This blood, still foaming with indignant rage, That it was shed for others, not for you;-- not only was there thought to be a very spirited refinement in the line of Hypsipyle to Medea, in the "Golden Fleece": "I have attractions only; you have charms;" but it was not perceived--and few connoisseurs perceive it yet--that in the imposing part of Cornelia, the author almost continually puts wit where grief alone was required. This woman, whose husband has just been assassinated, begins her studied speech to Cæsar with a "for": _César, car le destin que dans tes fers je brave_ _M'a fait ta prisonnière, et non pas ton esclave;_ _Et tu ne prétends pas qu'il m'abatte le cœur._ _Jusqu'à te rendre hommage et te nommer seigneur._ --MORT DE POMPÉE, act iii, sc. 4. Cæsar, For the hard fate that binds me in thy chains, Makes me thy prisoner, but not thy slave; Nor wouldst thou have it so subdue my heart That I should call thee lord and do thee homage. Thus she breaks off, at the very first word, in order to say that which is at once far-fetched and false. Never was the wife of one Roman citizen the slave of another Roman citizen: never was any Roman called lord; and this word "lord" is, with us, nothing more than a term of honor and ceremony, used on the stage. _Fille de Scipion, et, pour dire encor plus,_ _Romaine, mon courage est encore au-dessus._--ID. Daughter of Scipio, and, yet more, of Rome, Still does my courage rise above my fate. [Illustration: Pierre Corneille.] Besides the defect so common to all Corneille's heroes, of thus announcing themselves--of saying, I am great, I am courageous, admire me--here is the very reprehensible affectation of talking of her birth, when the head of Pompey has just been presented to Cæsar. Real affliction expresses itself otherwise. Grief does not seek after a "yet more." And what is worse, while she is striving to say "yet more," she says much less. To be a daughter of Rome is indubitably less than to be daughter of Scipio and wife of Pompey. The infamous Septimius, who assassinated Pompey, was Roman as well as she. Thousands of Romans were very ordinary men: but to be daughter and wife to the greatest of Romans, was a real superiority. In this speech, then, there is false and misplaced wit, as well as false and misplaced greatness. She then says, after Lucan, that she ought to blush that she is alive: _Je dois rougir, partout, après un tel malheur,_ _De n'avoir pu mourir d'un excès de douleur._--ID. However, after such a great calamity, I ought to blush I am not dead of grief. Lucan, after the brilliant Augustan age, went in search of wit, because decay was commencing; and the writers of the age of Louis XIV. at first sought to display wit, because good taste was not then completely found, as it afterwards was.