composition, the difficulties of the
task.

The genius of the tragick and comick writer will be easily allowed to be
remote from each other. Every performance, be what it will, requires a
turn of mind which a man cannot confer upon himself; it is purely the
gift of nature, which determines those who have it to pursue, almost in
spite of themselves, the taste which predominates in their minds. Pascal
found in his childhood, that he was a mathematician; and Vandyke, that
he was born a painter. Sometimes this internal direction of the mind
does not make such evident discoveries of itself; but it is rare to find
Corneilles, who have lived long without knowing that they were poets.
Corneille, having once got some notion of his powers, tried a long time,
on all sides, to know what particular direction he should take. He had
first made an attempt in comedy, in an age when it was yet so gross in
France, that it could give no pleasure to polite persons. Melite was so
well received, when he dressed her out, that she gave rise to a new
species of comedy and comedians.

This success, which encouraged Corneille to pursue that sort of comedy,
of which he was the first inventor, left him no reason to imagine, that
he was one day to produce those masterpieces of tragedy, which his muse
displayed afterwards with so much splendour; and yet less did he
imagine, that his comick pieces, which, for want of any that were
preferable, were then very much in fashion, would be eclipsed by another
genius[36] formed upon the Greeks and Romans, and who would add to their
excellencies improvements of his own, and that this modish comedy, to
which Corneille, as to his idol, dedicated his labours, would quickly be
forgot. He wrote first Medea, and afterwards the Cid; and, by that
prodigious flight of his genius, he discovered, though late, that nature
had formed him to run in no other course but that of Sophocles. Happy
genius! that, without rule or imitation, could at once take so high a
flight: having once, as I may say, made himself an eagle, he never
afterwards quitted the path which he had worked out for himself, over
the heads of the writers of his time; yet he retained some traces of the
false taste which infected the whole nation; but even in this, he
deserves our admiration, since, in time, he changed it completely by the
reflections he made, and those he occasioned. In short, Corneille was
born for tragedy, as Moliere for comedy. Moliere, in