completed the work in which his genius shows itself in its consummate
form--the great tragedy of _Phèdre_. The play contains one of the most
finished and beautiful, and at the same time one of the most
overwhelming studies of passion in the literature of the world. The
tremendous rôle of Phèdre--which, as the final touchstone of great
acting, holds the same place on the French stage as that of Hamlet on
the English--dominates the piece, rising in intensity as act follows
act, and 'horror on horror's head accumulates'. Here, too, Racine has
poured out all the wealth of his poetic powers. He has performed the
last miracle, and infused into the ordered ease of the Alexandrine a
strange sense of brooding mystery and indefinable terror and the awful
approaches of fate. The splendour of the verse reaches its height in the
fourth act, when the ruined queen, at the culmination of her passion,
her remorse, and her despair, sees in a vision Hell opening to receive
her, and the appalling shade of her father Minos dispensing his
unutterable doom. The creator of this magnificent passage, in which the
imaginative grandeur of the loftiest poetry and the supreme force of
dramatic emotion are mingled in a perfect whole, has a right to walk
beside Sophocles in the high places of eternity.

Owing to the intrigues of a lady of fashion, _Phèdre_, when it first
appeared, was a complete failure. An extraordinary change then took
place in Racine's mind. A revulsion of feeling, the precise causes of
which are to this day a mystery, led him suddenly to renounce the world,
to retire into the solitude of religious meditation, and to abandon the
art which he had practised with such success. He was not yet forty, his
genius was apparently still developing, but his great career was at an
end. Towards the close of his life he produced two more plays--_Esther_,
a short idyllic piece of great beauty, and _Athalie_, a tragedy which,
so far from showing that his powers had declined during his long