by no other poetry in the world.  To have grown familiar with the voice of Racine, to have realised once and for all its intensity, its beauty, and its depth, is to have learnt a new happiness, to have discovered something exquisite and splendid, to have enlarged the glorious boundaries of art.  For such benefits as these who would not be grateful?  Who would not seek to make them known to others, that they too may enjoy, and render thanks?

M. Lemaitre, starting out, like a native of the mountains, from a point which can only be reached by English explorers after a long journey and a severe climb, devotes by far the greater part of his book to a series of brilliant psychological studies of Racine’s characters.  He leaves on one side almost altogether the questions connected both with Racine’s dramatic construction, and with his style; and these are the very questions by which English readers are most perplexed, and which they are most anxious to discuss.  His style in particular—­using the word in its widest sense—­forms the subject of the principal part of Mr. Bailey’s essay; it is upon this count that the real force of Mr. Bailey’s impeachment depends; and, indeed, it is obvious that no poet can be admired or understood by those who quarrel with the whole fabric of his writing and condemn the very principles of his art.  Before, however, discussing this, the true crux of the question, it may be well to consider briefly another matter which deserves attention, because the English reader is apt to find in it a stumbling-block at the very outset of his inquiry.  Coming to Racine with Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans warm in his memory, it is only to be expected that he should be struck with a chilling sense of emptiness and unreality.  After the colour, the moving multiplicity, the imaginative luxury of our early tragedies, which seem to have been moulded out of the very stuff of life and to have been built up with the varied and generous structure of Nature herself, the Frenchman’s dramas, with their rigid uniformity of setting, their endless duologues, their immense harangues, their spectral confidants, their strict exclusion of all visible action, give one at first the same sort of impression as a pretentious pseudo-classical summer-house appearing suddenly at the end of a vista, after one has been rambling through an open forest.  ’La scene est a Buthrote, ville d’Epire, dans une salle du palais de Pyrrhus’—­could anything be more discouraging than such an announcement?  Here is nothing for the imagination to feed on, nothing to raise expectation, no wondrous vision of ‘blasted heaths,’ or the ‘seaboard of Bohemia’; here is only a hypothetical drawing-room conjured out of the void for five acts, simply in order that the persons of the drama may have a place to meet in and make their speeches.  The ‘three unities’ and the rest of the ‘rules’ are a burden which the English reader finds himself quite unaccustomed to carry; he grows impatient of them; and, if he is