consistent with the conventional and declamatory style of the English as well as French tragedians of the time.
Voltaire continued to write tragedies up to the end of his life, producing twenty-six in all, of which the concluding specimen, from one of the most popular of many that were eminently successful, has now been given.
The reader who knows his Shakespeare, and who studies a tragedy or two of Voltaire, or Addison's "Cato," will see that there are two very different principles on which to write a play. One is, to regard it as a picture of life; to give to the characters some of the individuality of real men and women—that individuality of course being made to suit and strengthen the plot; to disregard time and space, so as to obtain latitude for the free development of story and of character; to call on the spectator of the drama for the many concessions required to meet the exigencies which these conditions entail; to mix, as in life, high with low, laughter with tears, rude jests with sublime sentiments; and to make the language and manners of the characters correspond with them in their range from the lover, the patriot, the tyrant, down to the knave, the jester, and the sot. This, the Shakespearian method, admits so many side-lights from the world without, as to impart a spacious, open-air character to the drama, as if the stage were merely an eddy in the great tide of human affairs which sweeps past almost within sight and hearing.
The Voltairian drama (the drama of the ancients, and of Corneille and Racine) makes illusion and situation its chief aims. The time occupied by the action of the story is the same as that occupied by the performance of the
