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CHAPTER X.
ZAIRE.
In the preface to a tragedy addressed to Bolingbroke, he thus speaks of the difficulties offered to composition in French verse: "That which affrighted me most in re-entering on this career was the severity of our poetry, and the slavery of rhyme. I regretted the happy liberty you have of writing your tragedies in blank verse; of lengthening, and more, of shortening, nearly all your words; of making the verses run into one another; and of creating, in case of need, new terms, which are always adopted among you when they are sonorous, intelligible, and necessary. An English poet, said I, is a free man, who makes his language subservient to his genius; the French is a slave to rhyme, obliged sometimes to make four verses in order to express what an Englishman would render in one. The Englishman says all he wishes—the Frenchman only what he can; the one travels in a vast highway—the other marches in shackles, in a narrow and slippery path.
"But we can never shake off the yoke of rhyme—it is essential to French poetry. Our language does not agree with inversions; our verses do not suffer the running of
