fallen,[386] is one of the great epoch-making sentences of criticism. Of course it was not attended to; but for a hundred years and more French literature bore ever-increasing testimony to its truth. ----- Footnote 385: P. 125 _ed. cit._ Footnote 386: “L’excès choquant de Ronsard nous a un peu jetés dans l’extrémité opposée; on a appauvri, desséché et gâté notre langue.” And he proceeds, with much humour and more truth, to stigmatise the prim following of grammar, the “substantive hand in hand with its adjective,” the verb “walking behind with an adverb at its heels, and an accusative in a place unalterable.” “C’est ce,” this great _locus_ continues, “qui exclut toute suspension d’esprit, toute surprise, toute variété, et souvent toute magnifique cadence.” 1830 could say no more; and often said it with less authority. ----- The censure of French drama is injured, partly by certain prejudices of the moralist and the theologian, and partly by less accountable crotchets. On Molière in particular, though he cannot help admiring the greatest of his contemporary countrymen, he is something from which we had best turn our faces, putting likewise into the wallet at our backs (and Time’s) the complaints of _la basse plaisanterie de Plaute_, and the statement that _on se passe volontiers d’Aristophane_. The point is the quantity of opinion which is not for Oblivion’s alms-bag. And, abundant as this is in Fénelon, the quality of it is more remarkable even than the quantity. He always prefers the study of author, and book, and piece, and phrase, to the study of Kind and the manufacture of Rule. Though he is in no sense an Anarchist, and may even have sometimes his cloth rather too much in his remembrance, yet he remembers likewise, and transfers to profane things, the sacred precept, “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.” The fatal fault of the extremest kind of neo-classic criticism—the weak point in all of it—is the usual refusal to “prove” the work, even to see whether it is good or not, if it fails to answer at first blush to certain arbitrary specifications. Fénelon is free from this: he has escaped from the House of Bondage.