Le public révolté s'obstine à l'admirer.”
Corneille was a voluminous writer. He wrote nearly as many plays as Shakespeare, but his later ones are not equal to those of his best days. And he wrote a translation in verse of the Imitatione Christi. This was a pecuniary success. The book was bought and eagerly read, though now it is rarely taken down from the shelf. But his prose, unlike Racine's, which charms by its grace, is insignificant. And, unlike Racine, his speech when he was received into the French Academy was dull, and disappointed everybody. An Academical reception is one of the occasions in which Frenchmen have always expected that the recipient of honor should distinguish himself. But it was not in Corneille's power to please his audience by making a speech. We need not be too heavy upon him because his glory was not universal. As he said of himself, he was none the less Pierre Corneille. Readers have generally extolled Corneille too highly, or have not given him his due praise. This is partly from the fact that after his great success he wrote much that was unworthy of his former self; and partly, we believe at least, that even in his best plays he is too spasmodic. His fine lines come out too much by starts, amidst much that is uninteresting. The famous “Qu'il mourût” (Horace, Act III., sc. 6) is very grand, and the next line, though not English in sentiment, is fine. But the four succeeding lines are washy, and take away from the dignity of what has just gone before. Instinctively Corneille was a dramatist, and had it not been for the laws of the unities which bound him down to conventional and unwise rules, he would in all probability have risen higher in the world's esteem. He was also a poet, having the gift of poetical expression more at his command than the larger measure of composition in prose. His lines are often sweet and very stirring, for he was moved towards his subject with a true feeling of poetic chivalry. None of his lines is more quoted than one in which he proudly spoke of himself:—
Je ne dois qu'à moi seul toute ma renommée.
—Gentleman's Magazine.
[CHARLES DICKENS AT HOME.]
With Especial Reference to His Relations with Children.
BY HIS ELDEST DAUGHTER.
Charles Dickens was a very little and very sickly boy, but he had always the belief that this circumstance had brought to him the inestimable advantage of having greatly inclined him to reading.
When money troubles came upon his parents, the poor little fellow was taken away from school and kept for some time at an occupation most distasteful to him, with every surrounding that could jar on sensitive and refined feelings. But the great hardship, and the one which he felt most acutely, was the want of the companionship of boys of his own age. A few years later on we read in “Mr. Forster's Life” a schoolfellow's description of Charles Dickens: “A healthy-looking boy, small, but well-built, with a more than usual flow of spirits, inclining to harmless fun, seldom, if never, I think, to mischief. He usually held his head more erect than lads ordinarily do, and there was a general smartness about him.” This is also a very good personal description of the man.
I have never heard him refer in any way to his own childish days, excepting in one instance, when he would tell the story of how, when he lived at Chatham he and his father often passed Gad's Hill in their walks, and what an admiration he had for the red-brick house with its beautiful old cedar trees, and how it seemed to him to be larger and finer than any other house; and how his father would tell him that if he were to be very persevering and were to work hard he might perhaps some day come to live in it. I have heard him tell this story over and over again, when he had become the possessor of the very place which had taken such a hold upon his childish affections. Beyond this, I cannot recall a single instance of any allusion being made by him to his own early childhood.