he reduced and reëlaborated his original, losing the poetical soul of the Spanish poet in the process and destroying the alternate and spontaneous expression of tenderness and of violent passion. He found that he substituted oratorical adornments and a swollen phraseology for the pure language of sentiment, coquetry for the struggle of the affections, to which it is directly opposed, and a boastful charlatan for the heroic figure of Rodrigo. Klein, passing from severe criticism into open satire, described the _Cid_ to be a "commentary in Alexandrines" upon the poem of the _Mocedades,_ comparing the Spanish Jimena to a fresh drop of dew upon "a flower that has hardly bloomed," and the French Chimène on the contrary to a "muddy drop, which presents a tumultuous battle of infusorians to the light of the sun": the "infusorians" would represent the antithesis to the "Alexandrine tears" (_Alexandrinerthränen_), which she pours forth. But these negative judgments were not restricted altogether and at first to foreigners and romantics. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire (who for that matter sometimes lifts his eyes to the dangerous criterion of Shakespeare in his notes upon Corneille) did not refrain from criticising his illustrious predecessor for the frequent _froideur_ observable in his dramatic work, as well as for his constant habit of speaking himself as the author and not allowing his personages to speak, for his substitution of reflections for immediate expressions, and for the artifices, the conventions and the padding, in which he abounds. Vauvenargues showed himself irreconcilable (Racine was his ideal). He too blamed the heroes of Corneille for uttering great things and not inspiring them, for talking, and always talking too much, with the object of making themselves known--whereas great men are rather characterised by the things they do not say than those they do say--and in general for ostentation, which takes the place of loftiness, and for declamation, which he substitutes for true eloquence. Gaillard allowed the influence of the generally unfavorable verdict or the verdict full of retractations and cautions in respect of its theme, to colour the eulogy which he composed in 1768. It used to be said of Corneille that he aimed rather at "admiration" than at "emotion," and that he was in fact "not tragic." This insult (declared Gaillard) was spoken, but not written down, "because the pen is always wiser than the tongue." But the accusation of "coldness" had made itself heard on the lips of Corneille's contemporaries in the second half of the seventeenth century, particularly when the tragedies of Racine, with their very different message to the heart, had appeared to afford a contrast.