There has appeared of late, like a penultimate branching-out of the old classical trunk, or, better still, like one of those excrescences, those polypi, which decrepitude develops, and which are a sign of decomposition much more than a proof of life—­there has appeared a strange school of dramatic poetry.  This school seems to us to have had for its master and its fountain-head the poet who marks the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the man of wearisome description and periphrases—­that Delille who, they say, toward the close of his life, boasted, after the fashion of the Homeric catalogues, of having made twelve camels, four dogs, three horses, including Job’s, six tigers, two cats, a chess-board, a backgammon-board, a checker-board, a billiard-table, several winters, many summers, a multitude of springs, fifty sunsets, and so many daybreaks that he had lost count of them.

Now, Delille went into tragedy.  He is the father (he, and not Racine, God save the mark!) of an alleged school of refinement and taste which flourished until recently.  Tragedy is not to this school what it was to Will Shakespeare, say, a source of emotions of every sort, but a convenient frame for the solution of a multitude of petty descriptive problems which it propounds as it goes along.  This muse, far from spurning, as the true French classic school does, the trivial and degrading things of life, eagerly seeks them out and brings them together.  The grotesque, shunned as undesirable company by the tragedy of Louis the Fourteenth’s day, cannot pass unnoticed before her. It must be described, that is to say, ennobled.  A scene in the guard-house, a popular uprising, the fish-market, the galleys, the wine-shop, the poule au pot of Henri Quatre, are treasure-trove in her eyes.  She seizes upon this canaille, washes it clean, and sews her tinsel and spangles over its villainies; purpureus assuitur pannus.  Her object seems to be to deliver patents of nobility to all these roturiers of the drama; and each of these patents under the great seal is a speech.

This muse, as may be imagined, is of a rare prudery.  Wonted as she is to the caresses of periphrasis, plain-speaking, if she should occasionally be exposed to it, would horrify her.  It does not accord with her dignity to speak naturally.  She underlines old Corneille for his blunt way of speaking, as in,—­

    “A heap of men ruined by debt and crimes.”

    “Chimene, who’d have thought it?  Rodrigue, who’d have said
    it?”

    “When their Flaminius haggled with Hannibal.”

    “Oh! do not embroil me with the Republic.”

She still has her “Tout beau, monsieur!” on her heart.  And it needed many “seigneurs” and “madames” to procure forgiveness for our admirable Racine for his monosyllabic “dogs!” and for so brutally bestowing Claudius in Agrippina’s bed.