rama from the scourge we have just mentioned, as one of the most
powerful dams against the irruption of the commonplace, which, like
democracy, is always flowing between full banks in men's minds. And at
this point we beg the younger literary generation, already so rich
in men and in works, to allow us to point out an error into which it
seems to have fallen--an error too fully justified, indeed, by the
extraordinary aberrations of the old school. The new century is at
that growing age at which one can readily set one's self right.

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 assu