He never, it may be believed, forgot the cardinal's ill offices on this occasion, though his fear of offending caused him to dedicate his play of "Horace" to him in an adulatory address. [Sidenote: 1639. Ætat. 33.] This tragedy shows a considerable advance in the power of expressing noble and heroic sentiments. The framework is too slight, being the duel of the Horatii and the Curiatii, and the subsequent murder of his sister by the surviving Horatius, when she reproached him for slaying her betrothed. Such a subject in the hands of Shakspeare had not, indeed, been threadbare. He would have brought the jealousies of the states of Rome and Alba in living scenes before our eyes. We should have beheld the collision of turbulent, ambitious spirits, and felt that the world was not large enough for both. The pernicious rule of unity of time and place prevented this: the ambition of Rome could be displayed only in the single person of Horatius. All we have, therefore, are various scenes between him, his sister, his wife, and the Curiatius, betrothed to the former, and brother to the latter; and these scenes are, for the most part, repetitions one of another; for the same rules confining the time of action, restrict the whole play to the delineation of the catastrophe; variety of incident and feeling is excluded, and the art of the French dramatist consists principally in petty devices, to delay the catastrophe, and so to drag it through long _tête-à-tête_ conversations, till the fifth act: often they are unable to defer it beyond the fourth, and then the fifth is an appendix of little account. "Horace" is, however, a masterpiece. Corneille could speak as a Roman, and the character of the hero is conceived with a simplicity and severity of taste worthy of his country.