of any importance. It was somewhat different with tragedy, in which the French tradition, even as preserved by Hardy, was in favour of a short concentrated action, the dramatisation not of a whole story but a single crisis. To such a type of play, an approximation, at any rate, to a strict unity of time and place might lend intensity and éclat. The rigid enforcement of the rules—to which Corneille bowed his head somewhat unwillingly—was a triumph of pedantry, and of the spirit of social etiquette, which enforces its rules with a rigour compared with which religious, moral, and artistic laws operate uncertainly; but this triumph was possible only because in the Cid and its successors Corneille evolved a type of tragic action to which a rapid evolution is essential.
After Silvanire, Mairet experimented in comedy—which was still represented on the stage only by Sophonisbe. popular farces, the descendants of the mediæval farces modified by the influence of the Italian commedia dell' arte with its stock characters; and in Virginie, which has nothing to do with the daughter of Virginius and victim of Appius Claudius, he produced a melodramatic tragi-comedy in accordance with the rule of twenty-four hours. Then in 1634, realising possibly the need, for the observance of the Unities, of an appropriate crisis, he turned abruptly to tragedy, which had been for many years neglected, and wrote Sophonisbe, the first regular play which in any degree justifies its regularity. The unity of place is not interpreted rigidly, but the time of action is
