Honest Montaigne goes yet farther:  Nous ne sommes que ceremonie; la ceremonie nous emporte, et laissons la substance des choses:  Nous nous tenons aux branches, et abandonnons le tronc et le corps.  Nous avons appris aux dames de rougir, oyans seulement nommer ce qu’elles ne craignent aucunement a faire; Nous n’esons appeller a droict nos membres, et ne craignons pas de les employer a toute sorte de debauche.  La ceremonie nous defend d’exprimer par paroles les choses licites et naturelles, et nous l’en croyons; la raison nous defend de n’en faire point d’illicites et mauvaises, et personne ne l’en croit. My comfort is, that by this opinion my enemies are but sucking critics, who would fain be nibbling ere their teeth are come.

Yet, in this nicety of manners does the excellency of French poetry consist.  Their heroes are the most civil people breathing; but their good breeding seldom extends to a word of sense; all their wit is in their ceremony; they want the genius which animates our stage; and therefore it is but necessary, when they cannot please, that they should take care not to offend.  But as the civillest man in the company is commonly the dullest, so these authors, while they are afraid to make you laugh or cry, out of pure good manners, make you sleep.  They are so careful not to exasperate a critic, that they never leave him any work; so busy with the broom, and make so clean a riddance, that there is little left either for censure or for praise:  For no part of a poem is worth our discommending, where the whole is insipid; as when we have once tasted of palled wine, we stay not to examine it glass by glass.  But while they affect to shine in trifles, they are often careless in essentials.  Thus, their Hippolitus is so scrupulous in point of decency, that he will rather expose himself to death, than accuse his step-mother to his father; and my critics I am sure will commend him for it:  But we of grosser apprehensions are apt to think, that this excess of generosity is not practicable, but with fools and madmen.  This was good manners with a vengeance; and the audience is like to be much concerned at the misfortunes of this admirable hero.  But take Hippolitus out of his poetic fit, and I suppose he would think it a wiser part, to set the saddle on the right horse, and chuse rather to live with the reputation of a plain-spoken honest man, than to die with the infamy of an incestuous villain.[1] In the mean time we may take notice, that where the poet ought to have preserved the character as it was delivered to us by antiquity, when he should have given us the picture of a rough young man, of the Amazonian strain, a jolly huntsman, and both by his profession and his early rising a mortal enemy to love, he has chosen to give him the turn of gallantry sent him to travel from Athens to Paris, taught him to make love, and transformed the Hippolitus of Euripides into Monsieur Hippolite.  I should not have troubled myself thus