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Updated: May 21, 2025
He died in his seventy-ninth year, and Racine pronounced a high eulogy upon him, before the academy. Such was its beauty that the king caused it to be recited before him. In it he extolled the genius of the man who had at one time been his rival, and he taught his children to revere his memory. In France, much more in Paris, the name of Corneille is to-day half sacred.
How the Protector thought of Milton, or even that he knew him at all, there remains no evidence. Napoleon said of Corneille that, if he had lived in his day, he would have made him his first minister. Milton's ideas were not such as could have value in the eyes of a practical statesman. Yet Cromwell was not always taking advice, or discussing business.
His prefaces are a complete log of his life, and the habit of writing them was a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with a pen in his hand, which, according to Goethe, "if it do no other good, keeps the mind from staggering about." In these prefaces we see his taste gradually rising from Du Bartas to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from Corneille to Shakespeare.
And she appeared before an audience that applauded her, it is true, but cared nothing for Racine and Corneille, knew little of the French language, and were urgent that she should sing the "Marseillaise" as she had sung it in 1848! It was forgotten, or it was not known in America, that the actress had long since renounced revolutionary sentiments to espouse the cause of the Second Empire.
Not only was he greatly her senior, but there was nothing about him that responded to the ideal which that illustrious disciple of the Hôtel de Rambouillet had formed for herself, and which she pursued in vain through guilty illusions, until that which she sought and found at its very source no longer in the school of Corneille and of Mademoiselle de Scuderi, but in that of her Saviour, in the Carmelite convent and at Port Royal.
"Such," continued Corneille, "has been the fate of these two young men whom you lately saw so powerful. Their last sigh was that of the ancient monarchy. Nothing more than a court can reign here henceforth; the nobles and the senates are destroyed." "And this is your pretended great man!" said Milton. "What has he sought to do?
Before him, there had been boisterous farces, conventional comedies of intrigue borrowed from the Italian, and extravagant pieces of adventure and burlesque cast in the Spanish mould. Molière did for the comic element in French literature what Corneille had done for the tragic: he raised it to the level of serious art.
The charm of the Spanish poetry consists, generally speaking, in the union of a sublime and enthusiastic earnestness of feeling, which peculiarly descends from the North, with the lovely breath of the South, and the dazzling pomp of the East. Corneille possessed an affinity to the Spanish spirit but only in the first point; he might be taken for a Spaniard educated in Normandy.
These monstrous decrees were carried into effect at a time when France reigned supreme in the domain of intellect, poetry, and the arts in the days of Racine, Corneille, Molière of Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Fénélon. Louis XIV. had the soldier, the hangman, and the priest at his command; but they all failed him.
Miss Martineau turned the head of the mighty Brougham. Mademoiselle d'Angeville ascended Mont Blanc, and Mademoiselle Rachel has replaced Corneille and Racine on their crumbling pedestals. I might waste hours of your precious time, sir, in perusing a list of the eminent women now competing with the rougher sex for the laurels of renown. But you know it all better than I can tell you.
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