Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/341

Rh Scudéry's Mort de César (1636) and Didon (1636), Tristan l'Hérmite's Mariamne (1636) and Panthée (1639)—embellished recasts of Hardy's plays,—Pierre du Ryer's Alcinée and Scévole (circ. 1644), are a few of the most notable. They are by no means all regular in the strict French classical sense of the word; and l'amour—the amour of the romances, "postiche, froid et ridicule" in Voltaire's words—is in all, or nearly all, the motive which determines the course of history at the most critical moments. This radical fault is unredeemed in them by Corneille's finer psychology of the will and the splendid eloquence of his verse. One only of Corneille's contemporaries has escaped oblivion, in virtue of a vein of imagination and naturalness which sets his work in pleasing contrast to that of most of his rivals.

Jean de Rotrou (1610-1650), the son of a merchant in Dreux, for some years like Hardy and Théophile a poète à gages, released from this patronage by the generosity of patrons among whom was Richelieu, was traditionally the friend of Corneille, and seems to have tried to play the part of a mediator between him and Scudéry in the quarrel of Le Cid. He retired in