ward find it too difficult to sacrifice it to that duty which will soon command us to leave it. In the same manner, we have become associated with the feelings of Polyeucte, and have trembled for him before becoming aware of the love of Pauline for Sévère; if our first interest had been attached to this love, perhaps it would have been difficult for us afterward to feel much for Polyeucte, whose presence would be importunate. Thus, when Zaïre has awakened our emotion as a lover, we are inclined to think that she abandons the position in which she has placed us rather too easily, in order to fulfill her duty as a daughter and a Christian. The philosophical indifference which Voltaire has imparted to her in the first scene, in order to facilitate her subsequent conversion, renders still more improbable the devotedness with which she so quickly enters upon a duty so recently discovered. If, on the other hand, at the outset, Voltaire had described her to us as troubled with scruples, and disquieted with regard to her happiness, fear would have prepared us beforehand to comprehend in all its extent, at its first appearance, the misfortune which threatens her, and to see her yield to it with that abandonment which is improbable because it is too sudden.
The employment of sudden changes of fortune, by which it is attempted to disguise, beneath a great alteration in circumstances, the too sudden transitions which the rule of unity in point of time may impose, frequently renders the inconveniences of this rule more striking, by depriving it of the means of making preparation for the different impressions which it accumulates within too limited a space. It is, on the contrary, by a single impression that Shakspeare, at least in his finest compositions, takes possession at the very outset, of our thought, and, by means of our thought, of space also. Beyond the magic circle which
