310 DRYDEN. 



the necessity of overcoming this obstacle, on the whole, an 

 advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and superior muse. How 

 did Dryden, who says nearly the same thing, succeed in his 

 attempt at the French manner 1 He fell into every one of 

 its vices, without attaining much of what constitutes its 

 excellence. From the nature of the language, all French 

 poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all that 

 keeps out decay. The length of their dramatic verse forces 

 the French into much tautology, into bombast in its 

 original meaning, the stuffing out a thought with words till 

 it nils the line. The rigid system of their rhyme, which 

 makes it much harder to manage than in English, has 

 accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would 

 shock them in prose. For example, in the &quot; China &quot; of 

 Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says to Augustus, 



&quot; Ces flammes dans nos coeurs dcs longtemps etoient nees, 

 Et ce sont des secrets de plus de qiiatre annees.&quot; 



I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely prosaic 

 surplusage exacted by the rhyme, nor of the jingling together 

 of ces, des, etoient, nees, des, and secrets, but I confess that 

 nees does not seem to be the epithet that Corneille would 

 have chosen torftammes, if he could have had his own way, 

 and that flames would seem of all things the hardest to keep 

 secret. But in revising, Corneille changed the first verse 

 thus, 



&quot; Ces flammes dans nos coeurs sans wtre ordre etoient nees.&quot; 



Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order ? 

 Yet Voltaire, on his guard against these rhyming pitfalls for 

 the sense, does not notice this in his minute comments on 

 this play. Of extravagant metaphor, the result of this same 

 making sound the file-leader of sense, a single example from 

 &quot; Heraclius &quot; shall suffice : 



&quot; La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre 

 Que Dieu tient dejk prete k le reduire en poud 



re. 



One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Appollo except in a 

 full-bottomed periwig, and the tragic style of their poets is 



