man, so majestic and yet so familiar, the signor so rude and so hoary, yet with a soul as straight and as pure as a lily, in whom dwells the ancient code of honour and all the glory of times past; in the king, so good-natured and ingenuous, yet so clever, like the good king one finds in fairy stories; in the gentle little infanta, with her precious soliloquies, so full of gongorism and knightly romances ..."; but as we have previously observed, this will be merely drawing fancy pictures. It suffices to read the _Cid,_ to see that it contains nothing of this and nothing of this is to be found among the tragedies of Corneille. The vanity of such criticisms, which attempt to alter Corneille by presenting him as that which he is not and does not wish to be, a poet of immediate passions, would at once be apparent, were it to be realised that no such attempts are made in the case of Racine, whose passionate soul makes its presence at once felt through literary and theatrical conventions, in the affection which he experiences for the sweet, for what is tremendous and mysterious with religious emotion, which palpitates in Andromache, in Phaedra, in Iphigenia and Eriphylis in Joad and in Attila. But it confutes itself by becoming modified, sometimes among the very critics whom we have been citing, into the thesis that Corneille is the poet of the "reason," or of "the rational will." And we say modified, because the reason or the rational will is in poetry itself a passion, and he would be correctly described as a poet of that kind of inspiration, who should accentuate the rational-volitional moment in the representation of the passions, by creating types of wise and active men, such as are to be found in the epic, in many dramatic masterpieces, in high romance and elsewhere. But not even this exists in Corneille, so much so that the very persons who maintain the thesis, remark that he isolates a principle and a force, the reason and the will, and seeks out how the one makes the other triumph. To this, they declare, we must attribute the "character of stiffness" proper to the heroes of Corneille, who are necessarily bound to lack "the seductive flexibility, the languors, the perturbations, which are to be observed in those moved by sentiment." Now this is not permissible in art, because art, in portraying a passion, even if it be that of inflexible rationality and inflexible will and duty, never "isolates" it, in the fashion of an analyst in a laboratory, or a physicist, but seizes it in its becoming, and so together with all the other passions, and together with the "languors" and "disturbances." Thus Corneille, described as they describe him by isolating the reason and the will, would be a slayer of life, and so of the will and the reason themselves. And when he is blamed for having given so small and so unhappy a place to love, "to the act by which the race perpetuates itself, to the relations of the sexes and to all the sentiments that