CORNBURY. 420 CORNEILLE. testable maggot." William Smith, in liis History of the Late Province of yew York (New York, 1820-30), si)eiiUs of hiin as follows: "We never had a governor so universally detested, nor one who so richly deserves the public abhorrence. In spite of his noble descent, his behavior was trifling, mean, and extravagant. The indigna- tion of the people was kindled by his despotic rule, savage bigotry, insatiable avarice, and in- justice not only to the public, but even his l)rivate creditors." Consult: Wilson. Memorial History of the City of Sew York, vol. ii. (Xew- York. 1S',11-!I3) ; and Gordon, A History of New Jcrse,/ (-Trenton, 1834). CORN-COCKLE. See Cockle. CORN-CRACKER STATE. Kentucky. See States, Populak Xames of. CORN-CRAKE. See Crake. CORNEA, kOr'ne-a (Xeo-Lat., fem. of Lat. coriicus, honi}-, from cornii, horn; so called from its resemblance to horn). The transparent an- terior portion of the outer coat of the eye. It contains no blood-vessels and obtains its nutri- tion by means of a system of spaces filled with lymph. Like other portions of the ej-e, the cornea is subject to inflammation, known as keratitis. Ulcer of the cornea is very connnon, resulting most often from injury, inflammations of the conjunctiva, phlyctenular keratitis, various disturbances in nutrition, etc. A number of forms are seen attacking difl'erent portions of the cornea. Aside from inflammation of other por- tions of the eye accompanying the ulceration, there may result adhesion and jirolapse of the iris, closure of the pupil, and opacity of a por- tion or the whole cornea. Staphyloma (q.v.), a protrusion of a part or the whole of the cornea, may follow. Keralocoiuis frequently ocurs in young women; the cornea protrudes at the centre from weakness and intraocular pressure. See Ete; and Eye, Bisease.s op the. CORNEILLE, kor'na'y', Pierre (1G06-84). One of the greatest tragic poets of France. He was born at Rouen, June 6, 1606, the son of a lawyer and magistrate of worth, ennobled in 1637. He was trained by the Jesuits, took the advocate's oaths in 1024, and held minor legal offices until 16.50. His first play, Melite, pre- sented in Paris (1629), was popular, and was followed by Clitandre (1632) ; La retire (1633), his first comedy: La galcrie dti palais and La swiroHfe, both comedies (1634). In 1634 he met Richelieu, composed a Latin eleun- on his visit to Rouen, and was enrolled among the five poets of the cardinal statesman, of whom Rotrou alone was at all worthy of his company. He soon incurred Richelieu's displeasure for too frank criticism of his literary work, and rote, uninfluenced bv the Minister's favor. La place ropale, Jlrdee (both 1635), and L'iUiision comiqiie (1636), But all this earlier work was completely cast in the shade by the triumph of his epoch-making Cid (1636), though we may not leave these earlier dramas without recording that they are far superior to anything that had preceded them in vigor and in truth to nature, and that to them we owe the hap])y in- vention of the soubrette. Such promise as they gave, however, pointed less to the field of Cor- neille's great achievement than to the drama of intrigue and to the comedy of contemporary society, for some of them are full of rather coarse stage business and a battledore and shuttlecock rejjartee, and are written in a style that he felt needed apology for its familiar simplicity. The tragi-comedy of Le Cid was so different from Corneille's earlier dramas that it hardly seems the work of the same hand. It gave him a preeminence over contemporaries and prede- cessors, questioned only by interested rivals and the Academy, which Richelieu summoned to sup- port them, and which it did with stuuied half- heartedness. Among the conservative critics passion ran as high as in the famous battle over Hugo's Hentaiii. Scudery, a critic of reimte, asserted, and seems to have believed, that Le Cid's subject was ill-chosen, its structure un- pardonable, its action clumsy, its versification bad, and that its undeniable beauties were stolen from a Spanish play by Guillen de Castro, which «as indeed its acknowledged source. But the public spoke with no uncertain voice, and though Le Cid may lack the ethical depth and tragic force of some of Corneille's later dramas, it was and has remained the most popular on the stage of them all. Modem French drama dates from Le Cid. In the controversy that raged around Le Cid, Corneille's position was delicate. He was not by nature a tactful disputant, being indeed in- clined to arrogance, as he shov.ed on this occa- sion by his Excuse a Arisie; he could not afford to lose the favor that Richelieu continued to show him, and he could not secure a full hearing without imperiling it. He therefore withdrew for three years to Rouen, When he returned in 1630 to Paris it was with a matured genius tliat almost immediately asserted itself in un- ])aralleled splendor and fecundity. Yet the theme of Le Cid, the struggle between honor and love in the hero, between duty and love in the heroine, remains typical of the later tragedies. Typical of them all are also the five acts and the three 'unities:' the time limited to twenty-four liours, the scene to a single town, and the action to a central interest — self-imposed fetters worn with even greater complacency by Racine, The Spaniards knew nothing of these unities, and the effort to force their romantic drama into this rigid mold had by the improbabilities, mate- rial and psychic, that it involved, given occasion for most of the criticism that had befallen Le Cid. Corneille, therefore, in 1639, turned to classical subjects that would lend themselves more readil.v to the episodical treatment which the unities demanded. What sun-ived of romance in him was the invariable intermingling of love with sterner themes, Horace ( 1640) sets the love of man and woman against the love of race and fatherland in four- fold treatment of a single theme. In Ciiiiia pas- sion twists love of fatherland to its purpose, and is opposed at once to the magnanimity and the patriotism of Augustus, Polyeuete (1642) op- poses Christian to marital duty in a story of Christian martyrdom, which was a bold venture, for many thought with Boileau that the mys- teries of the faith should be kept out of litera- ture. These three, with Le Cid, mark the height of Corneille's achievement, save that he touches for a moment a greater intensity of terror in Rodorninc (164.5). The other tragedies are more or less pale imitations of the merits of these. ^mong them it is worth while to name La mart de Pompce (1643); Thfodore (1646), an even
