The defenders of Corneille have often yielded to the temptation of accepting Shakespeare's dramas or at least the tragedies of Racine as a standard of comparison and a reply to criticism. They have attempted to prove that Corneille should be read, judged and interpreted in the spirit of those poets. They have claimed to discover in Corneille just that which their adversaries failed to discover and of which they denied the existence: this they call truth, reality and life, meaning thereby, passion and imagination. Thus we find Sainte-Beuve lamenting that not only foreigners, but France herself, had not remarked and had not gloried in the possession of Pauline (in _Polyeucte_), one of the divine poetical figures, which are to be placed in the brief list containing the Antigones, the Didos, the Francescas da Rimini, the Desdemonas, the Ophelias. More recently others have elevated the Cleopatra (of _Rodogune_) to the level of Lady Macbeth, and the Cid, on account of the youthful freshness of his love-making, to the rank of _Romeo and Juliet,_ while they have discovered in _Andromède_ nothing less than that kind of _féerie poétique_ "to which the English owe a _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and the _Tempest._" They also declare that the _Horace_ is a tragedy in which reigns a sort of "savage Roman sanctity," culminating in the youthful Horace, "intransigent and fanatical, ferociously religious"; while his sister Camilla is "a creature of nerves and flesh, who has strayed into a family of heroes" and rises up in revolt against that hard world. For them Camilla is an "invalid of love," "one possessed by passion," a "neurotic," of an altogether modern complexion. _Polyeucte_ represents "a drama of nascent Christianity," and its protagonist, a "mystical rebel," recalls at once "Saint Paul, Huss, Calvin and Prince Krapotkine," arousing the same curiosity as a Russian nihilist, such as one used to see some years ago in the beershops, with bright eyes, pale and fair, the forehead narrow about the temples and of whom it was whispered that he had killed some general or prefect of police at Petersburg. Severus seems to them to be similar in some respects to "a modern exegete," who is writing the history of the origin of Christianity. There exists no play "which penetrates more profoundly into the human soul or opens a wider perspective of untrodden paths." _Cinna_ represents in the tragedy of Augustus another neurotic after the modern manner. Augustus, ambitious and without scruples, has attained to the summit of his desires and is weary and tired of power. He negates the man who ordered the proscriptions that is in himself and his generosity is due almost to satiety for too easy triumphs and vengeances. Attila, in the tragedy of that name, springs out before us as "a monster of pride, cruel, emphatic and subtle, conscious of being the instrument of a mysterious power, an ogre with a mission": this "stupendous" conception is worthy