saint.[119] Malignantly expressed, there is in this some truth. It was one of the elements in the plan of dramatic reform that sprang up in Voltaire’s mind during his residence in England, that the subjects of tragedy should be more masculine, and that love should cease to be an obligatory ingredient. “It is nearly always the same piece, the same knot, formed by jealousy and a breach, and untied by a marriage; it is a perpetual coquetry, a simple comedy in which princes are actors, and in which occasionally blood is spilt for form’s sake.”[120] This he counted a mistake, for, as he justly said, the heart is but lightly touched by a lover’s woes, while it is profoundly softened by the anguish of a mother just about to lose her son. Thus in Mérope we have maternal sentiment made the spring of what is probably the best of Voltaire’s tragedies, abounding in a just vehemence, compact, full of feeling at once exalted and natural, and moving with a sustained energy that is not a too common mark of his work. It was the same conviction of the propriety of making tragedy a means of expressing other emotions than that which is so apt to degenerate into an insipidity, which dictated the composition and novel treatment of the Roman subjects, Brutus and La Mort de César. Here the French drama first became in some degree truly political. His predecessors when they handled a historic theme did so, not from the historic or social point of view, but as the illustration, or rather the suggestion, of some central human passion. In the Cinna of Corneille the political bearings, the moral of benevolent despotism which Bonaparte found in it, were purely incidental, and were distinctly subordinate to the portrayal of character and the movement of feeling. In Brutus the whole action lies in the region of great public affairs, and of the passions which these affairs stir in noble characters, without any admixture of purely private tenderness. In La Mort de César we are equally in the heroics of public action. Rome Sauvée, of which the subject is the conspiracy of Catiline, and the hero the most eloquent of consuls or men—a part that Voltaire was very fond of filling in private representations, and with distinguished success—is extremely loose and spasmodic in structure, and the speeches sound strained even when put into Cicero’s mouth. But here also private insipidities are banished, though perhaps it is only in favour of public insipidities. It is impossible to tell what share, if any, these plays had in spreading that curious feeling about Roman freedom and its most renowned defenders, which is so striking a feature in some of the great episodes of the Revolution. We cannot suspect Voltaire of any design to stir political feeling. He was now essentially aristocratic and courtly in his predilection, without the smallest active wish for an approach to political revolution, if indeed the conception of a change of that kind ever presented itself to him.