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Updated: June 22, 2025
Gray's bard might be sent to the lock-up, but even he would find bail. "C'est imiter quelqu'un que de planter des choux." Corneille's tragedy of "Pertharite" was acted unsuccessfully in 1659. Racine made free use of it in his more fortunate "Andromaque." Dryden's publisher. Preface to the Fables.
Nicomedes is a political comedy, the dryness of which is hardly in any degree relieved by the ironical tone which runs through the speeches of the hero. This is nearly all of Corneille's that now appears on the stage. His later works are, without exception, merely treatises or reasons of state in certain difficult conjunctures, dressed out in a pompous dialogical form.
His mother died when he was only ten years old, and his father was left with a large family of children to educate. The boy passed his early days in his father's warehouse, but his grandfather was accustomed to take him often to the play-house, where he listened to some of the great Corneille's plays, to his thorough delight.
The character of Bajazet is cold as ice, the manners of the Turks are ill observed in it, they do not make so much fuss about getting married; the catastrophe is not well led up to, there are no reasons given for that great butchery. There are some pretty things, however, but nothing perfectly beautiful, nothing which carries by storm, none of those bursts of Corneille's which make one creep.
He has been heard many times during his walks to repeat the celebrated speech of Augustus in Corneille's tragedy, and he has never missed saying, "Take a seat, Sylla," instead of Cinna.
The Bishop of Lisieux being a great admirer of Corneille's writings, and making no scruple to see a good comedy, provided it was in the country among a few friends, the late Madame de Choisy proposed to entertain him with one at Saint Cloud. Accordingly Madame took with her Madame and Mademoiselle de Vendome, M. de Turenne, M. de Brion, Voiture, and myself.
Neither affected to be cast in the mould of one of Corneille's heroes, and the thought of immolating their child on the altar of a barbaric idea would have filled them with horror; but the transfiguration of their petted boy suddenly become a hero, touched them with a tenderness never before felt.
I immediately read Corneille's "Treatise on the Three Unities," and learned from that how people would have it, but why they desired it so was by no means clear to me; and, what was worst of all, I fell at once into still greater confusion when I made myself acquainted with the disputes on the "Cid," and read the prefaces in which Corneille and Racine are obliged to defend themselves against the critics and public.
He translated from the French Monsieur Corneille's Horace, printed in 4to. London 1671, and dedicated to his dear sister Mrs. Stanhope Hutchinson. This play was first finished in 1665, but in his prefatory epistle he tells us,
"But if he would have us to imagine, that in exalting of one character, the rest of them are neglected; and that all of them have not some share or other in the Action of the Play: I desire him to produce any of CORNEILLE's Tragedies, wherein every person, like so many servants in a well governed family, has not some employment; and who is not necessary to the carrying on of the Plot, or, at least, to your understanding it.
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