“My natural force abates, from long success alone;
     Triumphant blooms the state, the wretched people groan
     Their shrunken bodies bend beneath my high emprise;
     Whilst glory gilds the throne, the subject sinks and dies.”

Sertorius appeared at the commencement of the year 1662.  “Pray where did Corneille learn politics and war?” asked Turenne when he saw this piece played.  “You are the true and faithful interpreter of the mind and courage of Rome,” Balzac wrote to him; “I say further, sir, you are often her teacher, and the reformer of olden times, if they have need of embellishment and support.  In the spots where Rome is of brick, you rebuild it of marble; where you find a gap, you fill it with a masterpiece, and I take it that what you lend to history is always better than what you borrow from it. . . .”  “They are grander and more Roman in his verses than in their history,” said La Bruyere.  “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