Racine transplanted a verse from the Cid into his comedy of The "Plaideurs"-- "Ses rides sur son front ont gravés ses exploits." "It ill becomes a young man," he said, "to make game of other people's verses." It was still worse when he was seduced into what the French have named a duel with Racine. Henrietta, daughter of our Charles I., wife of the brother of Louis XIV., was a principal patroness of men of genius;--her talents, her taste, her accomplishments; the generosity and kindness of her disposition, made her respected and loved. Louis and she had been attached to one another; their mutual position forced them to subdue the passion; but their triumph over it was not achieved without struggles, which, no doubt, appeared romantic and even tragical to the poor princess. She wished this combat to be immortalised; and, finding in the loves and separation of Titus and Berenice a similarity with her own fate, she deputed the marquis de Dangeau to engage Corneille and Racine, unknown to one another, each to write a tragedy on this subject--not a very promising one at best--and still more difficult on the French stage, where the catastrophe alone forms the piece. But Racine conquered these difficulties;--tenderness and truth of passion interested in place of incident--the audience wept--and criticism was mute. Corneille floundered miserably: love with him is always an adjunct and an episode, but not the whole subject: it helps as a motive--it is never the end. He fancied that his young rival was angry with him for competing with him; and he gave signs of a querulousness which he had no right to feel[18]; but there is something so _naïve_ in his self praises, and such ingenuousness in his repinings, that we look on them as traits portraying the simplicity and singleness of his character, rather than as marks of vanity or invidiousness. After "Berenice," he wrote two other plays, "Pulcherie" and "Surena," and then, happily, gave up composition. Though he saw the pieces of his young rival hailed with delight, he had the gratification of knowing that his own _chef-d'œuvres_ were often acted with applause, that the best critics regarded them with enthusiasm, and that his position was firmly established as the father of French tragedy. He lived to a considerable age; and his mind became enfeebled during the last year of his life. He died on the 1st September, 1584, in the seventy-ninth year of his age.