The same fantastic and anticritical method of comparison has been adopted with De Castro's play, with the object of obtaining a contrary result: this comparison, whenever it is conducted with the criterion of realistic art, or of art full of passion, cannot but result in a condemnation of Corneille's reëlaboration of the theme. This has been frankly admitted by more than one French critic (Fauriel for example), who contrived to loosen somewhat the chains of national preconceptions and traditional admirations. Indeed it was already implied in the celebrated judgment of the Academy, which is not the less just and acute for having been delivered by an academy and written by a Chapelain. Guillen de Castro's play, which is epical and popular in tone, celebrates the youthful hero Rodrigo, the future Cid, strong, faithful and pious, admired by all, and looked upon with love by princesses. An anecdote is recounted, with the object of celebrating him, describing how he was obliged to challenge and to slay the father of the maiden he loved. Bound to the same degree as himself by the laws of chivalry, she is held to be obliged to provide for the vendetta required by the death of her father. She performs her duty without hatred and solely as a legal enemy, an _"ennemie légitime"_ (to employ a phrase of the same Corneille in the _Horace)._ She does not cease to love, nor does she feel any shame in loving. Finally, his prowess and the favour of heaven, which he deserves and which ever accompanies him, obtain for Rodrigo the legal conquest of his loving beloved, who is also his enemy for honour's sake. De Castro's play is limpid, lively, full of happenings. Corneille both simplifies and complicates it, reducing it to series of casuistical discussions, vivified here and there with echoes of the passionate original, softened with moments of abandonment, as in the vigorous scene of the challenge, which is an echo of the Spanish play, or in the tender sigh of the duet, "_Rodrigue, qui Veut cru?... Chimène, qui l'eût dit?..._" which is also in De Castro. After this, it can be asserted that Corneille "has made a human drama, a drama of universal human appeal, out of an exclusively Spanish drama"; it will also be declared that "the most beautiful words of the French language find themselves always at the point of the pen, when one is writing about the _Cid;_ duty, love, honour, the family, one's native land," because "everything there is generous, affectionate, ingenuous, and there never has been breathed a livelier or a purer air upon the stage, the air of lofty altitudes of the soul." But this is verbiage. It is also possible to revel in the description of "the fair cavalier, protected of God and adored by the ladies, who carries his country about with him wherever he goes, and along with it everybody's heart; in the beautiful maiden with the long black veil, so strong and yet so weak, so courageous and so tender; in the grand old