but in fitting hands it might become a noble pleasure.

The easier part was chosen by PHILIPPE QUINAULT, the more arduous
by Racine. Quinault (1635-88) had given his first comedy as early
as 1653; in tragedies and tragi-comedies which followed, he heaped
up melodramatic incidents, but could not base them upon characters
strongly conceived, or passion truly felt. A frigid sentimentality
replaces passion, and this is expressed with languorous monotony.
Love reigns supreme in his theatre; but love, as interpreted by
Quinault, is a kind of dulcet gallantry. His tragedy _Astrate_ (1663)
was not the less popular because its sentiment was in the conventional
mode. One comedy by Quinault, _La Mere Coquette_, is happy in its
plot and in its easy style. But he did not find his true direction
until he declined--or should we rather say, until he rose?--into the
librettist for the operas of Lulli. His lyric gifts were considerable;
he could manipulate his light and fragile material with extraordinary
skill. The tests of truth and reality were not applied to such verse;
if it was decorative, the listeners were satisfied. The opera
flourished, and literature suffered through its pseudo-poetics. But
the libretti of Quinault and the ballets of Benserade are
representative of the time, and in his mythological or chivalric
inventions Benserade sometimes could attain to the poetry of graceful
fantasy.

Quinault retired from the regular drama almost at the moment when
Racine appeared. Born at La Ferte-Milon in 1639, son of a procureur
and comptroller of salt, JEAN RACINE lost both parents while a child.
His widowed grandmother retired to Port-Royal in 1649. After six
years' schooling at Beauvais the boy passed into the tutelage of the
Jansenists, and among his instructors was the devout and learned
Nicole. Solitude, religion, the abbey woods, Virgil, Sophocles,
Euripides--these were the powers that fostered his genius. Already
he was experimenting in verse. At nineteen he continued his studies
in Paris, where the little abbe Le Vasseur, who knew the _salons_
and haunted the theatre, introduced him to mundane pleasures.
Racine's sensitive, mobile character could easily adapt itself to
the world. His ode on the marriage of the King, _La Nymphe de la Seine_,
corrected by Chapelain (for to bring Tritons into a river was highly
improper), won him a gift of louis d'or. But might not the world
corrupt the young Port-Royalist's innocence? The co