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.  The latter had not been admitted to the body until 1641, after having undergone two rebuffs.  Corneille had died in the night.  The Academy decided in favor of Abbe de Lavau, the outgoing director.  “Nobody but you could pretend to bury Corneille,” said Benserade to Racine, “yet you have not been able to obtain the chance.”  It was only when he received into the Academy Thomas Corneille, in his brother’s place, that Racine could praise to his heart’s content the master and rival who, in old age, had done him the honor to dread him.  “My father had not been happy in his speech at his own admission,” says Louis Racine ingenuously; “he was in this, because he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, being inwardly convinced that Corneille was worth much more than he.”  Louis XIV. had come in for as great a share as Corneille in Racine’s praises.  He, informed of the success of the speech, desired to hear it.  The author had the honor of reading it to him, after which the king said to him, “I am very pleased; I would praise you more if you had praised me less.”  It was on this occasion that the great Arnauld, still in disgrace and carefully concealed, wrote to Racine:  “I have to thank you, sir, for the speech which was sent me from you.  There certainly was never anything so eloquent, and the hero whom you praise is so much the more worthy of your praises in that he considered them too great.  I have many things that I would say to you about that, if I had the pleasure of seeing you, but it would need the dispersal of a cloud which I dare to say is a spot upon this sun.  I assure you that the ideas I have thereupon are not interested, and that what may concern myself affects