older and stricter models. There were also the operas of Quinault, of which two at least, an Alcestis and a Theseus (Medea), were from Euripides; but which, as Voltaire well observes, while copying the externals of singing and of a chorus from the Greek plays, injured the true appreciation of them by bringing the musical part into such prominence that the real tragedy was neglected, and even the actor lost in the singer.
116. This brings us up to Rotrou and to the great Corneille—authors who hardly knew the difference between one classic model and another, and thought Seneca as great a poet as Euripides, perhaps indeed assumed him to be a literal translator. Thus it was through Seneca, and through modern versions like Dolce's, that Euripides told at first upon the drama of Europe. Indeed had Corneille been able to study the great originals, he would not have felt himself contesting in unequal conflict against the hostile theorists let loose upon him by Richelieu and the French Academy. These people drew from oblivion Aristotle's Poetics, and proved to him that his Cid was a direct violation of the scientific theory of drama (the unities of time, place, and circumstances, &c.) deduced from the infallible critic of antiquity. Hence, while inferior rivals composed their poor classic tragedies by rule and plummet-line, the great genius was struggling in vain against the yoke which he felt to be unjust, and which the Greek originals, especially Euripides', would have shown him to have been historically as well as æsthetically absurd. Do we not almost hear Euripides speaking in the preface to the Don Sancho, in which Corneille ventures on an independent theory of the drama against the essays of such as Chapelain and the Abbé Hedelin, the creatures of Richelieu, and the apes of Aristotle? "Why not," says he, "chausser le cothurne un peu plus bas Surely terror and pity, these essentials of tragedy, may be more strongly excited in us by the sight of misfortunes happening to persons of our own
