Classicism found its poet and its muse. An unknown but very worthy young man, not endowed with wealth of imagination, but imbued with the most honourable intentions, came to Paris from the provincial town where he had grown to manhood, with a manuscript in his pocket. And François Ronsard's _Lucrèce_, a tragedy from the antique, in its style sober and severe, reminding one of Racine, was represented amid thunders of applause, shortly after Hugo had been hissed off the stage. Enthusiastic admirers saw in it a glorious return to the great tragic drama of France, an emanation from the spirit of Corneille, and praised its clear, measured, and at once "classic and familiar" language. Together with its poet, the Classical reaction found its actress. In 1838 a young untrained child made her début at the Théâtre Français--a Jewish girl who had sung in the streets to the accompaniment of her harp. Rachel appeared upon the boards, and restored its former power of attraction to the old Classical repertoire, to the very tragedies which the Romantic school had banished from the theatre amid mockery and derision. _The Cid_, _Mérope_, _Chimène_, and _Phèdre_ recovered their place upon the stage. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ INGRES. THE MAID OF ORLEANS AT RHEIMS.] Painting took the same course. In opposition to the young painters who had burst into the arena with their gay-coloured uniforms, their gilded helmets and waving banners, _Ingres_ came forth in the great tournament of Romanticism in the character of the Black Knight. An old gentleman, a man who in all his being belonged to the generation that was passing away, who was fifty years of age at the time of the Revolution of July, stations himself suddenly as the angel of the flaming sword, or, in the phrase of his opponents, as the gendarme of Classicism, at the gates of the Academy, barring them against every suspicious-looking person. And the young men, eccentric, eager for action as they were, who had recently fought with so much fury, had to retreat before him. Golden sunshine and glow of colour were once more tabooed, and their representative heroes, Veronese, Rubens, and Delacroix, regarded as flickering Will o' the Wisps, whom every aspiring beginner should avoid as serpents and firebrands. One day when Ingres was taking his pupils through the Louvre he said, on entering the Rubens gallery: "_Saluez, messieurs, mais ne regardez pas._" The acrimony of the strife was so great that it extended even to the personal relations of the rival chiefs, and Ingres was attacked by convulsive spasms whenever he heard the name of the painter of the "Massacre of Chios." When in 1855 he had had a separate room prepared for his own pictures in the Universal Exhibition of that year, and observed Delacroix in the distance, just before the opening ceremony, he asked the attendant: "Has not somebody been here?--there is a smell of brimstone." "Now the wolf is in the