There is no longer any necessity for a criticism of Corneille's tragedies in a negative sense, for it is already to be found in several works. Further, if there exists a poet, who stands outside the taste and the preoccupations of our day (at least in France), it is Corneille. The greater number of lovers of poetry and art confess without reserve that they cannot endure his tragedies, which "have nothing to say to them." The fortune of Corneille has declined more and more with the growth of the fame of Shakespeare, which has been correlative to the formation and the growth of modern aesthetic and criticism; and if the fame of Shakespeare seemed strange and repugnant to classicistic elegance, the same fate has befallen the French dramatist, as the result of Shakespeareanism in relation to the appreciation of art which has now penetrated everywhere. Corneille once represented "_la profondeur du jugement_" as opposed to "_les irrégularités sauvages et capricieuses_" of the Englishman, decorum against the lack of it, calm diffused light against shadows pierced at rare intervals with an occasional flash. Lessing had selected for examination and theme the _Rodogune,_ which he held to be a work, not of poetical genius, but of an ingenious intellect, because genius loves simplicity, and Corneille, after the manner of the ingenious, loved complications. Schiller, when he had read the most highly praised works of Corneille, expressed his astonishment at the fame which had accrued to an author of so poor an inventive faculty, so meagre and so dry in his treatment of character, so lacking in passion, so weak and rigid in the development of action, and almost altogether deprived of interest. William Schlegel noted in him, in place of poetry, "tragic epigrams" and "airs of parade," pomp without grandeur--he found him cold in the love scenes--his love was not as a rule love, but, in the words of the hero Sertorius, a well calculated _aimer par politique--_intricate and Machiavellian and at the same time ingenuous and puerile in the representation of politics. He defined the greater part of the tragedies as nothing but treatises on the reason of State in the form of discussions, conducted rather in the manner of a chess-player than of a poet. Even the most temperate De Sanctis could not succeed in enjoying this writer, as is to be gathered from his lectures upon dramatic literature delivered in 1847. He found that he does not render the fullness of life, but only the extreme points of the passions in collision, and that he prefers eloquence to the development of tragedy, so that he often unconsciously turns tragedy into comedy. The confrontation of Corneille's _Cid_ with its Spanish original, _Las mocedades_ of Guillén de Castro, has however prevailed above all others as the text upon which to base arguments against the French dramaturge. Shack declared that the work of Corneille was altogether negative, that