itur 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.

This Melpomene, as she is called, would shudder at the thought of
touching a chronicle. She leaves to the costumer the duty of learning
the period of the dramas she writes. In her eyes history is bad form
and bad taste. How, for example, can one tolerate kings and queens
who swear? They must be elevated from mere regal dignity to tragic
dignity. It was in a promotion of this sort that she exalted Henri IV.
It was thus that the people's king, purified by M. Legouve, found
his "ventre-saint-gris" ignominiously banished from his mouth by
two sentences, and that he was reduced, like the girl in the old
_fabliau_, to the necessity of letting fall from those royal lips only
pearls and sapphires and rubies: the apotheosis of falsity, in very
truth.

The fact is that nothing is so commonplace as this conventional
refinement and nobility. Nothing original, no imagination,
no invention in this style; simply what one has seen
everywhere--rhetoric, bombast, commonplaces, flowers of college
eloquence, poetry after the style of Latin verses. The poets of this
school are eloquent after the manner of stage princes and princesses,
always sure of finding in the costumer's labelled cases, cloaks and
pinchbeck crowns, which have no other disadvantage than that of having
been used by everybody. If these poets never turn the leaves of the
Bible, it is not because they have not a bulky book of their own, the
_Dictionnaire de rimes_. That is the source of their poetry--_fontes
aquarum_.

It will be seen