them, the most insignificant of his verses can throw a deep enchantment, like the faintest wavings of a magician’s wand.  ’A-t-on vu de ma part le roi de Comagene?’—­How is it that words of such slight import should hold such thrilling music?  Oh! they are Racine’s words.  And, as to his rhymes, they seem perhaps, to the true worshipper, the final crown of his art.  Mr. Bailey tells us that the couplet is only fit for satire.  Has he forgotten Lamia?  And he asks, ’How is it that we read Pope’s Satires and Dryden’s, and Johnson’s with enthusiasm still, while we never touch Irene, and rarely the Conquest of Granada?’ Perhaps the answer is that if we cannot get rid of our a priori theories, even the fiery art of Dryden’s drama may remain dead to us, and that, if we touched Irene even once, we should find it was in blank verse.  But Dryden himself has spoken memorably upon rhyme.  Discussing the imputed unnaturalness of the rhymed ‘repartee’ he says:  ’Suppose we acknowledge it:  how comes this confederacy to be more displeasing to you than in a dance which is well contrived?  You see there the united design of many persons to make up one figure; ... the confederacy is plain amongst them, for chance could never produce anything so beautiful; and yet there is nothing in it that shocks your sight ...  ’Tis an art which appears; but it appears only like the shadowings of painture, which, being to cause the rounding of it, cannot be absent; but while that is considered, they are lost:  so while we attend to the other beauties of the matter, the care and labour of the rhyme is carried from us, or at least drowned in its own sweetness, as bees are sometimes buried in their honey.’  In this exquisite passage Dryden seems to have come near, though not quite to have hit, the central argument for rhyme—­its power of creating a beautiful atmosphere, in which what is expressed may be caught away from the associations of common life and harmoniously enshrined.  For Racine, with his prepossessions of sublimity and perfection, some such barrier between his universe and reality was involved in the very nature of his art.  His rhyme is like the still clear water of a lake, through which we can see, mysteriously separated from us and changed and beautified, the forms of his imagination, ‘quivering within the wave’s intenser day.’  And truly not seldom are they ’so sweet, the sense faints picturing them’!

    Oui, prince, je languis, je brule pour Thesee ... 
    Il avait votre port, vos yeux, votre langage,
    Cette noble pudeur colorait son visage,
    Lorsque de notre Crete il traversa les flots,
    Digne sujet des voeux des filles de Minos. 
    Que faisiez-vous alors?  Pourquoi, sans Hippolyte,
    Des heros de la Grece assembla-t-il l’elite? 
    Pourquoi, trop jeune encor, ne putes-vous alors
    Entrer dans le vaisseau qui le mit sur nos bords? 
    Par vous aurait peri le monstre