Belleau falls much short of what was possible, largely because his respect for classic models made him feel it incumbent on him to tell his story, not by dialogue and action, but by narratives. The return of the captain, for instance, which might have made an excellent scene, is only described by the old lawyer’s servant. The merits of the comedy are none the less considerable. They lie in the brisk flowing verse of the dialogue, which, as was to be expected of “le gentil Belleau,” is wholly free from mere grossness, and in the human truth of the characters. Even the author’s excessive deference to the classics is partly atoned for. His descriptions of what it would have been better to tell by action are mostly given by Jeanne, the lawyer’s servant, who is an excellent study of that very French personage, the _Bonne à tout faire_, the general servant, who is partly the drudge, but also partly the friend, and a little the tyrant, of the family. Jeanne is truly the ancestress of the _servante_ of Molière. With _La Reconnue_, as with Garnier’s _Bradamante_, we feel that only a little was wanted to make a complete success. But that little was not supplied, and the difference between the complete and the incomplete is in itself infinite. [SN: _Causes of failure of the early dramatic literature._] Of the dramatic work of the French poets of the later sixteenth century it has to be said that on the whole it was lost labour. The tragedy is too artificial, too slavishly imitated from a poor model. The comedy, as all can see who will look at the _Eugène_ of Jodelle, or the _Esbahis_ of Grévin, was incoherent, being partly a rehandling of the “sotties” and the “farces” of the Middle Ages, partly an imitation of Plautus and Terence, nowhere an original growth. Its authors were men of letters, doing exercises in kinds of literature to which they were attracted by their prestige. They did not really work for the stage. Now the theatre, in the material sense, is as necessary to the dramatist as the model is to the painter. The most “learned” of artists will soon find that his work loses life and reality unless he keeps the living figure constantly before his eyes. A play is meant to be talked and acted to an audience. When it is written only to be read, it soon loses life. From “the cart of Thespis” down to the “four boards” of Lope de Rueda in the Spanish market-place, there has always been the stage first, and then the dramatic literature. That is equally true in France. The history of the French stage is continuous from the Confrérie de la Passion, through the Enfants sans Souci, and the professional actors who succeeded them at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, down to the “maison de Molière.” But in the sixteenth century it skirted literature, and the alliance was not made between them till the time of Rotrou and Corneille. So the earlier dramatic literature remains a curiosity, or at the most an indication of what was to come.