intrigues were everywhere introduced, and the language was never allowed to descend from its pomp and grandeur. Most of the French dramatists were indeed bad Greek scholars,(49) and knew the plays from which they copied either through very poor translations, or through the rhetorical travesties surviving under the name of Seneca, which were long thought fully equal to the great and simple originals. So the French of the seventeenth century, starting from these half-understood models, and applying rigidly the laws of tragedy which they had deduced, with questionable logic, from that very untrustworthy guide, our text of the _Poetics_ of Aristotle, created a drama which became so unlike what it professed to imitate, that most good modern French critics have occupied themselves with showing the contrasts of old Greek tragedy to that of the modern stage. They are always praising the _naiveté_, the familiarity, the irregularity of the old dramatists; they are always noting touches of common life and of ordinary motive quite foreign to the dignity of Racine, and Voltaire, and Alfieri.(50) They think that the real parallel is to be found not among them, but in Shakespeare. Thus their education makes them emphasize the very qualities which we admit, but should not cite, as the peculiarities of Greek tragedy. _We_ are rather struck with its conventionalities, with its strict adherence to fixed form, with its somewhat stilted diction, and we wonder how it came to be so great and natural within these trammels.