of French plays, was after all so mean
and tame! "If the play be barren of fancy, you must blame the original
author. I am as much inclined to be civil to strangers as any man; but
then they must be strangers of merit. I would no more be at the pains to
bestow wit (if I had any) on a French play, than I would be at the cost
to bestow cloaths on every shabby Frenchman that comes over." Here we
have Racine put in his proper place; what claim had he to be considered
"a stranger of merit"? True, some crabbed English critics seem to have
taken his part against the translator, and, incredible as it may seem,
they have expressed a thought that "this suffered much in the
translation.--I cannot tell in what," answers Crowne, "except in not
bestowing verse upon it, which I thought it did not deserve. For
otherwise, there is all that is in the French play, verbatim, and
something more, as may be seen in the last act, where what is dully
recited in the French play is there represented, which is no small
advantage."[350] And true, it is, Pyrrhus is slain before our eyes;
there are "alarums" and other lively, if customary, ornaments.

In this age obviously Racine could not please. Nor would Shakespeare
have pleased a French audience, but as we know no attempt in that
direction was made in Paris. The two nations lent one another, if
anything, their defects. "Alaric" was named with praise by Dryden;
Scudery and La Calprenede continued to be most popular French authors
during the century. Even in the next we find something remaining of
their fame. Among the books in the library of the fashionable Leonora,
Addison notices: "'Cassandra,' 'Cleopatra,' 'Astraea' ... the 'Grand
Cyrus,' with a pin stuck in one of the middle leaves ... 'Clelia,' which
opened of it self in the place that describes two lovers in a
bower,"[351] &c. The passions in them which seem to us now so incredibly
frigid, had not yet cooled down; their warmth was still felt: so much so
that in one of Farquhar's plays, "Cassandra" is mentioned as greatly
responsible for Lady Lurewell's first and greatest fault, the beginning
of many others: "After supper I went to my chamber and read 'Cassandra,'
then went to bed and dreamt of it all night, rose in the morning and
made verses ..."[352] We cannot follow her in her account of the
consequences.

All that was truly noble and simple in French literature was known, but
at the same time generally misunderstood in England. To make