in collaboration, to pour forth vaudevilles,
dramas, and comedies, almost all of which were favourably received.
Scribe was generous to his associates, and would sometimes acknowledge
the communication of a bare idea by a share in the profits of the play
which it suggested. He had also an almost unrivalled knowledge of the
_technique_ of the theatre, and not a little wit. But his style is loose
and careless, and his dramas do not bear reading. His most important
later plays are _Valerie_, 1822; _Le Mariage d'Argent_, 1827; _Bertrand
et Raton_, 1833; _Le Verre d'Eau_, 1840; _Une Chaine_, 1841; _Bataille
de Dames_, 1851. One of the less famous partakers in the first Romantic
movement, Bouchardy, distinguished himself, in succession to
Pixerecourt, as a Romantic melodramatist, his most famous works being
_Le Sonneur de Saint Paul_, and _Lazare le Patre_. In 1843 a kind of
reaction was supposed to be about to take place, the signs of which were
the performance of the _Lucrece_ of Ponsard in that year, and of the
_Cigue_ of Emile Augier the year after. Ponsard, however, was only a
Romantic whose colour was deadened by his inability to attain more
brilliant tones. His succeeding plays, _Agnes de Meranie_, _Charlotte
Corday_, _L'Honneur et l'Argent_, showed this sufficiently. M. Emile
Augier is a more remarkable and a more independent figure. In so far as
he represents a protest against Romanticism at all (which he does only
very partially), it is because he shared in the growing tendency towards
realism, that is, to a recurrence in the Romantic sense to the _tragedie
bourgeoise_ of the preceding century, and because also he gave no
countenance to the practice, in which some of the early Romantics
indulged, of representing immoral personages as interesting. Almost all
M. Augier's dramas, such as _L'Aventuriere_, 1849, which is his
masterpiece, _Gabrielle_, 1849, _Diane_, 1852, _Le Mariage d'Olympe_,
1855, _Le Fils de Giboyer_, 1862, and others of more recent date, are
distinctly on the side of the angels. But the author does not make the
excellence of his intention a reason for passing off inferior work, and
he is justly recognised as one of the leaders of French drama in the
latter half of the century. About this same time (1845) was the date of
the appearance of a fertile and successful playwright of the less
exalted class, M. Dennery (_Don Cesar de Bazan_, _L'Aieule_). Auguste
Maquet, another of the old guard of Romanticism,