blindness to the fine creation, fresh fancy, and noble thought and imagery of our less superb men, yet to admit that there is in these limits of construction a concentration and regularity, and in these too contemned alexandrines a just and swelling cadence, that confer a high degree of pleasure of the highest kind, and that demand intellectual quality only less rare than that other priceless and unattainable quality of having the lips touched with divine fire. It is said, however, that such quality does not produce acting plays, but only dramatic poems: this is really laughable if we remember first, that the finest actors in the world have been trained in the recitation of these alexandrines, and second, that as large and as delighted an audience used until within some twenty years ago to crowd to a tragedy of Corneille or Racine, seen repeatedly before, as to a bran-new vaudeville, never to be seen again. ‘We insist,’ said Voltaire, ‘that the rhyme shall cost nothing to the ideas; that it shall neither be trivial nor too far-fetched; we exact rigorously in a verse the same purity, the same precision, as in prose. We do not permit the smallest licence; we require an author to carry without a break all chains, and yet that he should appear ever free.’[109] He admitted that sometimes they failed in reaching the tragic, through excessive fear of passing its limits. He does justice, if something less than English justice, to the singular merits of our stage in the way of action.[110] Shakespeare, he says, ‘had a genius full of force and fertility, of all that is natural and all that is sublime.’ It is even the merit of Shakespeare—‘those grand and terrible pieces that abound in his most monstrous farces’—that has been the undoing of the English stage.[111]