THE GOLDEN AGE: CORNEILLE.--The second half of the seventeenth century is in all respects the golden age of French literature. Great poets and great prose writers were then crowded in serried ranks. To begin with the dramatic poets, who furnished the most vivid glory of the epoch, there was Corneille, who, from 1636, with _The Cid_, was in full splendour and who before 1650 had produced his most beautiful works, _Cinna_, _The Horaces_, _Polyeucte_, continued for twenty-four years after 1650 to furnish the stage with dramas that often possessed many fine qualities, among which must be cited _Don Sancho of Aragon_, _Nicomedes_, _Oedipus_, _Sertorius_, _Sophonisba_, _Titus and Berenice_, _Psyche_ (with Molière), _Rodogune Heraclius_, _Pulcheria_. Corneille must be regarded as the real creator of _all_ the French drama, because he wrote comedies, tragedies, operas, melodramas. It was therein, apart from his universal virtuosity, that he more particularly made his mark, and in his best work he was the delineator of the human will overcoming passions and, as it were, intoxicated with this victory and his own power, so that he has become a great advocate of energy and a prominent apostle of duty. RACINE.--Racine, altogether different, without being opposed to duty, loved to depict passions victorious over man and man the victim of his passions and of the over-powering misfortunes therefrom resulting, thus furnishing a moral lesson. He was a more penetrating psychologist than Corneille, although the latter knew the human heart well, and he showed himself infallibly wise in composition and dramatic disposition, as well as an absolutely incomparable master of verse. His tragedies, especially _Andromache_, _Britannicus_, _Berenice_, _Bajazet_, _Phèdre_, and _Athalie_ will always enchant mankind. MOLIÈRE.--Molière who was admirably gifted to seize the ridiculous with its causes and consequences, very quick and penetrating in insight, armed with somewhat narrow but solid common-sense calculated to please the middle classes of all time, possessed prodigious comic humour, and who never gave the spectator leisure to reflect or breathe--in short, a great writer although hasty and careless--created a whole répertoire of comedy (_The School of Women_, _Don Juan_, _Tartufe_, _The Misanthrope_, _Learned Ladies_) which left all known comedy far behind, which eliminated all rivalry in his own time, knew eclipse only in the middle of the eighteenth century, and for the last hundred and forty years has proved the delight of Europe. He remains the master of universal comedy.