France was to

depreciate the Italians; and Tasso is often the subject of Rapin’s

censure; for want, among other things, of that grave and majestic

character which epic poetry demands. Yet Rapin is not so rigorous, but

that he can blame the coldness of modern precepts in regard to French

poetry. After condemning the pompous tone of Brebœuf in his

translation of the Pharsalia, he remarks that “we have gone since to

an opposite extreme by too scrupulous a care for the purity of the

language; for we have begun to take from poetry its force and dignity

by too much reserve and a false modesty, which we have established as

characteristics of our language, so as to deprive it of that judicious

boldness which true poetry requires; we have cut off the metaphors and

all those figures of speech which give force and spirit to words and

reduced all the artifices of words to a pure regular style which

exposes itself to no risk by bold expression. The taste of the age,

the influence of women who are naturally timid, that of the court

which had hardly anything in common with the ancients, on account of

its usual antipathy for learning, accredited this manner of

writing.”[1030] In this Rapin seems to glance at the polite but cold

criticism of his brother Jesuit, Bouhours.

[1030] P. 147.

|His Parallels of Great Men.|

17. Rapin, in another work of criticism, the Parallels of Great Men of

Antiquity, has weighed in the scales of his own judgment Demosthenes

and Cicero, Homer and Virgil, Thucydides and Livy, Plato and

Aristotle. Thus eloquence, poetry, history and philosophy pass under

review. The taste of Rapin is for the Latins; Cicero he prefers to

Demosthenes, Livy on the whole to Thucydides, though this he leaves

more to the reader; but is confident that none except mere grammarians

have ranked Homer above Virgil.[1031] The loquacity of the older poet,

the frequency of his moral reflections, which Rapin thinks misplaced

in an epic poem, his similes, the sameness of his traditions, are

treated very freely; yet he gives him the preference over Virgil for

grandeur and nobleness of narration, for his epithets, and the

splendour of his language. But he is of opinion that Æneas is a much

finer character than Achilles. These two epic poets he holds, however,

to be the greatest in the world; as for all the rest, ancient and

modern, he enumerates them one after another, and can find little but

faults in them all.[1032] Nor does he esteem dramatic and lyric poets,

at least modern, much better.

[1031] P. 158.

[1032] P. 175.

|Bossu on Epic Poetry.|

18. The Treatise on Epic Poetry by Bossu was once of some reputation.

An English poet has thought fit to say that we should have stared,

like Indians, at Homer, if Bossu had not taught us to understand

him.[1033] The book is, however, long since forgotten; and we fancy

that we understand Homer not the worse. It is in six books, which

treat of the fable, the action, the narration, the manners, the

machinery, the sentiments and expressions of an epic poem. Homer is

the favourite poet of Bossu, and Virgil next to him; this preference

of the superior model does him some honour in a generation which was

becoming insensible to its excellence. Bossu is judicious and correct

in taste, but without much depth, and he seems to want the acuteness

of Bouhours.

[1033]

Had Bossu never writ, the world had still,

Like Indians, viewed this mighty piece of wit.

MULGRAVE’S _Essay on Poetry_.

|Fontenelle’s critical writings.|

19. Fontenelle is a critic of whom it may be said, that he did more

injury to fine taste and sensibility in works of imagination and

sentiment, than any man without his good sense and natural acuteness

could have done. He is systematically cold; if he seems to tolerate

any flight of the poet, it is rather by caprice than by a genuine

discernment of beauty; but he clings, with the unyielding claw of a

cold-blooded animal, to the faults of great writers, which he exposes

with reason and sarcasm. His Reflections on Poetry relate mostly to

dramatic composition, and to that of the French stage. Theocritus is

his victim in the Dissertation on Pastoral Poetry; but Fontenelle gave

the Sicilian his revenge; he wrote pastorals himself; and we have

altogether forgotten, or, when we again look at, can very partially

approve, the idylls of the Boulevards, while those Doric dactyls of

Theocritus linger still, like what Schiller has called soft music of

yesterday, from our school-boy reminiscences on our aged ears.

|Preference of French language to Latin.|

20. The reign of mere scholars was now at an end; no worse name than

that of pedant could be imposed on those who sought for glory; the

admiration of all that was national in arts, in arms, in manners, as

well as in speech, carried away like a torrent those prescriptive

titles to reverence which only lingered in colleges. The superiority

of the Latin language to French had long been contested; even Henry

Stephens has a dissertation in favour of the latter; and in this

period, though a few resolute scholars did not retire from the field,

it was generally held either that French was every way the better

means of expressing our thoughts, or, at least, so much more

convenient as to put nearly an end to the use of the other. Latin had

been the privileged language of stone; but Louis XIV., in consequence

of an essay by Charpentier, in 1676, replaced the inscriptions on his

triumphal arches by others in French.[1034] This, of course, does not

much affect the general question between the two languages.

[1034] Goujet, i., 13.

|General superiority of ancients disputed.|

|Charles Perrault.|

21. But it was not in language alone that the ancients were to endure

the aggression of a disobedient posterity. It had long been a problem

in Europe whether they had not been surpassed; one, perhaps, which

began before the younger generations could make good their claim. But

time, the nominal ally of the old possessors, gave his more powerful

aid to their opponents; every age saw the proportions change, and new

men rise up to strengthen the ranks of the assailants. In philosophy,

in science, in natural knowledge, the ancients had none but a few mere

pedants, or half-read lovers of paradox, to maintain their

superiority; but in the beauties of language, in eloquence and poetry,

the suffrage of criticism had long been theirs. It seemed time to

dispute even this. Charles Perrault, a man of some learning, some

variety of acquirement, and a good deal of ingenuity and quickness,

published, in 1687, his famous “Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns

in all that regards Arts and Sciences.” This is a series of dialogues,

the parties being first, a president, deeply learned and prejudiced in

all respects for antiquity; secondly, an abbé, not ignorant, but

having reflected more than read, cool and impartial, always made to

appear in the right, or, in other words, the author’s representative;

thirdly, a man of the world, seizing the gay side of every subject,

and apparently brought in to prevent the book from becoming dull. They

begin with architecture and painting, and soon make it clear that

Athens was a mere heap of pig-sties in comparison with Versailles; the

ancient painters fare equally ill. They next advance to eloquence and

poetry, and here, where the strife of war is sharpest, the defeat of

antiquity is chanted with triumph. Homer, Virgil, Horace are

successively brought forward for severe and often unjust censure; but,

of course, it is not to be imagined that Perrault is always in the

wrong; he had to fight against a pedantic admiration which surrenders

sound taste; and having found the bow bent too much in one way, he

forced it himself too violently into another direction. It is the

fault of such books to be one-sided; they are not unfrequently right

in censuring blemishes, but very uncandid in suppressing beauties.

Homer has been worst used by Perrault, who had not the least power of

feeling his excellence; but the advocate of the newer age in his

dialogue admits that the Æneid is superior to any modern epic. In his

comparison of eloquence, Perrault has given some specimens of both

sides to contrast; comparing, by means, however, of his own versions,

the funeral orations of Pericles and Plato with those of Bourdaloue,

Bossuet, and Fléchier, the description by Pliny of his country seat

with one by Balzac, an epistle of Cicero with another of Balzac. These

comparisons were fitted to produce a great effect among those who

could neither read the original text, nor place themselves in the

midst of ancient feelings and habits. It is easy to perceive that a

vast majority of the French in that age would agree with Perrault; the

book was written for the times.

|Fontenelle.|

22. Fontenelle, in a very short digression on the ancients and

moderns, subjoined to his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, followed the

steps of Perrault. “The whole question as to pre-eminence between the

ancients and moderns,” he begins, “reduces itself into another,

whether the trees that used to grow in our woods were larger than

those which grow now. If they were, Homer, Plato, Demosthenes cannot

be equalled in these ages; but if our trees are as large as trees were

of old, then there is no reason why we may not equal Homer, Plato, and

Demosthenes.” The sophistry of this is glaring enough; but it was

logic for Paris. In the rest of this short essay, there are the usual

characteristics of Fontenelle, cool, good sense, and an incapacity, by

natural privation, of feeling the highest excellence in works of

taste.

|Boileau’s defence of antiquity.|

23. Boileau, in observations annexed to his translation of Longinus,

as well as in a few sallies of his poetry, defended the great poets,

especially Homer and Pindar, with dignity and moderation; freely

abandoning the cause of antiquity where he felt it to be untenable.

Perrault replied with courage, a quality meriting some praise where

the adversary was so powerful in sarcasm and so little accustomed to

spare it; but the controversy ceased in tolerable friendship.

|First Reviews--Journal des Sçavans.|

24. The knowledge of new accessions to literature which its lovers

demanded, had hitherto been communicated only through the annual

catalogues published at Frankfort or other places. But these lists of

title-pages were unsatisfactory to the distant scholar, who sought to

become acquainted with the real progress of learning, and to know what

he might find it worth while to purchase. Denis de Sallo, a member of

the parliament of Paris, and not wholly undistinguished in literature,

though his other works are not much remembered, by carrying into

effect a happy project of his own, gave birth, as it were, to a mighty

spirit which has grown up in strength and enterprise, till it has

become the ruling power of the literary world. Monday, the 5th of

January, 1665, is the date of the first number of the first review,

the Journal des Sçavans, published by Sallo, under the name of the

Sieur de Hedouville, which some have said to be that of his

servant.[1035] It was printed weekly, in a duodecimo or sexto-decimo

form, each number containing from twelve to sixteen pages. The first

book ever reviewed (let us observe the difference of subject between

that and the last, whatever the last may be) was an edition of the

works of Victor Vitensis and Vigilius Tapsensis, African bishops of

the fifth century, by Father Chiflet, a Jesuit.[1036] The second is

Spelman’s Glossary. According to the prospectus prefixed to the

Journal des Sçavans, it was not designed for a mere review, but a

literary miscellany; composed, in the first place, of an exact

catalogue of the chief books which should be printed in Europe; not

content with the mere titles, as the majority of bibliographers had

hitherto been, but giving an account of their contents, and their

value to the public; it was also to contain a necrology of

distinguished authors, an account of experiments in physics and

chemistry, and of new discoveries in arts and sciences, with the

principal decisions of civil and ecclesiastical tribunals, the decrees

of the Sorbonne and other French or foreign universities; in short,

whatever might be interesting to men of letters. We find, therefore,

some piece of news, more or less of a literary or scientific nature,

subjoined to each number. Thus, in the first number, we have a

double-headed child born near Salisbury; in the second, a question of

legitimacy decided in the parliament of Paris; in the third, an

experiment on a new ship or boat constructed by Sir William Petty; in

the fourth, an account of a discussion in the College of Jesuits on

the nature of comets. The scientific articles, which bear a large

proportion to the rest, are illustrated by engravings. It was

complained that the Journal des Sçavans did not pay much regard to

polite or amusing literature; and this led to the publication of the

Mercure Galant, by Visé, which gave reviews of poetry and of the drama.

[1035] Camusat, in his Histoire Critique des Journaux, in two

volumes, 1734, which, notwithstanding its general title, is

chiefly confined to the history of the Journal des Sçavans, and

wholly to such as appeared in France, has not been able to clear

up this interesting point; for there are not wanting those who

assert, that Hedouville was the name of an estate belonging to

Sallo; and he is called in some public description, without

reference to the journal, Dominus de Sallo d’Hedouville in

Parisiensi curia senator. Camusat, i., 13. Notwithstanding this,

there is evidence that leads us to the valet; so that “ampliùs

deliberandum censeo; Res magna est.”

[1036] Victoria Vitensis et Vigilii Tapsensis, Provinciæ Bisacenæ

Episcoporum Opera, edente R. P. Chifletio, Soc. Jesu. Presb., in

4to. Divione. The critique, if such it be, occupies but two pages

in small duodecimo. That on Spelman’s Glossary, which follows, is

but in half a page.