Richelieu, stirred to dramatic ambition—finding probably that it was an art less easy than it seemed—sought the assistance of five dramatists to write up and give more effect to his tragedies; at least any other reason for such collaboration is not easy to be imagined. One of the five chosen was Corneille, who, naturally somewhat curt and abrupt in speech, did not spare to find fault with some of the details of the cardinal’s work, and the concatenation of _The Cid’s_ success and of Corneille’s frankness over _Euterpe_ and _Mirame_, stirred such offence in the cardinal’s jealous mind, that he endeavoured to drive a spoke in the wheel of Corneille’s car of triumph; and one of the earliest achievements of the recently constituted Académie Française was a critique on _The Cid_ commanded of its members by its founder. It had no effect at all in lessening the enthusiasm of the world of letters, or of the general public for the drama. The poison did not act, in spite of the endeavours of several of the poetasters to second the pronouncements. One defect, that it was not original in plot and construction, but based on a Spanish dramatic model, was to be conceded; if defect that was which at the time was held to be almost indispensable in a play. There is nothing new under the sun. Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies alike—the English historical plays excepted—are one and all based on old legends and classic stories which he drew from Italian, and Spanish and French, and other sources that had, in their turn, sprung from tradition no longer traceable, hidden in origins lost in the lapse of centuries. Richelieu’s own dramatic effusions were reproductions of classical themes. It was the grandeur of the verse of Corneille, its lofty thought, its dignity and moral conception, its depicting of conflicting passions—this it was that won the admiration, and struck home to heartfelt sympathies, in its power of presenting character, under other names, of living men and women, the contemporaries of Ninon’s time, contending, suffering, striving in the stormy political atmosphere, darkening in now with the shadows of the Thirty Years’ War.