Carmine, qui tragico, vilem certavit ob hircum.

The goat thus adorned, and his beard painted, was hunted about the long
table, at which the fifty poets were seated; and after having served
them for a subject of laughter for some time, he was hunted out of the
room, and not sacrificed to Bacchus. Each of the guests made verses on
the occasion, in imitation of the Bacchanalia of the ancients. Ronsard
composed some dithyrambics to celebrate the festival of the goat of
Etienne Jodelle; and another, entitled "Our travels to Arcueil."
However, this Bacchaualian freak did not finish as it ought, where it
had begun, among the poets. Several ecclesiastics sounded the alarm, and
one Chandieu accused Ronsard with having performed an idolatrous
sacrifice; and it was easy to accuse the moral habits of _fifty poets_
assembled together, who were far, doubtless, from being irreproachable.
They repented for some time of their classical sacrifice of a goat to
Tragedy.

Hardi, the French Lope de Vega, wrote 800 dramatic pieces from 1600 to
1637; his imagination was the most fertile possible; but so wild and
unchecked, that though its extravagances are very amusing, they served
as so many instructive lessons to his successors. One may form a notion
of his violation of the unities by his piece "La Force du Sang." In the
first act Leocadia is carried off and ravished. In the second she is
sent back with an evident sign of pregnancy. In the third she lies in,
and at the close of this act her son is about ten years old. In the
fourth, the father of the child acknowledges him; and in the fifth,
lamenting his son's unhappy fate, he marries Leocadia. Such are the
pieces in the infancy of the drama.