good masters, all correct, classical, and conventional, by his innovating notions and juvenile extravagances: but he is conscientious, and they must bear with him; he can argue as well as assert; he can unfold a series of reasons, as well as move a series of resolutions; be only begs them to govern their tamper, and to answer him if they can. "They have passed the age," says he, "at which men study and discuss; and I am at that when truth is the object of pursuit; they are taking their rest, and I am working, that in due time I may take my rest also. I am doing what they are no longer doing, but what once they too have done; they have found, and I am yet seeking." Elsewhere he says, "The studies I put forth on Racine are not designed to depreciate the classical to the gain of the romantic school; they are but the result of a very free but very sincere, a very decided but equally conscientious examination of an entire class of works, upon which the received judgment was passed under die Regency, that is to say, at an epoch when literary taste in France was of the falsest kind; they express the opinion of a serious writer, upon poems which everybody admires and nobody reads." How comes it, is he asked, that where others affirm, he denies? that where they subscribe, he protests? Does he believe himself wiser, better instructed, more reasonable, than every one else? "Certainly not. Only, there needs not to have better eyes than another, simply to see what he is not looking at." His judicial opponents he considers disqualified for judicial authority, by this very sort of judicial blindness. The age makes a great fuss about being original, and independent, and not taking things on trust; but nothing, in his opinion, is so common as a blind assent to vulgar creeds, be they even the vulgarest of vulgar errors.
The columns of the Presse and the Constitutionnel, to say nothing of the small arms of a score of "petits journaux," opened fire on M. de Cassagnac, for his treasonable attempt on Racine. It was no less than lèse-majesté, his audacious assault on the person of King John. And, by-the-by, a capital point in the capital crime was, the calling his majesty by his Christian name, John. M. de Cassagnac called John over the coals, as coolly as a Russell-square cit would his John, for sins of omission at the dinner-table, or of commission in the cellar. M. de Cassagnac accused John of bad grammar, bad rhymes, and other bad qualities; and if he did not tell John he ought to have known better, why, he told John's worshippers that they ought. Great was the wrath excited by this piece of familiarity. But even this wrath M. de Cassagnac turned against his assailants, to his own advantage and their confusion. "Many persons," quoth he, "have discovered a culpable degree of disrespect in the name of Jean, given by me to Racine. Let me be allowed to answer, that I am not nearly so disrespectful as my fault-finders are ignorant It was Voltaire who, in a prodigious fit of reckless admiration, gave Racine the name of Jean. I have only repeated the word, taking care to underline it, to imply that it was a quotation."
But does M. de Cassagnac actually disavow all homage to King John? Does he recognise no merit in the literary dynasty of the eighteenth century? Has he no good word to say for such authors as Fontenelle, and the elder Crébillon, and Marmontel, and La Harpe,—no enjoyment in reading the prose of Fénélon, the poetry of Voltaire? On the contrary, he conjures his readers, at starting, to take his word of honour
