SOURCE: "To an Author Who Asked My Opinion of a Play Where the Heroine Does Nothing But Lament Herself, " in The Continental Model: Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, in English Translation, edited by Scott Elledge and Donald Schier, Carleton College and the University of Minnesota Press, 1960, pp. 153-55.

In the following excerpt from an essay originally written in approximately 1672, Saint-Evremond decries Corneille's descent from the effective illumination of character to lachrymose sentimentality.

Corneille has had the misfortune to disgust the generality of his spectators in his latter days, because he must needs discover that which is most hidden in our hearts, that which is most exquisite in the passions and most delicate in the thoughts. After he had, as it were, worn out the ordinary passions with which we are agitated, he was in hopes of gaining a new reputation if he touched our most...