"Once only, in the Cid, Corneille had abandoned himself unreservedly to the reality of passion; scared at what he might find in the weaknesses of the heart, he would no longer see aught but its strength.

He sought in man that which resists and not that which yields, thus giving his times the sublime pleasure of an enjoyment that can belong to nought but the human soul, a cherished proof of its noble origin and its glorious destiny, the pleasure of admiration, the appreciation of the beautiful and the great, the enthusiasm aroused by virtue.

He moves us at sight of a masterpiece, thrills us at the sound of a noble deed, enchants us at the bare idea of a virtue which three thousand years have forever separated from us." (_Corneille et son temps,_ by M.Guizot.) Every other thought, every other prepossession, are strangers to the poet; his personages represent heroic passions which they follow out without swerving and without suffering themselves to be shackled by the notions of a morality which is still far from fixed and often in conflict with the interests and obligations of parties, thus remaining perfectly of his own time and his own country, all the while that he is describing Greeks, or Romans, or Spaniards.
[Illustration: Corneille reading to Louis XIV .-- --642] There is no pleasure in tracing the decadence of a great genius.
Corneille wrote for a long while without success, attributing his repeated rebuffs to his old age, the influence of fashion, the capricious taste of the generation for young people; he thought himself neglected, appealing to the king himself, who had ordered _Cinna_ and _Pompee_ to be played at court:-- "Go on; the latest born have naught degenerate, Naught have they which would stamp them illegitimate They, miserable fate! were smothered at the birth, And one kind glance of yours would bring them back to earth; The people and the court, I grant you, cry them down; I have, or else they think I have, too feeble grown; I've written far too long to write so well again; The wrinkles on the brow reach even to the brain; But counter to this vote how many could I raise, If to my latest works you should vouchsafe your praise! How soon so kind a grace, so potent to constrain, Would court and people both win back to me again! 'So Sophocles of yore at Athens was the rage, So boiled his ancient blood at five-score years of age,' Would they to Envy cry, 'when OEdipus at bay Before his judges stood, and bore the votes away.'" Posterity has done for Corneille more than Louis XIV.

could have done: it has left in oblivion _Agesilas, Attila, Titus,_ and _Pulcherie;_ it preserved the memory of the triumphs only.

The poet was accustomed to say with a smile, when he was reproached with his slowness and emptiness in conversation, "I am Peter Corneille all the same." The world has passed similar judgment on his works; in spite of the rebuffs of his latter years, he has remained "the great Corneille." When he died, in 1684, Racine, elected by the Academy in 1673, found himself on the point of becoming its director; he claimed the honor of presiding at the obsequies of Corneille.