of honour and friendship, consents; he kills Pyrrhus, and then returns to his mistress to claim his reward.  There follows one of the most violent scenes that Racine ever wrote—­in which Hermione, in an agony of remorse and horror, turns upon her wretched lover and denounces his crime.  Forgetful of her own instigation, she demands who it was that suggested to him the horrible deed—­’Qui te l’a dit?’ she shrieks:  one of those astounding phrases which, once heard, can never be forgotten.  She rushes out to commit suicide, and the play ends with Oreste mad upon the stage.

The appearance of this exciting and vital drama, written when Racine was twenty-eight years old, brought him immediate fame.  During the next ten years (1667-77) he produced a series of masterpieces, of which perhaps the most interesting are Britannicus, where the youthful Nero, just plunging into crime, is delineated with supreme mastery; Bajazet, whose subject is a contemporary tragedy of the seraglio at Constantinople; and a witty comedy, Les Plaideurs, based on Aristophanes.  Racine’s character was a complex one; he was at once a brilliant and caustic man of the world, a profound scholar, a sensitive and emotional poet.  He was extremely combative, quarrelling both with the veteran Corneille and with the friend who had first helped him towards success—­Moliere; and he gave vent to his antipathies in some very vigorous and cutting prose prefaces as well as in some verse epigrams which are among the most venomous in the language.  Besides this, he was an assiduous courtier, and he also found the time, among these various avocations, for carrying on at least two passionate love-affairs.  At the age of thirty-eight, after two years’ labour, he completed the work in which his genius shows itself in its consummate form—­the great tragedy of Phedre.  The play contains one of the most finished and beautiful, and at the same time one of the most overwhelming studies of passion in the literature of the world.  The tremendous role of Phedre—­which, as the final touchstone of great acting, holds the same place on the French stage as that of Hamlet on the English—­dominates the piece, rising in intensity as act follows act, and ‘horror on horror’s head accumulates’.  Here, too, Racine has poured out all the wealth of his poetic powers.  He has performed the last miracle, and infused into the ordered ease of the Alexandrine a strange sense of brooding mystery and indefinable terror and the awful approaches of fate.  The splendour of the verse reaches its height in the fourth act, when the ruined queen, at the culmination of her passion, her remorse, and her despair, sees in a vision Hell opening to receive her, and the appalling shade of her father Minos dispensing his unutterable doom.  The creator of this magnificent passage, in which the imaginative grandeur of the loftiest poetry and the supreme force of dramatic emotion are mingled in a perfect whole, has a right to walk beside Sophocles in the high places of eternity.