There remains to mention but one last form of defence, which however is not a justification of the art of Corneille, but a eulogy of him as an ingenious man, who deserved well of culture and possessed refinement of manners, particularly as regards theatrical representations. To him belongs the "great merit" (said Voltaire in concluding his commentary) of "having found France rustic, gross and ignorant, about the time of the _Cid,_ and of having changed it 'by teaching it not only tragedy and comedy, but even the art of thinking." And his rival Racine, in his praise of Corneille before the Academy at the time of his death, had recorded "the debt that French poetry and the French stage owed to him." He had found it disordered, irregular and chaotic, and after having sought the right road for some time and striven against the bad taste of his age, "he inspired it with an extraordinary genius aided by study of the ancients, and exhibited reason (_la raison_) on the stage, accompanied with all the pomp and all the ornaments, of which the French language is capable." All the historians of French literature repeat this, beginning by bowing down before Corneille, the "founder," or "creator" of the French theatre. Such praise as this means little or nothing in art, because non-poets, or poets of very slender talents, even pedants, are capable of exercising this function of being founders and directors of the culture and the literature of a people. An instance of this in Italy was Pietro Bembo, "who removed this pure, sweet speech of ours from its vulgar obscurity, and has shown us by his example what it ought to be." He was not a poet, yet was surrounded with the gratitude, and with the most sincere reverence on the part of poets of genius, among whom was Ariosto, to whom belong the verses cited above.