s already been noticed more than once. But in no
department was it more marked than in that of drama. Jean de la Peruse,
who, like many of the Pleiade poets, died very young, produced a _Medea_
imitated from Seneca, and Charles Toustain an _Agamemnon,_ also taken
from the same author. Jacques de la Taille at a very early age wrote a
_Darius_ and an _Alexander_, besides a _Didon_, which is lost. These
pieces have some merit, and it is noteworthy that the metre varies, as
in Jodelle's model. A slight eccentricity of realism, however, has been
Jacques de la Taille's chief passport to a place in the history of
French literature. The death of Darius occurs in the middle of the word
_recommandation_,

Mes enfants et ma femme aie en recommanda ...
Il ne put achever, ear la mort l'en garda.

It is perhaps not insignificant that the verse is completed if the word
is not.

Of this immediate group of Jodelle's followers, however, the most
remarkable before Garnier was Jacques Grevin, who was noteworthy both as
a dramatist and as a poet. Grevin was a Protestant and a practitioner of
medicine, in which capacity he accompanied Marguerite de France, Duchess
of Savoy, to Turin, and died there, at the age of thirty. Before he was
twenty he wrote a tragedy, _La Mort de Cesar,_ which has considerable
merit, and two comedies, _Les Esbahis_ and _La Tresoriere_, which are
perhaps better still. Jean de la Taille, the brother of Jacques, but a
better poet and a better dramatist, wrote _Saul Furieux_ and _Les
Gabaonites_, two of the numerous sacred tragedies which have always
found favour in France, and the tradition of which it has been sought to
revive even in our own day. The theatre, like the pulpit, was used as an
engine by the Leaguers, but nothing of much value resulted from this.

[Sidenote: Garnier.]

Although many of the practitioners of this classical tragedy, notably
Jodelle, Grevin, and Jean de la Taille, produced work of interest and
merit, it contributed only one name which can properly be called great
to literary history. This was that of Robert Garnier[207], who brought
the form to the highest perfection of which it was capable in its
earliest state. Garnier was born at La Ferte Bernard in 1545, and died,
apparently in his native province of Maine, in 1601. He was a lawyer of
some distinction, being a member of the Paris bar, then Lieutenant
Criminel at Le Mans, and finally Councillor of State. He was an
immediate