e Belloy,
and who followed it up by other patriotic tragedies or dramas. But he
had the merit of attempting, though not with much success, some
innovations on the meagreness of the established model. The tragedies of
La Harpe are written throughout with the cold correctness (as
correctness was then held) which characterised his work generally.
Almost all the men of letters of this time wrote plays of this kind, but
they are for the most part valueless. Ducis is remarkable for a serious,
and to a certain extent successful, attempt to inoculate the French
tragedy with Shakespearian force. Versions of _Hamlet_, of _Macbeth_,
and other plays appeared from his hands, which were also busy during a
long life with dramatic work of all sorts. These versions have naturally
been regarded in England as mere travesties, but there seems no reason
to doubt that they really operated favourably as schoolmasters to bring
their audience somewhat nearer to dramatic truth. The classical tragedy
was indeed expiring of simple old age, and most of the names of its
practitioners, which emerge during the last quarter of the eighteenth
and the first of the nineteenth century, are those of innovators in
their measure and degree, whose innovations, however, were obliterated
and made forgotten by the great romantic reform. Marie Joseph Chenier
followed Voltaire's manner very closely (substituting for Voltaire's
bait of insinuated free-thinking that of republicanism more or less
violently expressed) in _Charles IX._, _Cyrus_, _Caius Gracchus_, _Henry
VIII._, _Tibere_, the last a work of some merit. Legouve dramatised
Gessner's _Death of Abel_ on the principles of Boileau. Nepomucene
Lemercier, the strange failure of a genius who has been already noticed
in the last chapter, produced much more remarkable work. His
_Agamemnon_, his _Fredegonde et Brunehault_ and some others display his
merits, and show that he was striving after something better. But, like
most transitional work, they are unsatisfactory as a whole. The _Hector_
of Luce de Lancival, the _Templiers_ of Raynouard, and many other
pieces, were once popular, but are now utterly forgotten.

[Sidenote: Lesage.]

The list of comic writers, along with whom, for convenience' sake, those
of the authors of opera and _drame_ may be included, is far longer and
more important. It includes two men, Lesage and Beaumarchais, of
European reputation, half-a-dozen others, Destouches, Marivaux, Piron,
Gres