3222 ([return])
[ See the principal romances of the seventeenth century, the "Roman Bourgeois," by Furetière, the "Princess de Clèves," by Madame de Lafayette, the "Clélie," by Mme. de Scudéry, and even Scarron's "Roman Comique."—See Balzac's letters, and those of Voiture and their correspondents, the "Récit des grands jours d'Auvergne," by Fléchier, etc. On the oratorical peculiarities of this style cf. Sainte-Beuve, "Port-Royal," 2nd ed. I. 515.]
3223 ([return])
[ Voltaire, 'Esay sur le poème épique', "Our nation, regarded by strangers as superficial is, with the pen in its hand, the wisest of all. Method is the dominant quality of all our writers.">[
3224 ([return])
[ Milton's works are built up with 8,000. "Shakespeare, who displayed a greater variety of expression than probably any writer in any language, produced all his plays with about 15,000 words and the Old Testament says all it has to say with 5,642 words." (Max Müller, "Lectures on the Science of language," I. 309.)—It would be interesting to place alongside of this Racine's restricted vocabulary. That of Mme. de Scudery is extremely limited. In the best romance of the XVIIth century, the "Princesse de Clèves," the number of words is reduced to the minimum. The Dictionary of the old French Academy contains 29,712 words; the Greek Thesaurus, by H. Estienne, contains about 150,000.]
3225 ([return])
[ Compare together the translations of the Bible made by de Sacy and Luther; those of Homer by Dacier, Bitaubé and Lecomte de Lisle; those of Herodotus, by Larcher and Courrier, the popular tales of Perrault and those by Grimm, etc.]
3226 ([return])
[ See the "Discours académique," by Racine, on the reception of Thomas Corneille: "In this chaos of dramatic poetry your illustrious brother brought Reason on the stage, but Reason associated with all the pomp and the ornamentation our language is capable of.">[