d to
his genius ... My daughter, let us take good care not to compare Racine
with him. Let us feel the difference!"[316] She writes elsewhere with
regard to the heroes of La Calprenede: "The beauty of the sentiments,
the violence of the emotions, the grandeur of the incidents and the
miraculous success of their invincible swords, all that delights me like
a young girl."[317]

This change, which consisted, not of course in the introduction of
heroism into novels, where it had in all times found place, but in the
magnifying, to an extraordinary degree, of this source of interest, and
in a transformation of costume and of tone of speech, appeared not only
in romances, but in the drama also, and even in history. Everything
worthy of attention was for many years to be heroical. Heroes defy earth
and heaven; they do not, like Aucassin, with a temper of ironical
submission, give up Paradise in the hope of joining Nicolete in the
nether world; they make the nether world itself tremble on its
foundations: for nothing can resist them. Even in serious historical
works the old rulers of the French nation appear under an heroical garb.
King Clovis is thus described by Scipion Dupleix, historiographer royal,
in his "Histoire Generale de France," 1634: "The hour of Easter-eve at
which the King was to receive the baptism at the hands of St. Remy
having come, he appeared with a proud countenance, a dignified gait, a
majestic port, very richly dressed, musked and powdered; his flowing wig
was curiously combed, curled, frizzed, undulated and perfumed, according
to the custom of the old french Kings;"[318] but much more it seems
according to the custom of less ancient sovereigns; and there is at the
Louvre, a portrait of Louis XIII. bare-legged, periwigged,
ermine-cloaked, which corresponds far better to this description than
anything we know of Clovis.

The same characteristics appear in the epic and the drama. Antoine de
Montchrestien, besides having written the earliest treatise of political
economy, and thus having stood, if nothing more, godfather to a new
science,[319] wrote a number of plays, flavoured most of them with a
grandiloquence and heroism which give us a foretaste of Dryden. In his
"Aman ou la vanite," he treats the same subject as Racine in his
"Esther," but he has nothing in common with his successor, and much with
the dramatists of the heroical school. In order, doubtless, to justify
from the first the title of the pl