to render the action intelligible. The name does not alter the nature of the thing. Horatio is a confidant, and Mercutio is not much else, though we do not call them by the title. That they are also interesting human beings is an argument for incorporating the chorus in the play, not a proof that some such wheel in the machinery is superfluous.[101] Then, as he was not under the obligation to maintain the perpetual gravity proper to classical and Biblical subjects, Garnier felt free to relieve the heroic passages by comedy. Aymon, the father of Bradamante, is a human, peppery, and peremptory old gentleman, very much the _barba_ of the Spanish _comedia_, and a true figure of comedy. This, it need hardly be said, is quite a different thing from the introduction of scenes of clowns who have nothing to do with the action. It is a detail worth noting that Garnier, who does not seem to have cared much whether his play was acted or not, adds a note to his preliminary argument to tell any manager who chooses to bring it out that he is free to replace the absent chorus by interludes between the acts, “in order that they may not be confounded, and not to join together what requires a certain interval of time.” This, besides proving how fully the French dramatists of the day accepted Scaliger’s most disputable theory, that the chorus served only to separate the acts, is an example of what has already been said of the Spanish and the English stages--namely, that an audience expected something more than the play, which the Spaniards gave in _saynetes_ and dances between the acts, and the English inserted in the body of the piece. [SN: _Montchrestien._] Antoine de Montchrestien, the last survivor of the French dramatists of the sixteenth century, may by a slight stretch of charity be described as the Racine of the epoch in which Garnier was the Corneille. The date of his birth is unknown, but he was killed in a skirmish during a Huguenot rising in 1621, after a very agitated life. At one time he was an exile in England on a charge of homicide, and owed his pardon to the intercession of James I., whose favour he had earned by a play on the death of Mary Queen of Scots, called _L’Écossaise_. It is sad to relate that he was afterwards accused of coining false money. In 1615 he published a _Traité de l’Économie Politique_, and was indeed the first to use the term. Montchrestien wrote a poem _Suzanne_, and a Bergerie, or Pastoral, in addition to his six tragedies--_Sophonisbe_, or _La Cartagénoise_ (translated from Trissino), _Les Lacènes_, _David_, _Aman_, _Hector_, and _L’Écossaise_. Montchrestien was an accomplished writer of the school to which he belonged, but his plays show no great originality. They were published in 1601, and were probably all written in his youth. It does not appear that they were ever acted. [SN: _The comedy._]