What other time, at least among the moderns, has seen flourishing together so many poets of the first order? We have, it is true, neither Homer, nor Dante, nor Milton, nor even Tasso. The epic, with its primitive simplicity, is interdicted us. But in the drama we scarcely have equals. It is because dramatic poetry is the poetry that is adapted to us, moral poetry _par excellence_, which represents man with his different passions armed against each other, the violent contentions between virtue and crime, the freaks of fortune, the lessons of providence, and in a narrow compass, too, in which the events press upon each other without confusion, in which the action rapidly progresses towards the crisis that must reveal what is most intimate to the heart of the personages. Let us dare to say what we think, that, in our opinion, AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, together, do not equal Corneille; for none of them has known and expressed like him what is of all things most truly touching, a great soul at war with itself, between a generous passion and duty. Corneille is the creator of a new pathetic unknown to antiquity and to all the moderns before him. He disdains to address common and subaltern passions; he does not seek to rouse terror and pity, as demands Aristotle, who limits himself to erecting into maxims the practice of the Greeks. Corneille seems to have read Plato, and followed his precepts:--he addresses a most elevated part of human nature, the noblest passion, the one nearest virtue,--admiration; and from admiration carried to its culmination he draws the most powerful effects. Shakspeare, we admit, is superior to Corneille in extent and richness of dramatic genius. Entire human nature seems at his disposal, and he reproduces the different scenes of life in their beauty and deformity, in their grandeur and baseness. He excels in painting the terrible or the gentle passions. Othello is jealousy, Lady Macbeth is ambition, as Juliet and Desdemona are the immortal names of youthful and unfortunate love. But if Corneille has less imagination, he has more soul. Less varied, he is more profound. If he does not put upon the stage so many different characters, those that he does put on it are the greatest that can be offered to humanity. The scenes that he gives are less heart-rending, but at once more delicate and more sublime. What is the melancholy of Hamlet, the grief of King Lear, even the disdainful intrepidity of Caesar, in comparison with the magnanimity of Augustus striving to be master of himself as well as the universe, in comparison with Chimene sacrificing love to honor, especially in comparison with Pauline, not suffering even at the bottom of her heart an involuntary sigh for the one that she must not love? Corneille always confines himself to the highest regions. He is by turns Roman and Christian. He is the interpreter of heroes, the chanter of virtue, the poet of