The only reality that could be concealed in "rationalistic poetry," for which Corneille is praised, as shown above, would be one of the categories in old-fashioned books of literary instruction, known as "didactic poetry," which was not too well spoken of, even there. Corneille is admired from this point of view, among other things, for his famous political dissertations in the _China_ and in the _Sertorius,_ where Voltaire considers that he is deserving of great praise for "having expressed very beautiful thoughts in correct and harmonious verse." In this connexion are quoted the remarks of the Maréchal de Grammont about the _Othon,_ that "it should have been the breviary of kings," or of Louvois, "an audience of ministers of state would be desirable for the judgment of such a work." It is indeed only in "didactic poetry," which is versified prose, that we find "thoughts" that are afterwards "versified." The method employed by another man of letters would also make of the tragedies of Corneille masked didactic poetry. He is an unconscious manipulator of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in the manner of Hegel, and describes it as "the alliance of the individual with the species, of the particular with the general," which were separate in the medieval "farces" and "moralities," the former being all compact of individuals and actions, the latter of ideas, which Corneille was able to unite, being one of those great masters who proceed from the general to the particular and vivify the abstractions of thought with the power of the imagination.