The general features of this tragedy first claim attention; they are all calculated to please noblemen and members of the court. The poet does not fail in the blandishment, of truth, which by its nature is often crude; he allows no murders on the stage; he disguises brutality and repudiates violence, such as blows, butcheries, yells, and groans, everything that might offend the senses of a spectator accustomed to moderation and the elegancies of the _salon._ For the same reason he excludes disorder, never abandoning himself to the caprices of fancy and imagination like Shakespeare; his plan is regular, he admits no unforeseen incidents, no romantic poesy. He elaborates his scenes, explains entrances, graduates the interest of his piece, prepares the way for sudden turns of fortune, and skilfully anticipates and directs dénouements. Finally, he diffuses throughout the dialogue, like a uniform brilliant varnish, a studied versification composed of the choicest terms and the most harmonious rhymes. If we seek the costume of this drama in the engravings of the time we find heroes and princesses appearing in furbelows, embroideries, bootees, swords and plumes--a dress, in short, Greek in name, but French in taste and fashion; such as the king, the dauphin, and the princesses paraded in, to the music of violins, at the court performances of ballets. Note, moreover, that all his personages are courtiers, kings and queens, princes and princesses of royal blood, ambassadors, ministers, officers of the guard, _menins,_[1] dependants and confidants. The associates of princes are not here, as in ancient Greek tragedy, slaves of the palace and nurses born under their master's roof, but ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and gentlemen of the antechamber, charged with certain duties in the royal household; we readily detect this in their conversational ability, in their skill in flattery, in their perfect education, in their exquisite deportment, and in their monarchical sentiments as subjects and vassals. Their masters, like themselves, are French noblemen of the seventeenth century, proud and courteous, heroic in Corneille and noble in Racine; they are gallants with the ladies, faithful to their name and race, capable of sacrificing their dearest interests and strongest affections to their honor, and incapable of uttering a word or an act which the most rigid courtesy would not authorize. Iphigenia, in Racine, delivered up by her father to her executioners, does not regret life, weeping like a girl, as in Euripides, but thinks it her duty to obey her father and her king without a murmur, and to die without shedding a tear, because she is a princess. Achilles, who in Homer stamps, still unappeased, on the body of the dying Hector, feeling like a lion or wolf, as if he would "eat the raw flesh" of his vanquished antagonist, is, in Racine, a Prince of Condé, at once brilliant and seductive, passionate concerning honor,