brought up in Paris, and his first play, Love in a Wood, was produced in 1672. His fame as a dramatist mainly rests on his two comedies The Country Wife and A Plain Dealer, both coarse enough to justify Macaulay's nausea, but both excellent in their characterisation and their humour. Other dramatists of the period of less importance are John Vanbrugh, the architect of Blenheim Palace, George Etheridge, Otway, and Lee, who collaborated with Dryden in imitations of Corneille. Dryden himself is a Restoration dramatist, but he was far more than a dramatist, as we have seen. BIBLIOGRAPHY The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by H. B. Wheatley, 8 vols.; in two vols. in the Everyman's Library. Percy Lubbock's Pepys. Hudibras, edited by A. R. Waller. Professor Saintsbury's Dryden. Dryden's Poetical Works. Dryden's Dramatic Essays in the Everyman's Library. The Best Plays of Dryden, 2 vols., in the "Mermaid" Series. A volume of Restoration Plays edited by Edmund Gosse. The following volumes in the "Mermaid" Series of the Old Dramatists: Dryden (2 vols.), Otway, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Wycherley. Pascal FRENCH LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF P LOUIS XIV § 1 ASCAL, one of the French writers of genius of the first half of the seventeenth century, was a very definite Puritan. He was born in 1623, and was a mathematician as well as a theologian and a great writer. In his Lettres Provinciales and his Pensées, Pascal deals with the great problems of life, the miserable insufficiency of all that is human and the consuming glory of God. No writer ever emphasised more fiercely the pitiful impotence of man as compared with the infinite, no religious fanatic ever more vehemently admonished humiliation, no philosopher was ever more awestruck by the greatness of the universe in which man is so small a thing. Looking to the heavens Pascal exclaimed: "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces fills me with fear." Many of his "Thoughts," brief, striking, and profound, are as familiar as household words in almost every land. Here are a few typical examples: Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The heart has reasons of its own, of which Reason never dreams. If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter the whole history of the earth would have been changed. The French Academy The idea of ensuring the correctness of the French language, of establishing a recognised standard of literary taste, and of creating a literary authority, owed much to Cardinal Richelieu, who set up the French Academy in 1629. The Cardinal desired order and authority in literature as in everything else. While the French Academy has given literature a place in national life that it has never had in England, it has always made a conservative resistance to every new literary development, and some of the greatest of French writers, including Molière and Flaubert, have never been elected to a seat among the "Immortals." One of the earliest acts of the Academy was to belittle the first work of genius to be produced in France in the seventeenth century-Pierre Corneille's Le Cid. But no academy or any other committee of literary men could be expected to discover novelties that achievement is for the intuition of individuals. The French Academy has nobly served its end by giving official expression to the tradition of literary good taste in France-a tradition which unfortunately has not maintained itself so uniformly in any other national literature except that of the Greeks. Pierre Corneille Pierre Corneille was born at Rouen in 1606, and his first play was produced in 1636. Corneille lived until 1684, and his later plays belong to the era of Louis XIV. He stands in literary history as the forerunner of the great century of French literature rather than as one of its actual figures. Corneille was by nature a romantic; he loved words as much as Rabelais loved them. He was as fond of rhetoric as Marlowe, and of tempestuous melodrama as Webster or any other of the Elizabethans. Corneille was a very unequal writer. Molière once said: "My friend Corneille has a familiar spirit that inspires him to write the finest verses in the world. Sometimes the familiar spirit |