Whole families of words are thus driven from the
kingdom of poetrv ; for them too the edict of Nantes is
revoked ; in 1694 the Academv " banished " them, as
she expresses it, from her dictionary, and their exile
was to last longer than that of the Protestants.

What place could be found in the favour of a public
thus formed, for an author who accepts words ot all
sorts, old or new, lewd, technical, choleric, or learned ;
every sentiment and every idea, and far from attenu-
ating them in order to keep them within the bounds of
nobleness and decorum, carries them to extremes with
the view of rendering his contrasts as decided as possible ;
an author who falls into the most execrably bad taste,
reaches the loftiest heights of sublimity, writes plays
with or without heroes, plays with whole legions of per-
sonages, among which he admits not only the whistling
valet and the swearing drunkard, descried as in a
nightmare by pessimist La Bruyere, but even dogs, and
even a bear (" Exit pursued by a bear ") ; an incom-
mensurable dramatist now full of tears, now of jokes,
who watches the martlets fly (in the middle of a
tragedy), wonders whether the crickets are listening
(" Yond' crickets shall not hear it "), sings the sweetest
love-songs the world has ever heard, divines all our
joys, weeps for all our sorrows ; coarse beyond
endurance, lyrical beyond all possibility of adequate
praise; in a word, what place was there for Shakespeare
in the France of Louis Quatorze ?