be packed with applauding spectators, the other
to exhibit empty benches, diversified with creatures who could hiss.
Nothing could dignify Pradon's play, as nothing could really degrade
that of Racine. But Racine was in the highest degree sensitive, and
such a desperate plot against his fame might well make him pause and
reflect.

_Phedre_, like _Iphigenie_, is a new creation from Euripides. Its
singular beauty has been accurately defined as a mingling of horror
and compassion, of terror and curiosity. It is less a drama than one
great part, and that part consists of a diseased state of the soul,
a morbid conflict of emotions, so that the play becomes overmuch a
study in the pathology of passion. The greatness of the role of the
heroine constitutes the infirmity of the play as a whole; the other
characters seem to exist only for the sake of deploying the inward
struggle of which Phedre is the victim. Love and jealousy rage within
her; remorse follows, for something of Christian sentiment is
conveyed by Racine into his classical fable. Never had his power as
a psychologist in art been so wonderfully exhibited; yet he had
elsewhere attained more completely the ideal of the drama. In the
succession of his profane masterpieces we may say of the last that
it is lesser than the first and greater. _Phedre_ lacks the balance
and proportion of _Andromaque_; but never had Racine exhibited the
tempest and ravage of passion in a woman's soul on so great a scale
or with force so terrible.

The cabal might make him pause; his own play, profoundly moralised
as it was, might cause him to consider. Events of the day, crimes
of passion, adulteries, poisonings, nameless horrors, might agitate
his spirit. Had he not fed the full-blown passions of the time? What
if Nicole's word that playwrights were public poisoners should be
true? Probably various causes operated on the mobile spirit of Racine;
certainly the Christian, of Jansenist education, who had slumbered
within him, now awakened. He resolved to quit the world and adopt
the Carthusian habit. The advice of his confessor was that he should
regulate his life by marriage. Racine yielded, and found his
contentment in a wife who was ignorant of his plays, and in children
whose inclinations and training were religious. The penitent was
happy in his household, happy also in his reconciliation with Nicole
and Arnauld. To Boileau he remained attached. And he did not renounce
the court. Was