The Satyre Menippée of the French is, in prose, the exact counterpart of Hudibras in rhyme.
A remarkable instance of concord of sound and sense is to be seen in the following stanza by M. Anton. Flaminius:
Ast amans charæ thalamum puellæ
Deserit flens, et tibi verba dicit
Aspera amplexu teneræ cupito a—
—vulsus amicæ.
Voltaire's ignorance of antiquity is laughable. In his Essay on Tragedy, prefixed to Brutus, he actually boasts of having introduced the Roman senate on the stage in red mantles. “The Greeks,” as he asserts, “font paraitre ses acteurs (tragic) sur des especes d'echasses, le visage couvert d'un masque qui exprime la douleur d'un coté et la joye de l'autre!” The only circumstance upon which he could possibly have founded such an accusation is, that in the new comedy masks were worn with one eyebrow drawn up and the other down, to denote a busy-body or inquisitive medler.
Several ancient tragedies, viz: Eumenides, Philoctetes, and Ædipus et Colonos, besides many pieces of Euripides, have a happy and enlivening termination.
The only historical tragedies by Grecian authors were The Capture of Miletus by Phrynicus and the Persians of Æschylus.