The picture is very like the corruption of the old society in Rome.

We see the rotten material which the purifying flame of Jacobinism was soon to consume out of the land with fiery swiftness.

We watch the very classes from which, as we have been so often told, the regeneration of France would have come, if only demagogues and rabble had not violently interposed.

There is no gaiety in the style; none of that laughter which makes such a delineation of the manners of the time as we find in Colle's play of _Truth in Wine_, _naif_, true to nature, and almost exhilarating.

In _Rameau_ we are afflicted by the odour of deadly taint.
As the dialogue is not in every hand--nor could any one wish that it should be--I have thought it worth while to print an English rendering of a considerable part of it in an appendix.