ROTROUJean de (1609-1650), the greatest tragic poet of France before Corneille, was born on August 21, 1609 at Dreux in Normandy, and died of the plague at the same place on the 28th June 1650. His family was of small means but of not inconsiderable station, and seems to have had a kind of hereditary connexion with the magistracy of the town of Dreux. He himself was “lieutenant particulier et civil,” a post not easy to translate, but apparently possessing some affinity to a Scotch sheriffship substitute. Rotrou, however, went very early to Paris, and, though three years younger than Corneille, with whom he was intimately acquainted, began play-writing before him. With few exceptions the only events recorded of his life are the successive appearances of his plays and his enrolment in the band of five poets who had the not very honourable or congenial duty of turning Richelieu’s dramatic ideas into shape. Rotrou’s own first piece, HHypocondriaque,, appeared when he was only seventeen. His second, La Bague de VOubli, an adaptation in part from Lope de Vega, was much better, much more suggestive, and much more characteristic. It is the first of several plays in which Rotrou, following or striking out for himself a way which did not lead to much for the time but which was again entered at the Romantic revival, endeavoured to naturalize in France the romantic comedy which had flourished in Spain and England instead of the classical tragedy of Seneca and the classical comedy of Terence. Corneille, as is known to readers of his early work, had considerable leanings in the same direction, and yielded but slowly and unwillingly to the pressure of critical opinion and the public taste. Rotrou’s brilliant but hasty and unequal work showed throughout marks of a stronger ...