not only that man (especially the bourgeois) is good but that the orthodox way for this goodness to manifest itself is to overflow through the eyes. Perhaps never before or since have tears been shed with such a strange facility. At no other time have there been so many persons who, with streaming eyes, called upon heaven and earth to bear witness to their innate excellence. A man would be ashamed, says La Bruyère, speaking from the point of view of _l’honnête homme_ and his decorum, to display his emotions at the theatre. By the time of Diderot he would have been ashamed not to display them. It had become almost a requirement of good manners to weep and sob in public. At the performance of the “Père de Famille” in 1769 we are told that every handkerchief was in use. The Revolution seems to have raised doubts as to the necessary connection between tearfulness and goodness. The “Père de Famille” was hissed from the stage in 1811. Geoffroy commented in his feuilleton: “We have learned by a fatal experience that forty years of declamation and fustian about sensibility, humanity and benevolence, have served only to prepare men’s hearts for the last excesses of barbarism.” The romanticist indulged in the luxury of grief and was not incapable of striking an attitude. But as a rule he disdained the facile lachrymosity of the man of feeling as still too imitative and conventional. For his part, he has that within which passes show. To estimate a play solely by its power to draw tears is, as Coleridge observes, to measure it by a virtue that it possesses in common with the onion; and Chateaubriand makes a similar observation. Yet one should not forget that the romantic emotionalist derives directly from the man of feeling. One may indeed study the transition from the one to the other in Chateaubriand himself. For example, in his early work the “Natchez” he introduces a tribe of Sioux Indians who are still governed by the natural pity of Rousseau, as they prove by weeping on the slightest occasion. Lamartine again is close to Rousseau when he expatiates on the “genius” that is to be found in a tear; and Musset is not far from Diderot when he exclaims, “Long live the melodrama at which Margot wept” (_Vive le mélodrame où Margot a pleuré_).