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Rh scenes as Shakespeare. He has not succeeded, however, in presenting the crisis—the conflict between outraged pride and filial affection—with the logical precision and eloquent fulness with which Corneille would have handled the theme. The French drama had to travel a long way and through a variety of experiments before it attained the shining summit of the Cid.

The main road through which it was to travel was indicated by Hardy not in the tragedies, but the tragi-comedies based on Spanish and other "novelle," and the closely related pastorals inspired by the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. The former are, as has been said, the characteristic story-plays of the Renaissance in all countries where the romantic or mediæval type of drama was not entirely superseded by the classical. Spain, France, England, and Holland all produced them in abundance. There is no evidence that Hardy's were modelled on the plays of Lope de Vega. They are drawn from the same source as those of the English and Dutch